Souls Of Black Folk Research Articles

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Reviewed by: Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields Michael O. West (bio) Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields London and New York: Verso, 2012, 302 pages. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields are sisters by blood. Each is a distinguished scholar and accomplished academic in her own right, Karen in sociology and Barbara in history. In this bold book, they reemerge as discursive compañeras, combining deep learning and political passion to make for an impressive duet. Their subject is “racecraft,” a term they may not have coined but with this book will likely do much to popularize. As the Fieldses tell it, racecraft is to American life what witchcraft is to some other societies, a principal difference being that witchcraft is much more hoary than racecraft, its relatively recent cognate. On the terrain of history and ideology, the Fieldses reckon that the two, witchcraft and racecraft, share any number of features, rational and irrational. Between them, the authors would seem to know. Karen, whose previous research focused on Central Africa, is well familiar with witchcraft; while Barbara, an expert on U.S. slavery and its aftermath, is equally adept at racecraft. In this book, they jointly conclude that race is the American witch, a defining issue (if not the single most defining one) in the national experience, having served well its intended function as ideological obfuscation for inequality in practically all its forms. Racecraft’s very Du Bosian subtitle, The Soul of Inequality in American Life, encapsulates the book’s central argument. (The allusion, of course, is to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk.) Above all, Racecraft is a meditation on the decisive and corrosive effect of racial, nay racist, ideology [End Page 75] on U.S. society, to the historic and material disadvantage of its denizens, white and black alike. It bears noting that, despite occasional references to Americans of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, this is fundamentally a study in black and white. As told by the Fieldses, the racial saga in the United States, then and now, emerged largely from the crucible of interactions between Americans of African and European descent. In a rebuke to multiculturalism, at least of a certain kind, the book insists on the “uniqueness” of the U.S. black experience, “rejecting the false history, spurious logic, and expedient politics that collapse the situations of Afro-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans into a single category” (95). This amounts to throwing down a gauntlet, and some may be inclined to pick it up. If so, the Fieldses would seem to be up to the challenge. Racecraft is a collection of old and new pieces. The former, consisting of six previously published essays, are offered here in revised form as chapters 3–8. Some of these, such as chapter 4 (Barbara’s “Slavery, Race, Ideology and the United States of America”) and chapter 8 (Karen’s “Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation Between Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. Du Bois”) are well known and widely cited. (Full disclosure: I am one of several persons credited, no doubt overgenerously in my case, for reading many moons ago drafts of the original chapter 8 and “sharing their erudition” with the author.) The remainder of the book, an introduction and a conclusion, plus chapters 1 and 2, are new and are appearing in print for the first time. The previously published, and solo-authored, essays form the spine of the work; while the newer, and apparently jointly written pieces, constitute the connecting tissues. Despite the disparateness of its constitutive parts, then, the collection holds together as a single whole. That said, the Fieldses, and their editors, could have aided readers to better determine authorial responsibility for the various chapters by indicating (in the contents or at the beginning of each chapter) exactly which author wrote what pieces, individually or jointly. In writing, style matters. The Fieldses are nothing if not stylists, and that of a high Du Boisan order. Speaking of herself and her sister...

Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism by Jonathan Flatley (review)

