The Black Utopia: Secret Societies and Time Travel in W. E. B. Du Bois and Sutton E. Griggs

Abstract

Abstract While prevailing scholarship on utopian fiction, attendant disproportionately to white authors, defines the utopia by way of its temporal or geographical separation from society, I argue that the under-theorized Black utopia is defined by the element of the secret society. The project taken up by Black utopian societies, such as the overlooked “secret societies” of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the eponymous shadow government of Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), are articulated but not represented by their respective texts, framed in retrospect and within their own foreclosure. Du Bois and Griggs participate, too, in the intellectual return of much Black writing from the dawn of the Jim Crow Era to the early years of Reconstruction, offering alternative histories that locate utopian potentiality in the project of Reconstruction while identifying the project’s failures. Ultimately, the foreclosure of utopian anti-racist potentiality is attributed by these texts to the incompatibility of Black solidarity with interpellation into (white) national subjectivity.