On Double Consciousness

Abstract

What are the historical origins of the Du Boisian notion of consciousness? What explains the enduring existential resonance of the notion in various literatures on the black diaspora, particularly in what Paul Gilroy has rendered poignant as the Black Atlantic? There are unmistakable echoes of the notion of double consciousness in the wider vocabulary of postmodern and postcolonial criticism, particularly in concepts such as ambivalence or, increasingly, the religious and cultural identity of the modern Muslim. What relations might we, today, draw across these existential and historical dispersals in the senses of the Afro modern? With no aspirations to the exhaustive, I intend to accomplish the following through these and similar questions: a) explore the double roots of double consciousness in the histories of capitalist racial slavery and colonial modernity; b) examine the motives for current practices of characterizing identities by the psychological and cultural conditions of double consciousness; and c) ask in what ways the identities so characterized may or may not be compatible with key features of sociality and transnational conviviality that could be marked as democratically progressive and universal.