The double politics of double consciousness: Nationalism and globalism in the Souls of Black Folk

Public Culture

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 299-318

  Cooppan, Vilashini ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20744445798     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-17-2-299     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 5. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text.
2. Charles U. Smith and Lewis Killian read Du Bois's 1910 departure from Atlanta University and academic sociology for an executive position at the NAACP as the moment when "Du Bois the sociologist had become Du Bois the ideologist of social protest." See Smith and Killian, "Black Sociologists and Social Protest," in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 195.
3. For a related argument, see Elliot Rudwick, "W. E. B. Du Bois as Sociologist," in Black Sociologists; and Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Voice of the Black Protest Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
4. Another version of this chronological narrative organizes Arnold Rampersad's study The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), which traces the "vocational tension" between Du Bois's three careers as "historian and sociologist, poet and novelist, and propagandist" (47).
5. Eric J. Sundquist's comprehensive examination of Du Bois in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) updates the narrative, identifying not only a division within Du Bois's writing but also a link, in the form of later works' "completion" of the earlier works' vision (550).
6. In yet another variation on this theme, Cynthia D. Schrager describes the tension and ultimate transition between Du Bois's positivistic social science and his messianic mysticism rooted in late-nineteenth-century spiritualism in "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bois," American Quarterly 48 (1996): 551-86.
7. Probing the postfoundationalist dimensions of Du Bois's intellectual shifts, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) credits Du Bois with a diasporic cultural politics that resists and even "transcend[s]" the narrow particularisms of racial, ethnic, and national "absolutism" (121).
8. In a similar vein, Ross Posnock's Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) reads Du Bois as the advocate of a "cosmopolitan universalism" that offers a necessary alternative to cultural studies and its guiding "ideology of 'authenticity' " (21).
9. Thomas C. Holt provides a notable exception to the chronological plot in observing that "Du Bois's paradoxical positions may be taken as somehow emblematic of the African-American experience generally" and by arguing for the "necessarily interactive" relationship of those positions. See Holt's "The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 305-6.
10. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 18.
11. In contrast to Keith Byerman's assessment of Du Bois as "the wronged son" in his Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994)
12. and Claudia Tate's survey of Du Bois's overdetermined mothers in her Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), I suggest a psychoanalytical approach to Du Bois rooted in the rhetoric of psychic temporality.
13. Herbert Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and Cause" (1857), reprinted in Spencer, Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910).
14. On U.S. influence, see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 121-52;
15. George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 234-69;
16. and Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 10-26, 240-41.
17. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983)
18. and The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), especially "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished."
19. On James as a revolutionary social scientist whose psychological models of mind contradicted deterministic laws of instinct, behavior, heredity, and evolution, see Reba N. Soffer, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences 1870-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 32-45, 135-61;
20. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239-43;
21. and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois-Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 1:87-96.
22. For a useful introduction to the "new psychology" and a discussion of James's contributions, see Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially chaps. 3, 4.
23. On James's influence on Du Bois, see Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 68-90;
24. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 571-72;
25. Posnock, Color and Culture, 10-11, 18-19, 35-36, and 57-58;
26. Dickson D. Bruce, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness," American Literature 64 (1992): 299-309;
27. Thomas J. Otten, "Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race, " ELH 59 (1992): 227-56;
28. and Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 153-68.
29. Du Bois himself describes his debt to James in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New York: Schocken, 1968), 578, 590, 770-71.
30. Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois - Biography of a Race, 1:96.
31. Adolph Reed, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 124.
32. Reed refers to "Heredity and the Public Schools," Du Bois's 1904 lecture to the Principals' Association of the Colored Schools of Washington, D.C., reprinted in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 45-52.
33. Reed, American Political Thought, 105 and n. 80, 98 and n. 44.
34. On Hegel's influences on Du Bois, Reed cites Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 134;
35. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984);
36. Robert Gooding-Williams, "Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The Souls of Black Folk," Social Science Information 26 (1987): 106-8;
37. and Jacqueline Stevens, "Beyond Tocqueville, Please!" American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 987-90.
38. On the collected influence of James, Royce, and Emerson on Du Bois, Reed cites Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 74;
39. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 487, 570-71;
40. Bruce, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness, " 304;
41. Kimberly Benston, "I Yam What I Am: The Topos of (Unnaming) in Afro-American Literature," Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 170;
42. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 186-88, 249;
43. and Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 142-43.
44. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 251, 256.
45. Thus, where Reed advocates for the "synchronie focus" of contextualizing Du Bois's thinking within that of his peers and his moment, as opposed to the "diachronic telescopy" that he under stands to mark interpretations that advance "putative chain[s] of influence," I would urge a reading that thinks through both axes and even through their convergence. Reed, American Political Thought, 107, n. 80.
46. I take the model of conjunctural analysis from Antonio Gramsci's reconceptualization of history as a series of kaleidoscopic movements in which distinct subsets of dominant and subaltern classes now join or "articulate" at their points of commonality to produce hegemony, now break apart along their differences to produce change. As usefully glossed by Stuart Hall, Gramsci's theory of articulation rethinks the units and methods of social analysis in terms of positionality - from his rewriting of the concept of the ruling class, unified in itself and in its action, into brokered, constellated, constantly renegotiated historic blocs; to his redrawing of history's line as conjuncture's pattern and his reimagining of the nation-state as, in Hall's words, "not a thing to be seized, overthrown or 'smashed' with a single blow, but a complex formation in modern societies which must become the focus of a number of different strategies and struggles because it is an arena of different social contestations." Hall, "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 19. As I understand it, a conjunctural analysis of Du Bois explores how nationalism and globalism, gender and race, sociology and psychology, the line of progress and the agonistic dyad of doubleness all come together and break apart in order to produce social and conceptual change.
47. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 234.
48. Otten, "Pauline Hopkins," 229. For a related argument see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 148-99.
49. For a discussion of Egypt as one of Du Bois's "signature sites" and its conceptual "multivalence," see Gillman, Blood Talk, 186-99.
50. For historical accounts of the uses of Egypt in dominant Euro-American racial discourse, see Martin Bernai, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987);
51. and Robert Young, "Egypt in America: Black Athena, Racism and Colonial Discourse," in Racism, Modernity, and Identity: On the Western Front, ed. Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1994).
52. For a provocative discussion of race and time, see Charles Lemert, "The Race of Time: Du Bois and Reconstruction," boundary 2 27, no. 3 (2000): 215-48.
53. Walter Benjamin, "Allegory and Trauerspiel" in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 177-78.
54. Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228, 226.
55. For an excellent reading of this essay and Benjamin's, and a supple theory of national allegory, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap.
56. De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," 222.
57. Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text 15 (1986): 69.
58. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory," in In Theory:
59. Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 119.
60. Jameson's essay later turns to the possibilities of allegorical movement, citing "the capacity of allegory to generate a range of distinct meanings or messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places." Jameson, "Third-World Literature," 74. Although I cannot rehearse the argument fully here, suffice it to say that Jameson's literary theorizing of what he calls "the allegorical spirit" ("profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol," 73), works against the broader totalizing claims of his essay.
61. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, "The Economy of Desedimentation: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro," Callaloo 19 (1996): 80, 85.