Reviewed by: Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism by Jonathan Flatley Denise Ginfray Jonathan Flatley. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. 263pp. In this brilliant contribution to the studies of modernism, concerned with “a particular mode of modernist melancholizing” (2), the author [End Page 857] investigates the concept of loss central to Freud’s theory developed in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), choosing to combine individual histories of melancholia and loss, collective consciousness, ideology, culture, and the different predicaments of modernity. Jonathan Flat-ley’s “historical-aesthetic methodology” (3), with its many references to prominent theoretical works, is grounded on his dynamic concept of “Affective mapping,” namely “the aesthetic technology—in the older, more basic sense of a techne—that represents the historicity of one’s affective experience” (4). This book convincingly articulates theory and practice: in addition to a very useful glossary devoted to the key concepts of this essay (“Affect, Emotion, Mood [Stimmung], Structure of Feeling” [11–24]), two chapters describe the complex theoretical framework in detail, and the last three chapters offer a critical reading of three major literary narratives: Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw (1898), W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1926–1930). In his introduction, where he posits that the modern subject is shaped by the social and historical forces of collective experience through emotions, Flatley claims the necessity to regard the mapping process as experimental and “revisable” (7), and “the map” in relation to the Deleuzean concept of “rhizome.” The reader will certainly appreciate how carefully the author delineates his critical tools in his glossary, insisting on the similarities and differences between “emotion” (“something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression” [12]), “affects” (“always experienced in relation to an object or objects” [16]), “mood” (“a kind of affective atmosphere” [19]), and “structure of feeling” (“the ways social forces shape or structure our affective lives” [24]). Flatley develops his critical perspective in chapter 1 “Modernism and Melancholia”, and in chapter 2 “Affective Mapping”: borrowing mainly from Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Adorno, and Jameson, he suggests that the modern relation to time and temporality, the overwhelming influence of science and technology, the many discourses of normalization, have all created the melancholic subject. But, the critic insists, the aesthetic enterprise offers a response to depression: by distancing both the creative stance and his receptor from the entropic zone of loss and mourning, the imaginary scene of literature, among other forms of artistic experiences, may become a site where affects are rearticulated and recontextualized in a positive way, following a logic similar to the transferential logic of psychoanalysis. In chapter 3, “Reading into Henry James: Allegories of the Will to Know in The Turn of the Screw,” Flatley examines how “the ghosts from our past” (89) shape the reader’s experience and how the subtle dialectic between possession and dispossession affects [End Page 858] audiences. The critic considers Freud’s concept of tranference to be an essential component of James’s aesthetic venture in this novella. In addition, with reference to Michel Foucault and to the will to know that underlies the politics of modern sexuality, he argues that the embedded narratives of James’s work provide an emotional pattern of interpretation dominated by libidinal desire turned into textual energy. It is also relevant to relate the publication of The Turn of the Screw to its historical context, for the latter radically shaped the nature and function of creative imagination and altered the tenets of artistic commitment. Flatley insists on the historicity of James’s aesthetic, and he notes how, at the moment when epistemological doubt ushered the Western world into modernity, the novelist’s theory of reading responded to the collective sense of despondency by mapping individual affects and emotions into a shared experience of defamiliarization. James was genuinely convinced that “mimesis, possession, confusions of self and other and past and present—in a word ghosts—are necessary for life” (102). It is precisely this dominant mode of spectrality that combines pleasure, desire for the narrative, and imaginary identifications that so strongly appeals to most of us...

Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities by Laura Lomas (review)

