This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative juxtaposition of different modes of writing, the author suggests why Darkwater remains a valuable resource for democratic theory in an age misleadingly described as “post-racial.”
William N. Colson, "Phases of Du Bois," The Messenger1-2 (April-May 1920): 11 (emphasis in the original).
2.
Colson, "Phases of Du Bois ," 10 (emphasis in the original).
3.
The best-known versions of this claim appear in The Souls of Black Folk. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk , ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (1903; repr., Boston: Bedford, 1997), 34, 45, 61. Future references will be cited parenthetically as "Souls" in the body of the text.
4.
For an exploration of the debates about the political uses of culture that divided Du Bois from the editors of The Messenger, see John Brown Childs, "Concepts of Culture in Afro-American Political Thought, 1890-1920," Social Text4 (Autumn 1981): 28-43.
5.
Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
6.
For an account of the racial underpinnings of popular, political, and academic discourses and their connection to racial imperialism and slavery, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009 ).
7.
I borrow the phrase "the contours of black political thought" from Dawson’s first chapter. It also served as the organizing title for a pair of panels organized by Michael Hanchard at the 2007 APSA Annual Meeting. This essay revises my own essay for one of those panels and attempts to come to terms with some of the questions they raised.
8.
See Herbert Aptheker, "Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil," in The Literary Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1989), 143-63; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 170-83; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt , 2000), 1-36.
9.
Brent Edwards suggests how Du Bois’s "Postscript" might helpfully be regarded as a "framing gesture"; it situates the ideas to follow within their discursive context and indicates how they are related to what can be said and thought. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 1. Along similar lines, Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum note that Du Bois uses the "Postscript" to instruct the reader about how to approach Darkwater. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, "Introduction: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Juxtaposition," in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10.
10.
W.E.B. Du Bois , Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil ( 1920; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), ix. Future references will be cited parenthetically as "Darkwater" in the body of the text.
11.
For a comparative exploration of the relationship between Du Bois’s and Emerson’s use of optical metaphors, see Shannon Mariotti, "On the Passing of the First-Born Son: Emerson’s ‘Focal Distancing," Du Bois’ ‘Second Sight,’ and Disruptive Particularity," Political Theory 37 (June 2009): 351-74.
12.
Sheldon S. Wolin , Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17.
13.
Thomas C. Holt, "The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940,"American Quarterly42 (June 1990): 306 (emphasis in the original).
14.
Roxanne L. Euben , Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 45.
15.
Du Bois’s use of sonic metaphors is insightfully explored in Alexander Weheliye, "The Grooves of Temporality,"Public Culture17 (Spring 2005): 319-38.
16.
On the religious sources and lasting influence of Du Bois’s "Credo," his 1904 declaration of spiritual and political conviction, see Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
17.
Robert Gooding-Williams , "Du Bois, Politics, Aesthetics: An Introduction,"Public Culture17 (Spring 2005): 204. Gooding-Williams’s essay introduces a rich collection of reflections on The Souls of Black Folk that take up the challenge of reading Souls through the lenses of political theory and literary analysis. As he notes, however, this approach is not universally embraced. For a critique of such "bifocal" readings, see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
18.
On imagination and political theory, see Wolin , Politics and Vision, 17-20.
19.
Eric J.Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1993), 581.
20.
As Stanley Brodwin notes, Du Boise faced similar hurdles when he published Souls; the book "had to be not only a force in awakening black pride, but also a spiritual guidebook for whites, most of whom had little awareness of the genuine strivings and psychic realities in black folk." Stanley Brodwin, "The Veil Transcended: Form and Meaning in W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’"Journal of Black Studies2 (March 1972): 306.
21.
For a critique of the oppressive consequences of pursuing an ideal of "oneness" in a divided society, see Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12-20.
22.
"New Race Problem," New York Times, August 8, 1920.
23.
John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2000), 214.
24.
Colson, "Phases of Du Bois ," 10.
25.
W.E.B. Du Bois , Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984), xxix. As Keith Byerman suggests, we can read Du Bois’s autobiographical works as "a continuing revision of a basic story." Keith Eldon Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 181.
26.
Susan Gillman helpfully traces Du Bois’s practice of "self-citation" in Darkwater and notes that "The Souls of White Folk" recombines elements from earlier essays. See Susan Gillman, "Pageantry, Maternity, and World History ," in Next to the Color Line, 395.
27.
For a review of the controversy Darkwater provoked and, in particular, of the judgment of "bitterness" attached to it, see Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, 143-63.
28.
Du Bois’s vignettes find their echo in Virginia Woolf’s account of the outsized fury of the Oxbridge beadle who discovers a woman walking on turf restricted to fellows and scholars. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 6.
29.
See Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
30.
"The African Roots of the War" first appeared in the Atlantic in 1915. In addition to incorporating elements in "The Souls of White Folk," Du Bois revised this piece as "The Hands of Ethiopia," Darkwater’s third essay. For Du Bois’s successive efforts to produce a world history that neither ignores nor denies the contributions of Africans and their descendants, see The Negro (1915), Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939), and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1946).
31.
For Du Bois’s account of the "public and psychological wage" paid to white American workers in exchange for their acceptance of low material wages, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935; repr., Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1964), 700.
32.
The phrase is from Jean-Paul Sartre’s interpretation of negritude. Sartre, quoted in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld , 1967), 132.
33.
See also W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 146.
34.
Judith Butler , "Universality in Culture," in Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 48.
35.
"New Race Problem," New York Times, August 8, 1920.
