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What Is Pragmatic Religious Naturalism, and What Does It Have to Do with Du Bois?

Jonathon S. Kahn

in Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois

This chapter defines pragmatism and pragmatic religious naturalism through a reading of pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana. It shows how Du Bois constructs crucial notions of ... More

This chapter defines pragmatism and pragmatic religious naturalism through a reading of pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana. It shows how Du Bois constructs crucial notions of black identity, double consciousness, and black peoplehood with anti-essentialist pragmatist tools such as James's radical empiricism. It goes on to show how Du Bois's religious voice is fully inhabited by four key characteristics of pragmatic religious naturalisms: 1) skepticism of supernatural revelation; 2) conceiving of religion's powers as coming from finite human trusts; 3) finding religion's genius in its pairing of the real with the ideal; and finally 4) a meliorism in which hopefulness only emerges from a frank confrontation with real struggle and loss.Less

Spirit of Freedom

Terrence L. Johnson

in Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy

Chapter Three defines freedom within the moral and political imaginations of Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. Freedom here is not necessarily tied to the availability of state-supported rights, but is ... More

Chapter Three defines freedom within the moral and political imaginations of Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. Freedom here is not necessarily tied to the availability of state-supported rights, but is based on the moral and political agency one exercises, which emerges with self-consciousness.Less

The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place

in Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

This chapter explores how Du Bois translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic ... More

This chapter explores how Du Bois translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic construct of double consciousness. The pre-psychoanalytic language of the psyche that Du Bois draws on describes a black self located simultaneously within the United States and without it, both in the sense of lacking the nation and lying beyond it, in such extranational places and times as ancient Egypt, precolonial Ethiopia, and the resurgent black world of Du Bois's dreaming. The divisions and connections of double consciousness are mirrored in the formal strategies of Du Bois' polygeneric manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and writ large in his social realist romance, Dark Princess (1928), and final trilogy, The Black Flame (1957–61). Du Bois' straddling of racialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and diasporic allegiances illustrates one of this book's central tensions: the simultaneous pull between territorialization and deterritorialization, between a concept of identity rendered isomorphic with place and emblematic of race and nation, and identity reconceived as that which evades place per se and constitutes an altogether different kind of being, at once more interiorized and more diffused.Less

Intimate Interactions: Racework as Emotional Labor

Amy C. Steinbugler

in Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships

This chapter turns the lens from public spaces to the inner workings of relationships in order to look more closely at how interracial partners interpret and negotiate racial difference in everyday ... More

This chapter turns the lens from public spaces to the inner workings of relationships in order to look more closely at how interracial partners interpret and negotiate racial difference in everyday life. It introduces the concept of racial habitus, developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, to explain how racial differences emerge in routine interactions. It then identifies “emotional labor” as the form of racework that individuals use to manage race and racism. It shows how this type of racework permits interracial partners to negotiate differences in racial habitus. One crucial difference is that White partners have not needed to develop the double-consciousness that characterizes a Black racial habitus. The chapter then discusses the minority of partners whose racework is best characterized as racial silence. In sum, the chapter has two main goals: to make clear the ways in which racial difference infiltrates intimate relationships and to show how interracial partners go about directly and indirectly managing this difference.Less

The Audacity of Hope Jones: Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell and the Idealization of Barack Obama

Cameron Leader-Picone

in Black and More than Black: African American Fiction in the Post Era

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of ... More

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of Obama as a post-racial figure or “unhyphenated man”—meaning that he is not burdened by double consciousness—embraces his election as a moment of transformative change. Randall’s novel utilizes Obama as an almost mythological character—he is, in fact, never named in the novel—to imagine a racial self-consciousness detached from structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and absent, as well, from the proscriptive burdens of both the Civil Rights and post-civil rights eras. The chapter shows how Randall’s refusal of a racialized present echoes concepts such as post-Blackness and post-soul aesthetics.Less

“A Form of Insanity Which Overtakes White Men”

Veronica T. Watson

in The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness

This chapter theorizes white double consciousness by analyzing W.E.B. DuBois’ and Charles Chesnutt’s engagements with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse of neurasthenia. ... More

This chapter theorizes white double consciousness by analyzing W.E.B. DuBois’ and Charles Chesnutt’s engagements with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse of neurasthenia. Neurasthenia, a medical diagnosis that encapsulated a range of symptoms and ailments experienced by elite white Americans of the time, was being used to justify the uneasiness white Americans had toward shifting social realities and expectations related to race, class, and gender. DuBois and Chesnutt, understanding that science and medicine were being used to legitimate resistance to that social change, especially as it related the pursuit of racial equality in the U.S., intervened in the discourse to demonstrate the true cost to white subjectivity as well as the nation of their continued investment in white supremacy as a social organizing principle. They theorized a white schizophrenic subjectivity in which moderation toward social and racial justice would emerge as a desirable subject position for white Americans.Less

