#14, October 29, 2003
Du Bois Unveiled?
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
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
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
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
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,
In many ways, Black Reconstruction in America can be
seen as Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte set in the
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
In
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
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
For Marx, bourgeois
oligarchy was reestablished in
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
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
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
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
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?
[1]
[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
[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.
[10] Du Bois, “Karl
Marx and the Negro,” in Crisis 40
(March 1933), p. 6; quoted in
[11] The two contributions to the historiography
of Reconstruction that
[12] Though this is mere supposition, since
[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),
[20] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in
[21] Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 8; Du
Bois, Black Reconstruction in
[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]
[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]
[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.