Sixty-six: DuBois Unveiled?

October 29, 2003

Sometime in 1994 or 1995, while I was working at the University of Pennsylvania, I suggested to Michael B. Katz that he bring together scholars to reconsider the importance of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (originally published in 1899). He had applied for a grant from NEH seeking funding for a group to focus on the urban predicament – an off-shoot of his SSRC funded book on the Underclass debate. The NEH had responded that there wasn’t much new in this idea, so he asked me what the group should be trying to do. I suggested the Du Bois idea and apparently it worked a treat with the foundation. My idea, though, was more in the realm of auto-critique than the idea that went forward. I felt we should be critically examining both the way Du Bois came to his study of the black community of Philadelphia, and the way we undertake such study today, recognizing links between the two, as well as the strengths and limitations of both. The result was a study that did recognize some of the limits of Du Bois’ work in The Philadelphia Negro, but which by and large showed a degree of contentment with the way things have been done since.  A case in point was my essay, “Giant Steps.”  While there was much of value in this essay, and I certainly do not repudiate it, the manner in which it was edited down to fit the volume (W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City) was suggestive.  Originally the essay was called “Contesting White Mythologies” and was a meditation on Robert Young’s volume, White Mythologies. Several parts of the essay drew considerable criticism, and largely these were those parts where I was trying to say something radically new. In particular, my comparison of Black Reconstruction and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire incensed Thomas Holt. I was asked to remove it. What follows, then, is a version of what was left out; what one should not say about Du Bois.

In the venturesome spirit proposed by James Clifford in his influential work on travelling culture, I want to consider the impact that this outer-national, transcultural reconceptualisation might have on the political and cultural history of black Americans and that of blacks in Europe....It will require comprehension of such difficult and complex questions as W.E.B. Du Bois’s childhood interest in Bismarck, his investment in modelling his dress and moustache on that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his likely thoughts while sitting in Heinrich Von Treitschke's seminars, and the use his tragic heroes make of European culture.

– Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic[1] 

I. Contesting White Mythologies

In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Robert J. C. Young suggests that the post-structuralist onslaught on the historical narrative was in part a by-product of the Algerian War of Independence. This war awakened some western intellectuals, many of whom had experience living in Algeria, to the limitations of the Hegelian and Marxian historical method. The politics of post-structuralism, which has often been denounced as apolitical and reactionary,[2] was, Young asserts, articulated in the weaving together of ‘capitalist economic exploitation, racism, colonialism, sexism, together with, perhaps unexpectedly, “History” and the structure of the Hegelian dialectic.’

In the wake of the Algerian war, according to Young, left intellectuals began to perceive that Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no history,’ and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there. In short, while ‘History’ for Marxists promised liberation, for others ‘it entail[ed] another forgotten story of oppression.’[3]

Such analysis presents interesting questions for the student of W.E.B. Du Bois. For, as many scholars have noted, Du Bois's own work grew out of the Hegelian tradition.[4] While Du Bois worked in the years preceding the Algerian War, his work dealt with exactly this issue of the limits of white historical mythologies. How did he manage through his own historical writing to transcend these limits? Was he able, as Marx claimed to have done, to turn Hegel upside down through a brand of historical materialism, especially in light of the fact that by the end of his life Du Bois was a self-proclaimed Marxist? Or did some assumptions to be found in the idealist historical method survive intact?

By embracing Marxian categories, Du Bois made a self-conscious effort to test the foundation stones of the historical profession – objectivity and progress, as defined by the ‘White Man's Burden.’ In Black Reconstruction in America, he endeavored to highlight the limitations of American history and to question its propagandist or mythological aspects.[5] In the process, his work has become a valuable guide (along with the work of other anti-colonial and anti-racist writers of the period from C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, George Padmore, and Kwame Nkrumah within the African diaspora, to Jawarhalal Nehru in India), for historians who wish to move beyond strict class and race analyses towards a history that weaves together class, race, gender, and imperialism.[6]

Since much of Du Bois's historical writing highlighted tensions and presaged new ideas and approaches to history, we are brought at the end to consider some of the predicaments of writing history in post-colonial societies. Looking at Du Bois's attempts to contest ‘propaganda’ or ‘white mythology’ almost naturally leads to the question of the degree to which Du Bois himself could represent ‘a race’ when his subject position was in so many ways informed by ‘the Veil’ that he had helped to describe. 

