This paper will consider the significance of racial shame for the constitution of the black subject and determine its implications for our reading of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. I will argue that the primary expression of black American experience and its determination within the narrow orbit of white narrative is the affective experience of shame. Implicated in the racialized metaphysics of power relations that dominates Ellison’s world, shame both foments the violence of internalized oppression and the violence of self-valorizing racial orthodoxy in black nationalisms. Departing from Foucault’s notion of subjectivization whereby agency is determined by the individualizing strategies of power, the paper, however, plots a different narrative of invisibility in Ellison’s novel that harbors emancipatory possibilities. The totalizing regimes of identification that articulate and structure our social existence will be shown to be effectively undermined by Ellison’s intervention in the racial imaginary, testifying to his ability to look beyond the blockages of his present and anticipate alternate forms of subjectivity that are yet to be realized in the constituencies of our history.