During the course of his impressively long life, W. E. B. Du Bois occupied a bewildering range of positions, both on the domestic front of African American politics and on the international front of the anticolonial politics of the emergent Third World. As the recent and widely commemorated centennial of his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk (1903) reminds us, the most influential and ubiquitous African American intellectual and political ï¬?gure of the twentieth century was also its most penetrating, prescient, and—to this day—haunting anatomist of racial subjectivity. The striking simultaneity with which the outer territories of domestic and world politics converge with the inner territories of psychic life in Du Bois’s writings, or with which the evocation of racial nationalism coincides with the invocation of racial globalism, imposes, as few other bodies of work do, the necessity of learning to think doubly about the scene of political identiï¬?cation. Double consciousness, as Du Bois terms the iconic state of “unreconciled strivingsâ€? that is both the curse and the gift of African American being, is a case in point: both contemporaneous with what is often characterized as Du Bois’s nationalist phase and philosophically coterminous with his career-long effort to think outside the space and time of the nation.1 Time and again, Du Bois’s writings construct nationalism and globalism as neither philosophical antitheses nor chronological others but rather as secret sharers, mutually sustaining conditions of being in whose agonistic embrace lies a quite different story of political evolution than the one we have been accustomed to tell.
Critical studies have narrated a certain passage, even progression, from Du Bois’s science to his politics, from his art to his ideology, and from his nationalism to the various globalisms of his pan-Africanism, socialism, communism, Third-Worldism, diasporic consciousness, and most recently what Ross Posnock terms his “cosmopolitan universalism.�2 Conversion narratives, though blessed with a certain thematic tidiness and chronological certitude, bifurcate at their peril. For as a close reading of Du Bois’s writings reveals, he was shaped not just by the transition from one intellectual or political framework to another but also, and possibly more so, by their ongoing contention, collusion, and coexistence. This is the intellectual equivalent of living with double consciousness: sustaining two opposed allegiances, choosing neither, thinking through both. What I want to signal in Souls, and Du Bois’s work more generally, is a distinct form of national and racial thinking that �nds its expressive medium and its oppositional force in a certain kind of globalism. Rather than asserting that Du Bois is more global than national, that his globalism succeeds, transcends, or sublates his nationalism, I suggest, with double consciousness as my model and postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory as my method, that it is only because he is one that he can also be the other.
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Northwestern University conference “100 Years of The Souls of Black Folk: A Celebration,� held in October 2003, and at a plenary session dedicated to Souls at the American Studies Association conference held in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2003. I am grateful to Dwight McBride, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Amy Kaplan for inviting me to participate in those events, to my co-panelists and audiences in Evanston and Hartford for spirited debate, and to the editors of this issue of Public Culture for their generous and constructive reading of an earlier draft.
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 5. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text.
2. Charles U. Smith and Lewis Killian read Du Bois’s 1910 departure from Atlanta University and academic sociology for an executive position at the NAACP as the moment when “Du Bois the sociologist had become Du Bois the ideologist of social protest.� See Smith and Killian, “Black Sociologists and Social Protest,� in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 195. For a related argument, see Elliot Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois as Sociologist,� in Black Sociologists; and Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Voice of the Black Protest Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). Another version of this chronological narrative organizes Arnold Rampersad’s study The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), which traces the “vocational tension� between Du Bois’s three careers as “historian and sociologist, poet and novelist, and propagandist� (47).
Eric J. Sundquist’s comprehensive examination of Du Bois in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) updates the narrative, identifying not only a division within Du Bois’s writing but also a link, in the form of later works’ “completion� of the earlier works’ vision (550). In yet another variation on this theme, Cynthia D. Schrager describes the tension and ultimate transition between Du Bois’s positivistic social science and his messianic mysticism rooted in late-nineteenth-century spiritualism in “Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bois,� American Quarterly 48 (1996): 551–86. Probing the postfoundationalist dimensions of Du Bois’s intellectual shifts, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) credits Du Bois with a diasporic cultural politics that resists and even “transcend[s]� the narrow particularisms of racial, ethnic, and national “absolutism� (121). In a similar vein, Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) reads Du Bois as the advocate of a “cosmopolitan universalism� that offers a necessary alternative to cultural studies and its guiding “ideology of ‘authenticity’ � (21). Thomas C. Holt provides a notable exception to the chronological plot in observing that “Du Bois’s paradoxical positions may be taken as somehow emblematic of the African-American experience generally� and by arguing for the “necessarily interactive� relationship of those posi- tions. See Holt’s “The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,� American Quarterly 42 (1990): 305–6.