II. Du Bois’s Marx

Du Bois's own criticism of his early work on The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade reveals the degree to which he felt he had adopted Marxist analysis in his work. In 1954, he claimed that he had earlier been ignorant "of the significance of the work of Freud and Marx." After outlining how his education at Harvard and in Germany had made him feel that Marx had already been ‘superseded’ and so he had given ‘little time to firsthand study of his work,’ he wrote:

This was important in my interpretation of the history of slavery and the slave-trade. For if the influence of economic motives on the action of mankind ever had clearer illustration it was in the modern history of the African race, and particularly in America. No real conception of this appears in my book. There are some approaches, some allusions, but no complete realization of the application of the philosophy of Karl Marx to my subject. That concept came much later, when I began intensive study of the facts of society, culminating in my Black Reconstruction in 1935.[7]

Finally, he concluded his assessment of both the earlier work, and implicitly the method of history from which it sprang: ‘What I needed was to add to my terribly conscientious search into the facts of the slave-trade the clear concept of Marx on the class struggle for income and power, beneath which all considerations of right or morals were twisted or utterly crushed.’[8]

In Deromanticizing Black History, Clarence E. Walker has dismissed Du Bois’s links to Marxist analysis. With the dismissive wave of a hand, Walker argues that Du Bois’s one claim to Marxism, Black Reconstruction in America, ‘is not really a systematic materialist analysis of history.’ For, ‘Du Bois never really accepted a key tenet of Marxism, that is, the idea of working-class solidarity. What Du Bois’s personal and intellectual experience told him was that, in America, racial caste and economic class were in conflict. He understood the primacy of race as a “transhistoric” phenomenon in America."[9] And yet, Du Bois’s claim that Black Reconstruction in America was a Marxist history ought to be taken seriously, for a scholar and intellectual of his stature could not have been so easily misled. A man who many now assert (including Walker himself) managed to redefine the history of Reconstruction among his many other towering intellectual accomplishments surely knew what he was doing when he was using Marxian models to describe and interpret Reconstruction. His own ideas had emerged out of his training in German philosophy and he knew the Kantian and Hegelian roots of his own ideas. He also wrote about the relevance of Karl Marx for interpreting the African American experience at this time. As Walker notes, Du Bois maintained that whatever Marx said “concerning the uplift of the working class must...be modified so far as Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had not studied at first hand their peculiar race problems here in America.”[10] But, if (as Walker suggests) this stands as a dismissal of Marx, why would Du Bois have so explicitly embraced Marxism in Black Reconstruction?[11]

Walker implies that any form of division within the working class contradicts Marxist analysis, which he believes is dependent upon the notion of ‘working-class solidarity.’ This one-dimensional reading of Marx, most likely seen through the more political writings (e.g., The Communist Manifesto) as opposed to the more historical works,[12] ignores the fact that Marx clearly delineated divisions within all class groups. Marx accounted for ethnic or ‘racial’ divisions when looking at the Irish in England and the political factions within the bourgeoisie. The fact that Du Bois and Marx would have and did define the proletariat differently is explained by the fact that they were observing different societies. For Du Bois African Americans represented a considerable portion of the American proletariat, and race thus became a key element of his analysis.