36.
I am mindful here of Shannon Mariotti’s observation that "Du Bois’ practice of second sight has always taken in both the particular and the universal." Where Mariotti emphasizes the ways in which encounters with "the disruptive particular" chasten Du Bois’s idealism, I emphasize Du Bois’s resistance to the reduction of blackness to particularity. Mariotti, "On the Passing of the First-Born Son," 351-74.
37.
Du Bois, quoted in Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, 148.
38.
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 15.
39.
Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 168-69. Gillman and Weinbaum similarly describe what they call "the politics of juxtaposition" in Darkwater. Building on Du Bois’s comment in "The Damnation of Women" that "the uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause" (Darkwater, p. 105), they argue that his tendency toward "simple and straightforward juxtaposition" reveals an "additive logic" that treats these causes as distinct. Although persuaded by their elucidation of this tendency in Du Bois’s work, I believe that they draw too hard a line between Du Bois’s "combination" and the expressly interactive linkages described by Stuart Hall as "articulation." I find both "combination" and articulation in Darkwater and in the treatment of relationships between gender, sexuality, class, and race in "Damnation," more specifically. Gillman and Weinbaum, "Introduction: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Juxtaposition," 1-34. For an alternative reading of the essay, albeit one that does not directly take up the contrast offered by Gillman and Weinbaum, see Lawrie Balfour, "Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois’s ‘Damnation of Women,’" Hypatia 20 (Summer 2005): 127-48.
40.
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 109.
41.
See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
42.
There is extensive scholarship on the significance of two-ness in Souls. See, e.g., Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, chap. 5; and Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
43.
Lewis, W.E.B.Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 16.
44.
For a recent assessment of the (still) groundbreaking character of Du Bois’s work on the role of the slaves in the Civil War, see Steven Hahn, "Did We Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History?" in The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55-114.
45.
He also addresses gendered forms of power in his critique of the conditions of menial labor in "The Servant in the House" and, in his anticolonial pieces, insistently albeit problematically, connects sexual violence against black women in the United States to the rape of Africa. There is a substantial literature that explores the gendered and erotic character of Du Bois’s anticolonial imagination in Darkwater and in Dark Princess, the novel that appeared in 1928. For two illuminating examples, see Herman Beavers, "Romancing the Body Politic: Du Bois’s Propaganda of the Dark World," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 250-64; and Vilashini Cooppan, "Move on Down the Line: Domestic Science, Transnational Politics, and Gendered Allegory in Du Bois," in Next to the Color Line, 35-68.
46.
This retelling of the annunciation story indicates the degree to which Du Bois’s work is permeated by religious imagery and references. Darkwater also repeatedly invokes miracle of the Black Christ, whose arrival is prophesied in "The Riddle of the Sphinx," whose birth is retold in "The Second Coming," and whose crucifixion is re-enacted in "Jesus Christ in Texas." For a study of Darkwater’s religious motifs in the context of Du Bois’s efforts to oppose white supremacist theology, see Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. On the image of the Black Christ and the erotics of Pan-African redemption, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 592-625.
47.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 275.
48.
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes explicates the biblical references that pervade the parable and notes its location between "Of the Ruling of Men" and "The Damnation of Women," concluding that "Du Bois affirms the importance of black women’s leadership by pointing to their experience as the basis for a divinely appointed mission to exercise power." Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "The Margin as the Center of a Theory of History: African-American Women, Social Change, and the Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois," in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge , 1996), 121-22.
49.
This is not to say that "Damnation" is unproblematically identified as "feminist." See Balfour, "Representative Women."
50.
Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 114-15.
51.
Readers may recall Du Bois’s fierce elegy for his son in Souls and its concluding suggestion that the Veil can only be transcended in death (Souls, 159-63).
52.
W.E.B. Du Bois , "Returning Soldiers," in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 381. This piece originally appeared in the May 1919 issue of the Crisis.
53.
For a reading of "The Comet" that situates the story within Du Bois’s evolving philosophy of race, see Ronald R. Sundstrom, "The Prophetic and Pragmatic Philosophy of ‘Race’ in W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Comet,’" Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, Fall 1999.
54.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 222.
55.
On Ralph Ellison’s contribution to the development of such a sensibility, see W. James Booth, "The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison," Political Theory36 (October 2008): 683-707.
56.
Robert Gooding-Williams , "Look, A Negro!" in Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15.
57.
See Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, "Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?" in After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina, ed. David Dante Troutt (New York: The New Press, 2006), 87-110; and the excellent collection of articles in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3 (March 2006).
58.
Charlie Savage , "A Judge’s View of Judging Is on the Record ," New York Times, May 14, 2009.
59.
Although I depart from Paul Gilroy’s arguments "against race," I appreciate his observation that "people think that being against racism is an obvious choice, that it’s something that doesn’t need to be explained or elaborated, unpacked politically. They think it’s a banal thing to say that one’s against racism. I’m not sure that’s true." Paul Gilroy, quoted in Tommie Shelby, "Cosmopolitanism, Blackness, and Utopia: A Conversation with Paul Gilroy," Transition 98 (2008): 135 (emphasis in the original).
60.
Du Bois’s work cuts against what Wolin calls this the "systematization of loss." "The very language used," Wolin comments, "‘the persistence of racism,’ ‘generations of those on welfare,’ is not meant to call the utopia into question but to state some of its conditions while offering object lessons." Sheldon S. Wolin, "Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation ," in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17-18 (emphasis in the original).
