ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to consider the implications of racial shame for the theoretical strategies that map out the underlying syntax of subject formation in its relation to power and further develop its significance for the reading of invisibility in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This novel traces the narrator's emerging sense of displacement in the political terrain of radicalized racial attachments, leading to an exposure of subjectivity that exceeds unitary assignations to consistent social positions. The narrator's desire for whiteness, which characterizes the first stage of his displacement, is ultimately based on the process of subjectivization that articulates the demands for his social existence. In the second stage of displacement, signified by the emancipatory return of the repressed black ontology, the body yet again carries the burden of affective investments. This time, it is fixed in a new symbolic attachment that seemingly reclaims the prerogatives of its history.