In many ways, Black Reconstruction in America can be seen as Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte set in the United States.[13] ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’[14] This oft quoted statement from Marx works for Reconstruction in the United States, except that in America farce and tragedy occurred almost simultaneously. Reconstruction witnessed the farce of a continuing bourgeois revolution occurring amidst the tragedy of a proletarian revolution. According to Marx:

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, the proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out.[15]

The simultaneity of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions in America accounts for Du Bois’s decision not to entitle Chapter 10 ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in South Carolina.’ Changing the title to ‘The Black Proletariat in South Carolina’ (because ‘it has been brought to my attention that’ this use of ‘dictatorship’ was incorrect) signified that the Prolatariat never gained the status of dictatorship in any meaningful sense. The bourgeoisie was still doing its thing.[16]

In America, northerners played the role of the French petty-bourgeoisie, seeking an alliance with the southern worker, attempting to ‘weaken their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.’ These people – missionaries, northern Republicans, and captains of industry – did not wish solely to enforce ‘an egoistic class interest.’ Rather, they believed that ‘the special conditions of [their] emancipation are the general conditions within the frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided.’[17] How much closer to the situation in America could Marx have approached without himself undertaking a study of Reconstruction? Such a statement can encompass the widespread belief in the benefits of free-labor ideology and the shoals of class division on which it fell apart.[18]  

Moreover, the division between northern capitalists and southern slaveholders could be comprehended as just a division within the American bourgeoisie similar to that found in France and England. Marx wrote:

Each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital – sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society (p. 48).

This passage brings into question Eugene Genovese's appropriation of Marx, where the Southern planters are described as pre-capitalist and far removed ideologically from northern capitalists.[19] It also enables us to understand the trajectory along which counter-revolution would travel in the United States, a trajectory clearly delineated by Du Bois in his chapter, ‘The Counter-revolution of Property.’[20] Northern capital ‘would thrust debt, concessions and graft on the South,’ divide northern labor into ‘exploiting and exploited groups’ (native-born/immigrant, skilled/unskilled), and transform the ‘laboring-peasants’ of the West ‘into land speculators and investors uniting [the West’s] interests through railways to the Solid South in return for non-interference with Big Business’ (p. 634).

For Marx, bourgeois oligarchy was reestablished in France through the vehicle of Louis Bonaparte and his manipulation of the peasantry. For Du Bois, the corresponding vehicle was President Andrew Johnson, in large part representing the ‘limitations’ of the southern poor white. The promise of reform embodied in the person of Johnson, ‘a champion of the poor laborer’ who demanded that ‘the land monopoly of the Southern oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the soil, South and West, to the free laborer,’ came to a halt as the President underwent a ‘transubstantiation’:

He had demanded the punishment of those Southerners who by slavery and war had made such an economic program [free labor] impossible. Suddenly thrust into the Presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up extravagant ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demand for dividing up plantations when he realized that Negroes would largely be beneficiaries. Because he could not conceive of Negroes as men, he refused to advocate universal democracy, of which, in his young manhood, he had been the fiercest advocate, and made strong alliance with those who would restore slavery under another name (p. 322).

This was the ‘tragedy of American prejudice made flesh:’ The ‘rebel against economic privilege’ acquiring the ‘conventional ambition of a poor white to be the associate and benefactor of monopolists, planters and slave drivers.’ How like Marx’s description of Louis Bonaparte as ‘the grotesque mediocrity’ is Du Bois’s description of Johnson as ‘the most pitiful figure of American history?’[21]  

In short, Du Bois might have used the following text as the epigraph for his volume:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.[22]

The manner in which Johnson, the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually even radical republicans ‘conjure[d] up the spirits of the past,’ undermining the democratic promise of this revolutionary period closely paralleled the conclusion of French revolutionary impulses in ‘Napoleon the Little’s’ coup d'etat of 1851. To say that Du Bois was Marxist, then, is to say that were someone like Marx to be writing about Reconstruction in the United States during the 1930s, this might be how he or she would have described it. 