Reviewed by: Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities by Laura Lomas Leonora Simonovis Laura Lomas. 2008. Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 379 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4325-7. The debate on immigration reform has recently come to the forefront in political debates, academic classrooms, conferences, seminars, and discussions. The Latino population has exponentially [End Page 283] grown in the past decade and within the next ten to twenty years it will become a majority in several states. However, the history of immigration, the politics of the revolving door, and the color lines that have divided the United States since the nineteenth century, have been masked by discourses that promote assimilation and that have falsely appropriated the contributions of the diverse immigrant groups that made their homes in these lands. In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas proposes to reevaluate American literature and modernity through the lens of Latino writing. For that purpose, she studies the works of Cuban José Martí during the Gilded Age (1880-1895). In keeping with the book’s title, Lomas focuses on Martí’s translations of American political and cultural phenomena and invites the reader to acknowledge him as one of the first writers who founded an intellectual Latino tradition and who critically reflected on U.S. expansionism towards Latin America. For Lomas, Martí’s work bears witness to the struggle not just of Latino migrant workers, but also that of Asian Americans and African Americans. Martí’s contribution to the field of American studies relies on his undermining of class and racial hierarchies. His focus on labor exploitation, among other topics, aimed to prove how U.S. economy grew by relying on migrant workers who were underpaid and worked under harsh conditions. Unlike other studies of Martí that have mainly focused on his writing as representative of modernism, as well as on his role in the fight for Cuban Independence from Spain, Lomas explores this author’s writings from the point of view of “the deportee, the migrant and the prisoner as they cultivate the rage of the sea beneath the writer’s quill and below the ship’s keel” (53). What lies underneath Martí’s poems, stories, and essays are seeds for a revolutionary movement in the Americas that trusts in the power of minorities working together as one. In spite of his light skin and educational level, Martí disengages from an individualistic bourgeois perspective and does not identify with white, educated elite. He reflects on the collective Latino and immigrant struggles that he has witnessed and experienced while traveling and living abroad. Two of the most poignant reflections in the book have to do with: a) translation as a way to engage and connect the Americas and b) Martí’s double consciousness as a postcolonial subject. Lomas uses the term “imperial modernity” to refer to the political and economic expansion of the US as a form of colonialism. Martí translates the political, economic and cultural implications of this expansion in order to educate possible readers. Translation in this sense becomes a form of resistance that undermines “imperial modernity” and proposes other modernities that break the homogeneity of the empire. In addressing Martí’s double consciousness, Lomas departs from [End Page 284] W.E.B. Dubois’s well-known essay “The Souls of Black Folk”, to explain how Martí’s writing constitutes a process in which the author realizes the dangers of seeing oneself through the eyes of the colonizer. Martí’s imagery speaks about the duality, violence, and destruction that affect Latino subjectivity and create tension and distance between the Americas. This idea questions whether leaving one’s homeland in the name of liberty is thwarted when subjected to the colonizer’s gaze in the country of adoption. In this sense, Martí anticipates discourses that promote assimilation but simultaneously exclude the foreign other by limiting his/her choices, exploiting them as cheap labor, and defining them by their race (and ethnicity although this term is not used in the book). Martí chronicles his experiences and serves as a bridge between the two Americas. His translations give the texts new...

Reimagining the “Pythian Madness” of Souls

This essay offers a close reading of the tenth chapter of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, which is often referenced but rarely unpacked for its careful examination of the relationship between religion and African American modernity. I argue that Du Bois's encounter with the rhythms of southern African American religion during the late nineteenth century moves him into a different time, which he is only able to articulate through mythology. As a result, Du Bois constructs a discourse that subjects the nation to a collective psychoanalysis by prodding it to bring Africa into its metaphysics of time and space.

Contemporary Afro and two-sidedness: Black diaspora aesthetic practices and the art market

This paper examines the cases of five mid-career artists with Afro origins – Ghada Amer, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare, and Kara Walker – using interviews and other data provided by the artists, dealers, curators, contemporary art historians, and a collector. Such a variety of voices follows Negri [2009. Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour. Translated by E. Emery. Cambridge, MA: Polity], who suggests a two-sidedness of art as activity and commodity. Black diaspora aesthetic practices – double consciousness, associated with both Du Bois [1903. The Souls of Black Folk. http://www.bartleby.com/114/100.html] and Gilroy [1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press], and post-black, linked to Golden [2001. Freestyle. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem] – are addressed as part of an evolution of multiple identities. This is about how these artists negotiate the social structure they find themselves inhabiting and encountering to create meaning. These artistic phenomena, as commodities dictated by the circulation of capital, draw attention to the contemporary art market. The management of artistic relationships between artists and their dealers emphasizes what Granovetter [1985. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91 (3): 481–510], [1992. “Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis.” Acta Sociologica 35: 3–11] calls social embeddedness, the interdependence of economic and non-economic actions.

