Du Bois, dark princess, and the Afro-Asian international

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Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 217-239

  Mullen, Bill V ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650478258     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11-1-217     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. See Adolph Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
2. Despite the pronouncement of his socialism and Marxist leanings as early as 1905, few of Du Bois's critics or biographers have taken seriously the task of discerning their finer points or influences particularly regarding Dark Princess. Manning Marable's W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986), folds Du Bois's "radicalism" neatly into his "democratism." He reads Dark Princess primarily as emblematic of Du Bois's polemics against Garvey's UNIA nationalism and literary debates with Locke and younger Harlem Renaissance artists. While these are certainly features of the novel, Marable doesn't, for example, link Du Bois's 1926 visit to the Soviet Union to the Bolshevik themes of the text. Likewise, Adolph Reed, claiming his own fabian socialist Du Bois against Marable, writes that "throughout the interwar years, Du Bois was hardly a radical democrat" (65)
3. He notes Du Bois's "pro-Bolshevik rhetoric" of the 1920s, but glosses over careful analysis of this rhetoric and the text of Dark Princess. Paul Gilroy's interpretation of the novel's "heterogeneous multiciplicities" is consistent with his deployment of Du Bois's "double consciousness" as an aspect of diasporic hybridity, but looks past the overt dialectical imagery and rhetoric of the novel - much less Du Bois's reactions to events like the Russian Revolution and bolshevism (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993])
4. Tate's argument doesn't account for the ethnic and national difference of the princess in this formulation, nor the possibility of Du Bois's "gendering" as a response to discourses like orientalism. See Claudia Tate, introduction to Dark Princess, by W E. B. Du Bois (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), ix-xxxvi
5. and Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983)
6. Qtd. in Aptheker, introduction to Darkwater, 513
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Color Line Belts the World," Collier's Weekly, 20 October 1906, 20
8. Horizon, February 1907, 9
9. Kalyan Kumar Banerjee, Indian Freedom Movement: Revolutionaries in America (Calcutta: Sris Kuma Kunda, 1969), 79
10. Sudarshan Kapur, Raising up a Prophet: The African-American Counter with Gandhi (Boston, Beacon, 1992), 26
11. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Gandhi and India," Crisis, March 1922, 207
12. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Scribner's, 1922)
13. Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994)
14. Joseph Arthur Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: H. Fertig, 1967)
15. Qtd. in Aptheker, introduction, 6, 7
16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1921; Millwood, N. Y.: KrausThomson, 1975), 60
17. See Alys Eve Weinbaum, "Reproducing Racial Globality: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism," Social Text, no. 67 (summer 2001): 15-39. Weinbaum persuasively demonstrates that Du Bois's articulation of political arguments about race through metaphors of reproduction form an understudied feature of his work
18. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1916; New York: Blue Ribbon, 1927)
19. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97
20. Qtd. in Aptheker, introduction, 19
21. Du Bois, Darkwater, 49
22. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 228. All subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text
23. David N. Druhe, Soviet Russia and Indian Communism: 1917-1947 (New York: Bookman, 1959), 21
24. See Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), esp. 81-176
25. See also Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, 294-311
26. See also Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, esp. chapter 2, "Home to Moscow: Claude McKay's The Negroes in America and the Race of Marxist Theory," 63-94
27. Haywood, Black Bolshevik, 158
28. John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 33
29. Du Bois, "Gandhi and India," 206
30. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Black Man and Labor," Crisis, December 1925, 432
31. Ibid
32. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art," Crisis, October 1926, 290-297; Tate, introduction, xxxvi
33. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 144
34. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk," in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; New York: Norton, 1999), 11
35. David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (New York: Halsted, 1973), 4
36. Weinbaum, "Reproducing Racial Globality," 36, 37. On 17 March 1929, Du Bois debated Stoddard on the question "Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?" at the Chicago Coliseum. Du Bois's remarks appeared in a report published by the Chicago Forum, which sponsored the debate. In his remarks, Du Bois attacked Stoddard's theories of "Nordic" superiority as well as his racism and elitism. See Crisis, May 1929, 167-168
37. W. E. B. Du Bois, "I Sing to China," China Reconstructs, June 1959, 24-26