III. Post-Philosophical

Black Reconstruction in America witnessed Du Bois' move from a reliance on a single foundational (transhistorical) category – that of race – to a more fluid position in which race was still important, especially for highlighting the existence of oppression, but was nonetheless mediated by and placed alongside categories of class and gender. [23] Even though he may not have used the discourse of postcoloniality and deconstruction, his position was analogous to that of many Marxists later in the century, from Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, and Jameson to Said, Bhabha and Spivak. He and they differed from Marx in not giving primacy to the category of class, while believing they remained true to Marxism. 

In this vein, Du Bois believed his world revealed different things from that of Marx. While the development of industrial capitalism was seen as the most compelling social and historical force for Marx, Du Bois heralded the centrality of colonialism and imperialism (which clearly had important economic manifestations). Du Bois’s proletariat was necessarily also differently conceived from Marx’s. While the latter had conceived of the proletariat in Euro-American terms (Indians, Africans and others needed to ascend to the level of European capitalism before they could possibly contemplate transcending it), the former saw the proletariat emerging from worldwide struggles in which contesting white mythologies was crucial.

But, if Du Bois eschewed economic foundationalism, how can he be described as Marxist? The key here is not so much Du Bois’ readings of Marx, since he has never been noted as a Marxist scholar. Rather it lies in his background as a Hegelian (loosely conceived) and in the transformation that occurred slowly from the First World War to 1935 when he published Black Reconstruction in America. He, like Marx, endeavored to turn Hegel on his head. As outlined earlier (borrowing from Appiah), Du Bois extended Hegel’s ideas about national destinies to include African Americans. In doing this, he acted in a way rather similar to the Young Hegelians who attempted to incorporate the working-classes into their Hegelian model. But just as Marx had seen that adaptation was insufficient with regard to the downtrodden working class, Du Bois came to see that oppositions between colonizer and colonized, whites and blacks, men and women also brought the Hegelian edifice into question. Hegel saw history as the teleological unraveling of an Idea. While the young Hegel believed that ‘Man’ might still be unable to fathom the nature of that Idea and the providential design (he was, after all, an objective rather than a subjective idealist), thus providing a radical aspect to the dialectical model and enabling it to appeal to later radicals like Marx and Du Bois, the notion that history was driven by an Idea provided a profoundly difficult barrier for radicals to surmount. [24] Hegelians of all stripes, radical or conservative, tended to imagine that the Idea had finally been revealed. Thus Hegel increasingly came to believe that the highest stage could be witnessed in the appearance and ascendancy of the German State and bureaucracy; Marx found it in the urban-industrial proletariat; [25] and Du Bois saw it in the souls of black folk.

Having outlined the full extent of propaganda in American history, Du Bois was unwilling to make the further step to claiming that the very way in which history itself had been conceived was by its nature propagandist. This presented several problems that were evident at the time he was writing, but which have become more so as ‘the problem of the twentieth century’ gives way to or seems about to be refined in the twenty-first. For example, Du Bois searched for African Americans in the historical record who exemplified his notion of upright and worthy contributor to the cause of democratic Reconstruction. But what if he had found none? Would this have meant that all that American historians had said was true? Of course not. The pursuit of ‘Truth’ would always be heavily laden by moral intention; the attempt to deny a lie might verify the question. Just as The Philadelphia Negro had conformed to the model of finding urban poor guilty until proven innocent, Black Reconstruction would valorize resistance (‘general strikes’) and incorruptibility. In accepting such judgments as worthy, social historians have cast shadows on those who do not participate in such narratives (and who may still have their own unrecognized justifications for their actions) – those who ‘pass’, those who commit suicide, those who prostitute themselves, and who might be labeled an ‘Uncle Tom.’