African Americans and the Making of Modernity

When poet Paul Laurence Dunbar lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1905, he admitted to future NAACP executive secretary and fellow poet James Weldon Johnson, “I didn't start as a dialect poet. I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect” (160). Johnson, who had also begun his writing career using Negro dialect, replied that Dunbar had brought the form “as far as and as high as it could go.” “[T]he public,” Johnson continued, may have “still demanded dialect poetry, but …as a medium, especially for the Negro poet, it was narrow and limited” (161). In this brief exchange, Dunbar and Johnson reveal that the cultural problem of the twentieth century was not so much the problem of the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois so persuasively argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1903); it was African Americans' desire to be full partners and participants in modernism in all its forms. That desire extended to modernism in artistic circles as well, whether in black writers and artists' wish to be appreciated as modernists or in their shaping of modernism itself by their very presence and cultural riches. Predictably, no single definition of “modern” sufficed for all African Americans, but virtually all would agree that as a group, African Americans could not remain behind in the US's semifeudal past, subject to the whims of their fellow citizens and deprived of agency.

The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (review)

Reviewed by: Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor Tom Riis Blackness in Opera. Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012. 304 pp. $35.00. Arguably the greatest African American concert composer in the twentieth century, William Grant Still (1895-1978), as Gayle Murchison tells us here, [End Page 185] once declared, “My love has always been opera—the theater. This love of operatic music, stimulated in my early youth by listening to operatic records, was the thing that first aroused the desire to compose. All my other work has been a means to this end” (141). Such a statement demands close attention. What has opera meant for black folks in general? What has it done to them and for them, and what has black opera meant for everyone else? Blackness in Opera sets out to address these questions. Ann Sears, in her chapter on Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, lends a keynote for the whole volume by citing a passage from Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903): “Here [to America] we brought our three [African] gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song …; the gift of sweat and brawn …; the third, a gift of the spirit.… Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation” (112). Most of the other authors here join with Sears to illustrate the wide variety of contributions among Du Bois’s woven weavers—black composers, writers, directors, singers, actors. This collection of essays has evident roots in an academic setting (all fourteen of the contributing authors hold professorships in colleges or universities, while only one, George Shirley, has achieved an international reputation as a performer), and forms a part of the larger, continuing—perhaps perpetual—discussion about race consciousness within the performing arts, both lowbrow and highbrow, within the United States. The olio of “black” works and “black” performers discussed here is examined through many lenses, with attention given to dominant class or subaltern images, social and stage constructions of race, various understandings of opera as an American genre similar to but different from its European parents (although a few non-American works are included), various musical metaphors, period conventions, physical signs, and verbal markers for ethnicity, and the economic power dynamics implicated in theatrical productions everywhere. In his introduction, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. asserts, “The present collection … attempts to identify and theorize the various ways in which the idea of blackness has worked as a practice—as a complex of representational strategies in the genre of opera.” Ramsey acknowledges that “these essays do not present a unified theoretical voice, but like the practice of blackness itself forward complex ideas about race, humanity, and creativity … [derived from a] notoriously unstable set of assumptions, ploys, signs and compositional strategies” (ix). The themes expounded upon here range widely—from the meaning of blackface in a seventeenth-century Jacobean court entertainment (Schmalenberger, “Hearing the Other in The Masque of Blackness”) to an allegoric Weimar Republic fantasy about a black American violinist in a “jazz opera” with hardly any actual jazz music (Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf”) to the stimulus to black artistic consciousness and creativity provided by the U. S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 (Bryan, “Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance”) to gender-conscious studies of female characters created by such male writers as George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Scott Joplin. The poet Vijay Seshadri once described William Carlos Williams as “moralistic, pragmatic, and quixotic in his search for an American measure to match the American voice.” The chapters of this collection are also aptly described by this diverse set of adjectives. All twelve chapters tackle in various ways the inherently gnarly challenge of distilling meaning from a genre encrusted with assumptions about its contemporary status (and for which sophisticated analysis is of uneven quality). The critical place of individual operatic works over time—the first ones appeared in Italy around 1600—has come down to us more or less correlated to the posthumous reputation of the composers or librettists...

On Du Bois’ Notion of Double Consciousness

AbstractThe recent reception of Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” in the humanities has affirmed the notion as crucial and pivotal throughout his work. In contrast, its recent reception in the social sciences has tended to reject its centrality and importance. This essay will give general credence to the former position but, more importantly, show why a turn to Rousseau’s conception of amour‐propre may illuminate the importance of “double consciousness” in and for Du Bois’ 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk (SBF), despite the fact that he never elaborated on or embraced the notion in work subsequent to SBF’s publication.

