Du Bois, Politics, Aesthetics: An Introduction
There is little evidence to suggest . . . that the methodology of formalism contravenes historical perspective or deep political commitment . . . a method is not inherently ahistorical, or endemic to a fixed, divine order. . . . The attempt, then, to treat a literary text by a black writer as a text (a spate of discourse operating according to certain formal principles) need not exclude the critic’s whole consciousness, but, of necessity, draws its plenitude into specific concentration.
Hortense J. Spillers, “Formalism Comes to Harlem”
The essays collected in this issue celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903 by A. C. McClurg, Souls is Du Bois’s biting dissent from the racist and nationalist ideologies animating the public, political culture of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow America. Announcing that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” it is Du Bois’s best-known attempt to explore the “strange meaning of being black” in a society that was structured by racial apartheid and that consistently treated blacks with contempt.1 To this end, Souls details a sweeping tableau of African American social and political life, highlighting the economic and social legacies of slavery, the fight for political and civil rights, and the contributions of African Americans to the spiritual and material formation of the American nation. The advent of Souls was an incisive event—an original, philosophically daring, and artfully wrought initiative that gave new life to the black resistance to white supremacy. In the words of David Levering Lewis, it “was like a fireworks going off in a cemetery . . . sound and light enlivening the inert and the despairing . . . an electrifying manifesto mobilizing people for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history.”2
Lewis’s remarks could be taken as an epigraph for the volume as a whole, because they suggest that Souls is both a call to arms and an aesthetic event, at once a manifesto and electrifying sound and light—thus, a book that demands to be read equally as political argument and literary art. His remarks also resonate with the now commonplace claim that Du Bois’s book invites appraisal from many disciplinary perspectives—including politics and literary criticism—because its impact and significance cannot be reduced to the terms available to just one such point of view. The essays collected here support this claim, for they demonstrate the possibility of combining literary critical analysis with detailed reflections on Souls’s larger political themes (e.g., white supremacy, homosocial patriarchy, and the relation between race and nation) to produce bifocal readings of Souls. Incorporating the sensibilities of the literary critic and the political theorist alike, they rely on the former to explore aspects of Du Bois’s political agenda and on the latter to make sense of his aesthetic choices.
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Notes
Earlier versions of the essays collected in this volume were presented as part of “100 Years of The Souls of Black Folk: A Celebration,” a conference honoring the centenary of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk and sponsored by the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities and the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, October 24–25, 2003. For help in assembling this special issue of Public Culture, I thank the journal’s editorial committee and especially Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Beth Povinelli, and Claudio Lomnitz. I also thank Beth Povinelli, Claudio Lomnitz, and Dwight McBride for their very helpful comments on the first draft of this introduction. Thanks, too, to each of the contributors.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 34. All subsequent references to The Souls of Black Folk are to this edition.
- David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois—Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1993), 227.