Du Bois attempted to turn propagandist history on its head, to reveal historical narratives that empowered African Americans and contested the rationalizations of the elite. Nevertheless, even this social historical approach could harbor within it limitations: whose narratives (based on class, color, gender, religion, education, etc.) would come to stand for African Americans or Africans as a group? Would the replacement of teleological histories (‘white mythologies’) lead to other kinds of teleological histories? What hidden ‘facts,’ ‘well-authenticated truths,’ and other ‘raw materials’ might shape historical narratives in ways that privileged some groups and led to the disempowerment of others? [26] Such questions could not necessarily be answered within Social History, which used as its building blocks many of the same ‘facts’ fashioned to advantage by social elites. Merely inverting a paradigm, showing what some African Americans had achieved even after ‘the veil’ had been laid aside and the fullness of the achievement had been made clear, was insufficient. For the search for the ‘real truth,’ beyond that ‘veil,’ disguised the fact that the veil would never actually be removed for everybody. Complimenting one group, in a relational world, meant implicitly downgrading another. Thus, however, close historians flew to ‘historical truth,’ they could not fail but crash to the ground, their wings melting in the heat of ‘propaganda’.

Thus, in adapting and transcending Marx, Du Bois never transcended Hegel’s historicism. His unwillingness to question the notion of historical truth itself, left his own histories continually requiring modification and development, in order to approach more closely the goal of establishing some absolute. In effect, the objective of turning Hegel on his head – positing historical materialism (Marx) or a form of cultural materialism (Du Bois) as a replacement for Hegelian idealism – was in its own way the imposition of a teleology and thoroughly Hegelian. In this regard, it is instructive that Du Bois never fully examined or problematized his own position relative to racial discourse. He clearly saw the problems in the works of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Mr. Carter G. Woodson (as well as his own problems as a young man – before seeing the light), but he didn’t acknowledge that ‘the Other’ might be himself – now. How was it that he, along with Washington and Woodson, might have ‘practically’ accepted racial inferiority, and at what point was one able to lift the Veil, when it lay across the face of American society? If the Veil was as all embracing as Du Bois suggested, what enabled him to peak through? And how could he be certain that his eyes had indeed seen the other side, and had not merely seen further distortions from the Veil? Certainly, Du Bois’ own personal history made his experience different from that of many African Americans, [27] but did that help him see, or blind him to the realities of other members of ‘the race?’ The complexity of African American culture and history that Du Bois had revealed in all his works made ‘speaking for the race,’ or living ‘a biography of the race’ as David Levering Lewis would have it, simultaneously necessary and impossible – necessary because white mythology denied complexity and difference among African Americans, impossible because that complexity made representing the group as a whole an imposition of one person’s or one faction’s vision of its historical meaning and significance over others.  Those who tried to accomplish this feat by hanging onto this swinging pendulum generally fell off as it swung towards reduced complexity: mythology would be inverted or tampered with but reliance on it would continue.

Such a pendulum, swinging between the points of myth and counter-myth, also confounded other theorists grappling with the desire to appropriate Marx for the post-war, anti-colonial world. Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to fashion a single ‘History’ with one meaning through the exclusion of others. [28] In his attempt to create a Marxian narrative, Sartre would exclude all histories except that of the West so ending in a state of ‘determined ethnocentricity.’ Robert Young writes, ‘the lesson of Sartre's Herculean attempt to make history truth, and to give it one meaning, was the relation of such history to Western cultural imperialism.’ [29] Du Bois’ own efforts to marry Marx and ‘the rest’, would evade such problems of overt ethnocentricity, but they would be fraught with their own difficulties. For Young notes that while Sartre may have been renowned for his opposition to the Algerian War, even so:

[His] courageous intervention against French and other Colonialisms could not have a corresponding theoretical impact so long as he retained his historicist Marxist framework. For his unitary theory of history was the effect of disallowing radical attempts at rewriting or retrieving other histories excluded by the West.[30]

Such difficulties plaguing unitary theories remained on whatever side of the Veil a historian was located.

At the other end of the pendulum's trajectory, a theorist like Edward Said, whose use of the notion of Orientalism seems to closely resemble Du Bois’ use of the Veil, would argue that the object of Orientalism, Islam, was more complex than Orientalists’ projections suggested. [31]   And yet, locating the post-Orientalist, characterizing the nature of Islamic culture outside Orientalism, has become hazardous. [32] Just as Said’s ‘analysis of Orientalism comes to seem remarkably close to an Orientalist work itself,’ [33] so also Du Bois’ analysis of the Veil could be seen as a product of a particular racially inflected society. After all, ‘how does any form of knowledge – including Orientalism – escape the terms of Orientalism’s critique?’