Self-Negation within African Caribbean Christianity

As part of the Anglophone African Caribbean, the Bahamas is such a society with varying degrees of embedded self-hatred akin to the psychology of the colonized that Frantz Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks, or the “double consciousness” W.E.B. DuBois coined in The Souls of Black Folk. One is hard pressed to find a better example of this than in the ambiguous attitudes towards Junkanoo, a carnival-like street festival integral to Bahamian national and cultural identity, particularly in its relationship to the Church within Bahamian society. The central thesis of this article is that, as a thriving African religio-cultural retention within the Anglophone Caribbean, Junk-anoo for Bahamian people, just like folk and popular culture for Caribbean people generally, is indispensable to Caribbean Christianity, especially in regards to the critical issue of self-negation.

Aliens, cyborgs and other invisible men

Drawing on the racial discourses of W.E.B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk (1903) and 'The Comet' (1920), this article examines the containment and commodification of the black protagonist in Hollywood sf cinema starting with The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959) and ending with I Am Legend (2007) to discredit the notion that the race 'problem' has been solved by the 'colour-blind', 'post-racial' society. While each section of the article emphasises a specific strategy to contain and commodify the protagonist, from introjected racism to masking, the splitting of the self, and the recontextualisation of slavery, the analyses of the films shows these strategies form an interrelated and continuous approach that requires black actors to labour under a perpetual disadvantage.

Du Bois’s Ambient Poetics: Rethinking Environmental Imagination in The Souls of Black Folk

No book has had more enduring an influence on the symbolic geography of African American literature than W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois’s description of the Southern landscape and his trope of the journey south as a process of selfdiscovery have been as inspiring for African American writers as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) has been for white American nature writers and ecocritics. Souls would sit rather uneasily in a canon of environmental writing defined by writers like Thoreau or John Muir; unlike the writers most often valorized by ecocritics, Du Bois’s main concern is not to foster attention to and concern for nonhuman nature, but to explore “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century” (Souls 359). 1 Yet for Du Bois that project is in some way environmental: offering both a poetics of race and place and a nascent theory of “the Negro’s double environment” (Dusk 681), Souls makes place and environment central to its articulation of the “spiritual world” in which African Americans “live and strive” (Souls 359). Given its canonical status and its complex treatment of environment, place, and “world,” Souls is an obvious starting point for dialogue between ecocriticism and African American literary studies. Yet despite recent efforts to redress ecocriticism’s marginalization of African American perspectives, surprisingly few critics have examined Souls as environmental writing. 2 In her study of African American environmental thought, Kimberly K. Smith treats Du Bois as a key figure in a distinctive black environmental tradition whose main concern is not to protect nature from human interference but to “facilitate responsible and morally beneficial interaction with nature” while contesting racist practices and ideologies that constrain black people’s relations with the land (7). But while she finds an emphasis on natural beauty throughout Du Bois’s work (91), Smith’s reading of Souls focuses less on its representation of environment than on its valorization of rural black people as a “folk” with an organic or primitive connection to nature (98–118, 138–39). Scott Hicks does analyze Souls as nature writing, making suggestive but somewhat contradictory claims about how Du Bois’s treatment of nature compares with that of Booker T. Washington and with the white Romantic tradition. For Hicks, Du Bois challenges dominant white attitudes that Washington uncritically embraces, including both the instrumental view of nature as exploitable resource and the Romantic ideal of nature as an aestheticized retreat from politics and history (206–07, 210). Yet he also attributes to Du Bois some of the same values ecocritics find in white Romantics like Thoreau and Wordsworth, arguing that Du Bois “resists ways of speaking about the land that reduce it to human activities and epistemologies” and celebrates marginal landscapes like the swamp for the aesthetic and

