The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case"

Abstract

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case" Erika Renée Williams (bio) W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he defines as "a problem" in the Euro-American imaginary, has long been understood to denote an alienated black subjectivity and an American body politic divided by racial caste. The white gaze, Du Bois instructs, has the potential to restrict the parameters of black subjectivity by barring black subjects from fully accessing their citizenship and expressing their humanity. In the opening chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," he recounts the childhood memory that perhaps occasioned his divided consciousness: that of a young white female classmate refusing the affection he offered with the gift of a "gorgeous" calling card.1 The incident leads him to realize that his blackness signals not approbation but abjection to many of his white compatriots and thus to see that they deem him a problem and not fully a person. Because he likens this experience of failed interpersonal, interracial affection to that of being cast out from his native land, Du Bois arguably suggests a parallel failed "romance," understood in its most capacious sense as any heightened exchange of intersubjective affect, between himself and the American nation writ large. In rendering the young white girl a symbol of an ungenerous and withholding white nation, Du Bois implicitly ties the development of individual states of black consciousness to the promise and pathos of black assimilation into a Euro-centrist American body politic, foregrounding the way interpersonal dynamics of intimacy shape collective processes of nation-building and implicitly rendering double consciousness a matter of misbegotten love. [End Page 27] Moreover, Du Bois's recounting of a childhood story of foreclosed "puppy love" to set up his theory of double consciousness in Souls marks his deployment of a literary trope that I term the "cross-caste romance." Drawing on Lisa L. Moore's work regarding the role of intercultural love in imagining and shaping the fabric of a nation, I define the cross-caste romance as an intimate relation between persons separated by differences (e.g., race, class, and gender) that are purportedly immutable but are in fact constructed, a relation that foregrounds the fragility of intersubjective exchange and the tenuousness of nation formation.2 Simultaneously a remainder of transatlantic slavery, a harbinger of antiracist and decolonial critique, and an object of metaphysical inquiry, double consciousness cannot be understood solely by way of history, politics, or philosophy. Rather, I argue that it must be approached through the framework of the story with which he introduces it and through its trope of failed interpersonal intimacy, which symbolizes not just the psycho-social alienation of black subjects but the broader material and sociopolitical divisions fracturing the United States. Indeed, Du Bois's various narrative projects, both fictional and nonfictional, describe the urgency of America's revaluation and acceptance of its ethnic others by using the language of intersubjective and intrasubjective intimacy—whether figured as romantic courtship or as other forms of love or eros. For Du Bois, the solution to the conundrum of the black subject's compulsory, divided consciousness is twofold: first, a robust process of black recovery and reclamation, premised partly on the recovery and reclamation of African ancestry and African folkways, and second, an attempt at some form of black assimilation, through which the black subject might "consent," with Motenian echoes, not to being reduced to a "single being" but rather to being incorporated into the American body politic while still maintaining some measure of cultural distinction.3 Du Bois suggests that black American subjects, once having taken sustenance from the legacy of "wasted, dispersed, or forgotten" African "genius," might then be freer to offer up the gifts—however conditional—of their affective labor.4 Like his anecdote in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's forgotten 1907 detective story "The Case" frames double consciousness as a form of misbegotten love and in terms of the challenge of placing black self-love on a parallel track with black assimilation in the form of affective, intersubjective...