And yet, such questions, such difficulties, have become evident in part because Du Bois’ historical writings made clear the propagandist nature of the practice of history. Recognizing the significance of this genealogy, Homi Bhabha ends The Location of Culture with a tribute to Du Bois. [34] In endeavoring to open up a space that is not predetermined by the veil or by Orientalism, to move ‘beyond’ them, Bhabha turns to Toni Morrison's Beloved and finds that ‘a battle has been waged on hybrid territory, in the discontinuity and distanciation between event and enunciation, in the time-lag in-between sign and symbol.’ From this terrain, Bhabha attempts ‘to constitute a postcolonial, critical discourse that contests modernity through the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of enunciation’ (p. 254). Those ‘who have seen the nightmare of racism and oppression in the banal daylight of the everyday,’ he writes, those behind ‘the veil’ in Du Bois’ words, can ‘represent an idea of action and agency more complex than either the nihilism of despair or the Utopia of progress. They speak of the reality of survival and negotiation that constitutes the moment of resistance, its sorrow and its salvation, but is rarely spoken in the heroisms or the horrors of history’ (p. 255). Clearly this need not be the case: in Morrison’s Beloved the characters find resistance in survival; but, for much of his career, Du Bois’ history represented an attempt to reach for the heroic. 

Nevertheless, as Bhabha proceeds to point out, Du Bois captured some of this spirit of resistance and survival also: never defeatism, but ‘the enactment of the limits of the “idea” of progress, the marginal displacement of the ethics [and propaganda] of modernity.’ For Bhabha, this came from his ability to speak ‘across the veil’, becoming the ‘great prophet of the double consciousness of modern America’ (ibid.). In the foregoing, I have suggested that it also derived from the dialectical quality of his work – the emergence of alternate readings, space, within his analysis. The Philadelphia Negro held within it The Souls of Black Folk, which then released Black Reconstruction in America. Each stage of Du Bois’s writing would represent a release or step from the limitations of the previous one, while from its confines the next one would appear like a defeat – the chiliasm or nihilism of despair. As such, it comes as no surprise that we find Bhabha (or Paul Gilroy for that matter) employing Du Bois, even though from the confines of his brand of social history Du Bois might have scorned notions of postcoloniality, in the way that so many historians dismiss it as ‘not history.’

Bhabha makes Du Bois the ‘prophetic precursor of [his] discourse of the time-lag’ and he quotes from The Souls of Black Folk:

So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of swift and slow in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe and flickered, flamed and died in Africa? So long the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty? (ibid.)[35]

For Bhabha the Sorrow Songs resound once more in the way that Du Bois intended them to do, ‘their eloquent omissions and silences’ concealing ‘much of real poetry beneath the conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.’ [36] This ‘unmeaning’ ‘discloses a symbolic vision of a form of progress beyond modernity and its sociology.’ This Not-history, has within it ‘an indeterminacy which is also the condition of being historical.’ In this passage at least, Du Bois commands ‘the certain shores of “modern” science to recede’ (ibid.). Bhabha closes with a postcolonial rendition of Du Bois' work:

The problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism. The rhythm of the Sorrow Songs may at times be swift – like the projective past – at other times it may be slow – like the time-lag. What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical. (255-56)

Where else might we end?

Notes

[1] Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993) p. 17.

[2] See, for example, Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

[3] Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990) pp. 1-3.

[4] David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1993); see also, Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1976).

[5] Young, White Mythologies.

[6] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.

[7] Du Bois, "Apologia," 1954, p. xxxi-ii.

[8] Ibid., p. xxxiv.

