W.E.B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the Staging of Alterity

Abstract

In his 1995 study Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903, Shamoon Zamir has provided us with one of the most detailed accounts to date of what he calls the "drama of alterity" (115) that Du Bois stages in The Souls of Black Folk. Zamir offers us in particular a fascinating analysis of the role that Du Bois' complex encounter with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit played in his scripting of a drama that has become one of the most important models for thinking about cultural difference today. In 1897, Du Bois first published "Strivings of the Negro People," which, in revised form and under the title "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," became the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. 1 As is well known, Du Bois in this opening chapter describes a differential duality of "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" (364), a duality which the title associates with "black folk" in general, and which has been related in particular to the black elite that Du Bois describes elsewhere as the "Talented Tenth" (Zamir 116, 147-). What I am interested in here is a certain ambivalence in the staging of the very terms of duality, "twoness," "doubleness" and "double consciousness." 2 I will trace a shifting of semantic bonds and valencies of these terms themselves, read through the context of Du Bois' appropriation of Hegel as it has been outlined by Zamir.