The Prophethood of Work and the Gospels of The Souls of Black Folk

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most important American thinkers of the social and the political in the first half of the twentieth century, was involved in labor politics for much of his life, but while some scholars are now beginning to appreciate the extent to which Du Bois is also a thinker of the religious, no one has tried to connect his stance on questions of labor and his religious thought. Yet his early book, The Souls of Black Folk, presents, among other things, a complicated theology of labor. Du Bois criticizes the principle of submission glorified by white American Christianity, and imposed by white Christians on black slaves. At the same time, he confesses a veritable faith in "work, systematic and tireless," but only as it functions as part of a broader cultural renewal, itself dependent on what I describe as a "missiology of cultural knowledge." To accomplish this project, Du Bois must deploy an inegalitarian principle, separating manual laborers from intellectual or cultural laborers as fundamentally different kinds of human being. This principle is obviously in tension with the great struggles for equality in which Du Bois participated all his life. At the same time, Du Bois is not simply interested in consecrating work as such, but in explaining the connection that ties together labor, the aesthetic, and the religious. Our reading of Souls is informed by the hermeneutic practices modeled by Jacques Rancière in his political philosophy.

“The Tenth Talented” v. “The Hundredth Talented”: W. E .B. Du Bois’s Two Versions on the Leadership of the African American Community in the 20th Century

Abstract Comparing two essays written by Du Bois at a great interval of time, “The Tenth Talented” (1903) and “The Hundredth Talented” or the “Guiding Hundredth” (1948), the author of this article intends to deal with Du Bois’s endeavor to cohere culturally and politically an answerable and duty-bound black leadership, and to acknowledge the different accents laid by the author of The Souls of Black Folk on culture and on politics. An accomplished essayist and journalist, a foremost militant for the cause of black emancipation, Du Bois strove to persuade both white and the black audience about the role of high culture, an idea which perfectly matched the towering ideals of Victorian culture, but ran counter to the rapid urbanization of America, and later on, to the times of the Great Depression. The utopian solving chosen by Du Bois in “The Hundredth Talented” mirrors the conflict between the political convictions of a great mind and American reality, as well as the winding course of intellectual ideas which brought black emancipation into life, only in the midst of the last century.

"Obsidian Mine": The Psychic Aftermath of Slavery

Oh, yes, I had my bad dreams. I had my good ones, too. Both required critique. He [the analysand] must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must … become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. In the foundational article “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race” (1996), Hortense Spillers argues “that the psychoanalytic object, subject, subjectivity now constitute the missing layer of hermeneutic/interpretive projects of an entire generation of black intellectuals now at work” (377). A mere handful of African-American writers serve as the exceptions that prove this rule, and the experimental science fiction and fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany is foremost among them. As both literary practitioner and critic, Delany has deeply considered the possibilities and the limitations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and as a means of psychic repair for black and/or queer subjects in the late-twentieth century. However, because Delany's oeuvre has often been analyzed outside the context of African-American literary and cultural studies, the implications of his engagement with and critique of psychoanalytic theory for black cultural discourse have not heretofore been explored. Representing psyches and, more specifically, sexualities damaged through racialized and gendered forms of oppression has been one of the most significant projects of twentieth-century African-American literature, at least since W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The internal operation of psychic recovery—the means by which psychological repair might be accomplished—takes up much less space within black American literature, and when the process of recovery has been represented, spiritual and cultural communion are, more often than not, the paths to psychic health.1 Thus, Delany's deployment of psychoanalytic practices of narrative healing, coupled with his critique of the homophobic orientation of much psychoanalytic theory, render his Return to Nevèrÿon series the most thorough engagement with psychoanalysis within African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952).2