Contesting Narratives of Failed Performance: Racial Identity and National Exceptionality

Brittany Powell Kennedy

in Between Distant Modernities: Performing Exceptionality in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South

This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial ... More

This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial and biological “purity” that was so violently affirmed in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South. Framing this chapter with African-American writer Richard Wright’s experience in what he describes as Franco’s “pagan” Spain, I examine how Spain and the South provide specific examples where racial indeterminacy compels the subject to embrace performativity as a means of shirking the expectations of “race” and “biology” thrust upon them by those perceived as “pure.”Less

Revisiting race and nation: double consciousness, Black Britishness, and cultural consumption

Ali Meghji

in Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption

This chapter considers how Black middle class people use cultural consumption to contest the polarisation of Blackness and Britishness. It sketches out a brief history of this polarisation, looking ... More

This chapter considers how Black middle class people use cultural consumption to contest the polarisation of Blackness and Britishness. It sketches out a brief history of this polarisation, looking at how the present replicates the past. I then analyse Black middle class cultural consumption through the lens of double consciousness. Firstly, I look at how those towards strategic assimilation often construe Black Britishness as two identities needing to be reconciled. Such participants therefore consume cultural forms bringing together what they see as traditional British cultural forms with traditional Black diasporic cultural forms. Those towards the ethnoracial autonomous identity mode display Black British double consciousness through the notion of a gifted ‘second sight’, therefore using cultural forms as a means to specifically critique British post-racialism.Less

Threatening Gender and RaceDifferent Manifestations of Stereotype Threat

Christine Logel, Jennifer Peach, and Steven J. Spencer

in Stereotype Threat: Theory, Process, and Application

We propose that there might be important differences in people’s experience of stereotype threat depending on the group to which they belong, and on the nature of the stereotypes that apply to their ... More

We propose that there might be important differences in people’s experience of stereotype threat depending on the group to which they belong, and on the nature of the stereotypes that apply to their group. In this chapter, we describe similarities and differences in the experience of threat that arises from two of the most commonly investigated stereotypes: those about gender and those about race. Although little research has examined women and racial minorities simultaneously, we draw on evidence from separate studies to make divergent predictions about the experience of stereotype threat among women and among non-Asian racial minorities. Proposing a modern version of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” we suggest that the experience of stereotype threat may differ depending on how motivated group members are to avoid the stereotype, and how vigilant they are for signs that they may be judged in light of a negative stereotype.Less

“This Strange White World”: Race and Place in Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter and RoseGordon’s Newspaper Writing

Michael K. Johnson

in Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West

Era Bell Thompson in her North Dakota memoir American Daughter revises the traditional opposition of frontier literature—the difference between West and East, the wilderness and the metropolis—to ... More

Era Bell Thompson in her North Dakota memoir American Daughter revises the traditional opposition of frontier literature—the difference between West and East, the wilderness and the metropolis—to symbolize double-consciousness. Moving west to the frontier means separating from the black community and becoming part of a “strange white world.” American Daughter describes a sense of restless movement between West and East, reflecting the difficulty of that choice. As did Thompson, Rose Gordon grew up in a pre-dominantly white frontier community, White Sulphur Springs, Montana. In contrast to Thompson, who eventually moved to Chicago, Gordon spent her entire life in her western home. Juxtaposed here are different accounts of black western experience by two African American women. Rose Gordon’s writing—mostly contributions to her local newspaper—reflects her strategies for making home in one particular place, a story of settlement that converges and diverges with accounts of black western travel.Less

The Souls of an Ex-White Man: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Biography of John Brown

Nahum Dimitri Chandler

in X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

This chapter considers W. E. B. Du Bois’ s 1909 biography of John Brown. It shows the distinction of Du Bois’ s approach, which places Brown in relation to an African American sense of the project ... More

This chapter considers W. E. B. Du Bois’ s 1909 biography of John Brown. It shows the distinction of Du Bois’ s approach, which places Brown in relation to an African American sense of the project and destiny of America. Du Bois weaves Brown into the fabric of African American historical memory in two dimensions, conceiving of Brown as a leader that is both of and for African Americans and as a spiritual figure whose sense of self and mission was reconstructed through his complex re-identification of himself by way of a kind of “double-consciousness” - no longer simply “White” but not Black or African American, but something else altogether - in relation to the abolition of slavery and the recognition of the humanity of Negro American slaves. The death of John Brown “proper” should be understood to have marked the opening toward the possibility of a new relation to the future, for America in the most general and world-historical sense. Yet, Du Bois operated his own sense of “double-consciousness” as a theoretical perspective to reopen this story. Brown may be situated not only in relation to Frederick Douglass, but back to David Walker and Maria Stewart, and forward to Martin Luther King, Jr.Less