[9] Clarence E. Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) p. 77.  Walker's assumption that Du Bois could not be Marxist derives in part from the general lack of attention to the work of African diaspora scholars in the Marxist tradition.  Walker treats the notion of "Black Marxism" as an oxymoron, which Cedric Robinson reveals to be far from the truth.  Even Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (not to mention Marx himself, who followed closely events in India, the United States and Ireland), considered the implications of Marxist theory for non-white proletarian populations.  This is how, as Robin D.G. Kelley shows in Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990), their writings could appeal to Southern black laborers and sharecroppers.

[10] Du Bois, “Karl Marx and the Negro,” in Crisis 40 (March 1933), p. 6; quoted in Walker, Deromanticizing Black History, p. 79.

[11] The two contributions to the historiography of Reconstruction that Walker attributes to Du Bois's text are profoundly Marxist: the international context within which Reconstruction was occurring and the significance of economic developments in shaping the outcome of reform.  Moreover, Walker contradicts himself by extolling Du Bois's departure from the idea of American exceptionalism, for he himself claims Marx's irrelevance to American history precisely because of the exceptional nature of race relations in America as compared to Europe. Deromanticizing Black History, p. 86.

[12] Though this is mere supposition, since Walker does not cite a single work of Marx's.

[13] It is unknown whether Du Bois used Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  In a letter written in October 1934, as he was working on Black Reconstruction, Du Bois noted that he had "a fair library of Marx."  He lamented, however, that he had "only one or two of Lenin's works."  For Aptheker, this accounts for his persistence "in using the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat'--even in the very limited way in which he did use that term -- as pertains to the Radical Reconstruction governments."  Aptheker, Afro-American History: The Modern Era (NY: Citadel Press, 1971) p. 57.  Aptheker's comment tells us more about his own Leninist assumptions than it does about Du Bois's Marxism.  Moreover, Du Bois's discussion of "the weakness of French democracy in Black Folk: Then and Now (NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), shows a remarkable reliance on Marx's analysis of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat: particularly, Du Bois's description of "the French peasant" as "a small, jealous reactionary landholder...with interests bound up in a national land patrimony" (p. 375).

[14] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1984) p. 15.

[15] Ibid., p. 19.

[16] Herbert Aptheker, Afro-American History, p. 63.  Aptheker claims that Du Bois was not Marxist but was instead "Du Boisian."  Unwittingly, this idealistic reading of Du Bois is appropriate insofar as Aptheker is correct that "to the end of his days [Du Bois] remained an idealist, philosophically speaking, in key areas of his thinking.(p. 57)  But to describe Du Bois thus is to make analysis of his development as a historian meaningless.  It also misses the fact that Marx himself was unquestionably "idealist, philosophically speaking," in spite of claims to materialism made by himself and historians like Aptheker.

[17] Ibid., p. 50.

[18] David Montgomery, Beyond Equality.

[19] Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (NY: 1969), Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974) pp. 3-25.

[20] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pp. 580-636.

[21] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 8; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 322.

[22] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 15.

[23] Gender was very much submerged beneath race and class in Du Bois's work, though he was very much in advance of many male social theorists of his time.  See for example, "The Damnation of Women," in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (London: Constable & Co., 1920).

[24] Lawrence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[25] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 155-223; Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's `Philosophy of Right' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 141-2.

[26] Many of these questions and others are considered in Gyan Prakash's "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories," Comparative Studies in History and Society (1990).

[27] Gilroy, Black Atlantic.

[28] Young, White Mythologies, p. 46.  "It is one history because it is (only) one history."

[29] Ibid., p. 47.

[30] Ibid.  E.P. Thompson's own attempts to defend the empirical method did not preclude his own anti-colonial political position.

[31] Edward Said, Orientalism.

[32] Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories."

[33] Young, White Mythologies., p. 132.

[34] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Press, 1994), page numbers appear in parentheses in the text.

[35] quoting from The Souls of Black Folk, p. 275.

[36] here Bhabha quotes from The Souls of Black Folk, p. 271.