Accounting for ethnic and racial diversity: the challenge of enumeration

1. Accounting for ethnic and racial diversity: the challenge of enumeration Patrick Simon and Victor Piche 2. Collecting ethnic statistics in Europe: a review Patrick Simon 3. Group self-determination, individual rights, or social inclusion? Competing frames for ethnic counting in Hungary Andrea Krizsan 4. Making (mixed-)race: census politics and the emergence of multiracial multiculturalism in the United States, Great Britain and Canada Debra Thompson 5. Re-making the majority? Ethnic New Zealanders in the 2006 census Tahu Kukutai and Robert Didham 6. Used for ill used for good: a century of collecting data on race in South Africa Tom A. Moultrie and Rob E. Dorrington 7. Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality Mara Loveman, Jeronimo O. Muniz and Stanley R. Bailey 8. Capturing complexity in the United States: which aspects of race matter and when? Aliya Saperstein

“Contempt” in W. E. B. Du Bois's OF OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS

Eric J. Sundquist argues that “The Souls of Black Folk is one of the indispensable works of the early modern period, in literature and intellectual history alike; and yet, like W. E. B. Du Bois's w...

Beyond the Veil: Indeterminacy and Iconoclasm in the Art of Robert Hayden, Janet Kozachek, and Tom Feelings

Robert Hayden employs innovative modes of signification to unveil and expose race-based violence in United States. In Night, Death, Mississippi (1966) he defies bildverbot (1) traditions, or customary injunction against representing sacred or, in secular times, secret. This policy pertains to what must not be shown because it lies reach of representation (traditionally, God or Shoah) and also applies to what must not be shown because its portrayal undermines hegemonic ideologies that maintain and naturalize systems of oppression (as in phenomena of lynching and slavery). Some topics are designated unspeakable, beyond veil, or simply lack first-hand witnesses. Yet, this barred access or knowledge gap due to iconoclastic tendencies in culture does not inhibit a poet accustomed to poetry's mode of meaning by indirection. While we live in a time of relative freedom of speech and expression, vestiges of prohibition against depicting unrepresentable subject matter have led writers and artists to seek alternate aesthetic strategies that insist on historical and contemporary realities even as they dismantle conventional realism. Hayden's innovative portrayal of ostensibly obscene (ob scaena) matter of a death by lynching works according to ambiguous modes that depend on materiality of medium (language), rather than materiality of desecrated body itself. By treating language as a revelatory concrete substance--a clay of sounds, a stack of stanzas, a shifting web of syntax ruled and unruled--Hayden calls attention to his creative activity, and by extension, to hidden or forbidden subject matter as well. Thus, medium's material qualities anchor poem as does space/time referent: U.S.A., in mid 1960s. From this fixed point, poet then raises metaphysical questions about society and human suffering. In defiance of restrictions against using art to signify certain categories of experience, Hayden tears away rhetorical veil that falls over episodes too terrible to recount (to use a common collocation from slave narratives), employing a poetics of indeterminacy that both tempers and intensifies truth with its rhetorical power. The poet's insistence on subject matter, examining a generalized episode of a recurring event, serves as a call to witness for both those who follow his line of vision and those who avert their eyes. Dispersing perspective among at least four entities, Hayden offers a polyphony of internal and articulated voices that stage a quasi-narrative spanning past, present and future experience, both actual and imaginary. The trope of veil occupies a central position in U.S. literary history, due in part to ways W. E. B. Du Bois uses it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a sign of mourning, an instrument of separation or concealment, and a marker of prophecy. Werner Sollors explicates Old Testament references to demonstrate metaphor's function to separate Afro-Americans from American culture at large but also [to give] them a more profound vision and higher destiny (49; qtd. in Gates and Oliver xxviii): Du Bois imaginatively adapted two biblical images of veil as a division within Temple [Exodus 26.33] and as cover that divinely inspired Moses wore when he came back from Mount Sinai and spoke to people [Exodus 34.33-35]. (49) Hayden transposes this metaphoric configuration into an aesthetic strategy as he writes Night, Death, Mississippi, using language to obscure and reveal in delicate tones of lament that ultimately solidify protest nature of his poem. Hayden twice evokes notion of iconoclasm, literally the breaking of icons, in his essays on Harlem Renaissance-era activism (Prose 46) and on later aesthetic innovations (Recent Poetry 69). According to Hayden, Harlem Renaissance artists shattered inauthentic images of Black experience, asserting their own new depictions in place of old stereotypes. …