Introduction: The Post Era

Cameron Leader-Picone

in Black and More than Black: African American Fiction in the Post Era

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture ... More

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.Less

Originary Displacement: Or, Passages of the Double and the Limit of World

Nahum Dimitri Chandler

in X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

This chapter provides both a critique and a way beyond the central theoretical approaches that dominated the social scientific study of the cultural provenance of the social and historical practices ... More

This chapter provides both a critique and a way beyond the central theoretical approaches that dominated the social scientific study of the cultural provenance of the social and historical practices of African American for most of the second half of the twentieth century and remains a powerful central discourse. Those approaches conceptualized African American matters as always derivative from a pre-formed American culture. This essay offers instead the idea that the problematic African American of historicity is exemplary of how one should understand American culture possibility in general -- as formed out of multiple sources and motifs, yet comprising a distinctive ensemblic whole. W. E. B. Du Bois’ s thought of the African American as configured as an historical subject of at least double reference - a kind of “double-consciousness” - is the central theoretical guide here. In addition, the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene Genovese, Ranajit Guha, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Hortense Spillers are guiding, if at times critically engaged, references. The eighteenth century narrative of Olaudah Equiano is considered at length.Less

Dueling Banjos: African American Dualism and Strategies for Black Representation at the Turn of the Century

James Smethurst

in The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

This chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's claim that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject “ever feels his twoness” was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic and sometimes ... More

This chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's claim that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject “ever feels his twoness” was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic and sometimes transatlantic black modernity expressing the ambivalent location of people of African descent simultaneously within and beyond what is known as “the West.” Certainly, Du Bois's articulation of dualism, largely drawing on the language of William James and early U.S. psychology, has remained a powerful trope available to a wide range of artists and intellectuals both inside and outside the United States down to the present. To understand why Du Bois's formulation of the concept had such force, however, one has to examine the relationship of his formulation to similar expressions of African American dualism, within the political and cultural context in which these various articulations appeared.Less

Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction: the altered books of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube

Katy Masuga

in Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube are sculptors, creating artwork out of old books. This essay focuses on a form of altered books called “subtraction,” where the artists only remove from the pre-existing ... More

Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube are sculptors, creating artwork out of old books. This essay focuses on a form of altered books called “subtraction,” where the artists only remove from the pre-existing form of the book, carving into old encyclopaedias, dictionaries and other disused books to reveal hidden potential. Their work is part of a collaborative process with the form and purpose of the original book by removing its elements, raising questions concerning how different mediums elicit different sensory experiences. Dettmer and Beube perform what W.J.T. Mitchell calls in What Do Pictures Want? (2005), ‘critical idolatry’ that enacts a ‘creative destruction’ while producing a ‘double consciousness’, such that we, in contemporary Western culture, impart a dual nature upon images by regarding them as living objects yet in conjunction with the logical sensibilities that simultaneously reveal otherwise. We necessarily imbue both the book and its content with power, while also acknowledging them as utterly powerless human constructions, Masuga argues. With the production of the bookwork, that relationship is made more complex. Examining the construction of these bookworks, this essay considers their significance in the digital age, expanding on Mitchell’s concept to argue for an effect that Masuga calls ‘double consciousness squared’.Less

What Is Disorientation in Thinking?

Ami Harbin

in Disorientation and Moral Life

This chapter argues that some disorientations prompt individuals to gain new awareness in politically and morally important ways, even when they do not prompt capacities for decisive moral judgment ... More

This chapter argues that some disorientations prompt individuals to gain new awareness in politically and morally important ways, even when they do not prompt capacities for decisive moral judgment or confidence. It investigates disorientations of experiencing racism, white privilege, consciousness-raising, and critical education, drawing on first-person, philosophical, and empirical accounts of double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois), white anti-racism, moral shock, double ontological shock (Sandra Bartky), gaslighting, outlaw emotions (Alison Jaggar), and feminist pedagogy. It demonstrates how, in some cases, these disorientations generate awareness of contingent oppressive norms and of political complexity, and it then argues for the moral and political significance of such awareness. Even as it does not help individuals resolve how to act, such awareness can generate epistemic humility, allow individuals to relate differently to their histories and communities of origin, and clarify the necessity of collaborative rather than individual action.Less

Emerson, Thoreau, and the Double Consciousness

Joel Porte

in Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed

This chapter examines the views of American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau on the issue of double consciousness. It suggests double consciousness is an issue that joined and ... More

This chapter examines the views of American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau on the issue of double consciousness. It suggests double consciousness is an issue that joined and separated Emerson and Thoreau. It explains that while Emerson believed that Transcendentalism threatens to invalidate contracts his works continued to be influenced by the transcendental. The same is true with Thoreau. This chapter also contends that both Emerson and Thoreau could feel transcendental or descendental by turns and write accordingly.Less