Du Bois and the Production of the Racial Picturesque
It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End. . . . So called apparently by way of sarcasm, to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was no earthly “beyond” open to him. George Eliot, Middlemarch
With her characteristic understatement, George Eliot exposes the English bourgeoisie’s use of picturesque art to affirm its self-identification and selectively to ignore aspects of reality. However, where Eliot questions the bourgeoisie’s assertion of its own interests at the expense of the laboring classes, W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk,1 questions the racial self-identification and interests of white America—which he takes on as social and metatheoretical problems. Thus, rather than dismissing the picturesque as Eliot does, Du Bois finds that it can be recoded so that it functions instead to promote social critique, foster sociability across racial lines, and transform self-interest into an interest in others. All of this might explain why, in several key moments of Souls, Du Bois appropriates language associated with the picturesque aesthetic and produces what I am referring to as a “racial picturesque,” in which a language of social analysis and critique is supplemented by romantic vocabulary and imagery. By aestheticizing the social and political landscape of early-twentieth-century America, Du Bois takes the risky step of creating a textual environment that, while not directly reflecting a real social environment, invites a coming to terms with the notion that the racial picturesque can reveal important aspects of the Negro problem and of our ways of approaching it.
The racial picturesque engenders a mobile subject who is sensitive to racial and other social inequalities. Facilitating the process of transforming a presumed knowledge into interests, Du Bois constructs a textual environment from the diverse tropes of the picturesque, specifically those remarking vistas, vantages, prospects, and other objects comprehended in spatial terms. By means of the picturesque, Du Bois’s narrator shows a different face of the land and challenges the reader (about whom more will be said) to see and to respond differently to the signifiers representing the Negro problem. As writer rather than as narrator, Du Bois has two tasks: to motivate the reader to comprehend the color line and its effects on whites as well as blacks and to supplement conventional formulations from sociology and political economy with aesthetics, their seemingly polar opposite.2
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Notes
I thank Donna Landry, Kathryne Lindberg, Ted Pearson, and the Public Culture anonymous reader for providing me with valuable insights and editorial suggestions. The first three, I hope, know how grateful I am to have received their constant support of my work.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States/Viking, 1986). Hereafter referred to as Souls.
- Ross Posnock argues for the compatibility of aesthetic and political discourses in Du Bois’s writings and encourages those who would insist that they are incompatible to recall a similar articulation in “Western Marxism,” particularly the Frankfurt school. See Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” American Literary History 7 (1995): 500–524.