The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance by James Smethurst (review)

Reviewed by: The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance by James Smethurst John Lowney James Smethurst . The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. 264 pp. $65.00 cloth/$26.95 paper. James Smethurst's The African American Roots of Modernism is an impressively thorough and provocative account of the impact of African American literature on modernism in the United States. While previous scholarship has addressed the [End Page 258] importance of African American culture, and especially language and music, on the development of modernism, this book emphasizes the influence of African American writers on the understanding of modernity in the U. S. Smethurst identifies "the African American roots of modernism" with the establishment of the Jim Crow system of segregation, beginning with the "separate but equal" system of the South and continuing with the segregation of urban space throughout the U. S. African American artists and intellectuals who wrote between Reconstruction and the New Negro Renaissance not only conceptualized the "sort of fragmented subjectivity and urban alienation that became a hallmark of modernism in the United States," they also were "among the very first to imagine, represent, and promote a U. S. artistic bohemia linked to an 'American' new literature" that was distinctively interracial (215). Although not as comprehensive as Smethurst's magnificent The Black Arts Movement (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism is perhaps more likely to transform perceptions of African American literary history. The chapters of this book are organized thematically, but they also follow a chronological trajectory of two "waves" of African American writers. The first group includes Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Booker T. Washington, who grew up after emancipation but became active as writers as Jim Crow superseded the ideals of Reconstruction in the 1890s. The second features James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, and William Stanley Braithwaite, whose early literary careers coincide with the extension of Jim Crow segregation in northern cities in the 1900s and 1910s. The first chapter of The African American Roots of Modernism examines constructions of African American dualism that responded to the intensification of Jim Crow segregation by the turn of the century. This chapter incisively explains how concepts of dualism articulated in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Washington's Up from Slavery, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Chesnutt's conjure stories, and the poetry of Dunbar and Fenton Johnson not only respond specifically to the political and cultural questions of the Jim Crow U. S., but also have a lasting resonance in U. S. modernism. While Du Bois's concepts of "double consciousness" and "the veil" are the best-known figures for African American dualism, Smethurst emphasizes the dialogue about black subjectivity and culture in which they emerged, the dialogue compelled by the Jim Crow "dual status" of African Americans as "citizens and subcitizens" (63). He furthermore argues for the greater literary influence of Dunbar's concept of "the mask," which is comparable to the veil but is more assertive in showing "the act of concealment and its coerced motivation, underpinning militant and historically pointed social criticism" (34). Dunbar's influence as a poet and novelist is paramount throughout The African American Roots of Modernism. His underappreciated importance is also evident in the second chapter, which documents how the trope of the black Civil War soldier evolved as a figure of "black modernity in which African American citizenship would be a key constituent of the new reconstructed nation" (19). With the development of the Jim Crow system, the figure of the black Civil War veteran becomes one of betrayal, of regret, of melancholy, or of "an existential validation of African American humanity adrift in the fogs of an American political limbo" (20), a figure comparable to subsequent African American literary portrayals of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam War veterans. The next two chapters address the literary and cultural implications of the Jim Crow system in urban centers, especially Northern cities such as Chicago and New York. The chapter on the early...

The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois'sThe Souls of Black Folk

In recent decades, the concept of “the people” has received sustained theoretical attention. Unfortunately, political theorists have said very little about its explicit or implicit use in thinking about the expansion of the American polity along racial lines. The purpose of this article in taking up this issue is twofold: first, to provide a substantive account of the meaning of “the people”—what I call its descriptive and aspirational dimensions—and second, to use that description as a framework for understanding the rhetorical character of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work,The Souls of Black Folk, and its relationship to what one might call the cognitive–affective dimension of judgment. In doing so, I argue that as a work of political theory,Soulsdraws a connection between rhetoric, on the one hand, and emotional states such as sympathy and shame, on the other, to enlarge America's political and ethical imagination regarding the status of African-Americans.