W. E. B. DuBois and the Identity of Africa

My argument will be that DuBois's engagement with Africa was not merely connected to well-known political projects—the desire for decolonization and the emergence of a Pan-African consciousness—but was ultimately part of his search for a new way of thinking about the modern identity of the black subject through what has come to be known as the aesthetic ideology. [1] My thesis will be that DuBois's detailed attention to questions of art and the aesthetic were not simply reflections on the culture of taste, which he cultivated as the quintessential man of letters; rather it was part of his long search for a conduit through which the black could enter the culture of modernity as a non-alienated subject. Like most of his great Pan-African precursors, most notably Wilmot Blyden and Alexander Crummell, DuBois operated under the shadow of modernity, a desired horizon of expectations that had constantly proven elusive under the veil of race. Indeed, one of the key themes of The Souls of Black Folks was how black peoples' attempts to come to consciousness of themselves as modern subjects was constantly frustrated by racist ideologies and practices in Reconstruction America and, indeed, the long nineteenth century.

Exiled from dominant European notions of truth, beauty, and morality, the black had come to be defined, since the age of Enlightenment, by an unhappy consciousness, a mark of the failure of history to live up to the mandate of modernity and modernization. But DuBois seemed to believe that in art, and especially to what he saw as the essentially artistic nature of the African, could be found a significant way out of the prison house of rationality, a detour to a happy consciousness as it were. Thus, rather than see questions of art and politics as separate in DuBois's mind, I will show that Africa—and the aesthetic forms it generated—provided an important resource in developing a critique of modernity. I will follow J. M. Bernstein who has argued, in a different context, that the aesthetic critique of "truth only cognition" leads to "an indirect reconceptualization of politics and the meaning of the political at work in the aesthetic critique of modernity"; that "the discourse of aesthetics is a proto-aesthetic discourse standing in for and marking the absence of a truly political domain in modern, enlightened societies." [2]

DuBois's entire political project was driven by one fundamental need: to elaborate a critique of the failure of enlightened society to provide a political domain in which the black could be modern. The lives of the subjects he considered exemplary of the African American quest for a modern identity—Alexander Crummell, for example—were defined by the promise of freedom embedded in the self-thinking of the nineteenth century and its ultimate, almost inevitable, failure. For DuBois, Crummell was the allegorical representation of the black's struggle to emerged out of "the Valley of Shadow of Death"; his pilgrimage was a tortuous and difficult journey from the failure of the dream of freedom, embodied in the Missouri Compromise, to the replication of this failure, at the end of the century, in the echo of imperial events at Manila and El Caney. In both the beginning of his quest for freedom to his death as a citizen of Liberia, Crummell strived within what DuBois considered to be the prison house of time, "stirring times for living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to." [3] In a situation where the teleological mandate of modern time had failed, reflections on modernity and its history would take the form of the Hegelian unhappy consciousness, the place where alienation would become the condition of possibility of black being and becoming.

In his encounter with, and elaboration of, the narrative of modernity, DuBois's tactic was to contrast the theoretical claims of the modern doxa with its practical effects, the material manifestations of modernization, which he saw as impoverished, with the spiritual condition of blackness, what he called the soul. [4] In exploring the radical gap between the claims of modernity and its betrayal of black expectations, DuBois would fall back on the force of negativity as a productive tactic in understanding the place of the African—and African American—in the culture of modernity. Here, his famous figuration of the condition of blackness as a paradox or aporia, the key tropes that define the rhetorical method of The Souls of Black Folks, were part of his scheme to disclose and acknowledge the power of negativity in the failed quest for a modern identity. [5] This, however, is the easy part. The more difficult part is to show that in the absence of a political domain that would secure universal freedom, the turn to aesthetic questions would provide a means of grasping the history of this absence; that aesthetic modernism—even one informed by notions of African primitivism—would enable the overcoming of the political force of modernity as a form of alienation. It is this second, more difficult case that I want to explore in the discussion that follows.

1.

I will start with an excursus, a fragment of a scene of reading, perhaps one of the most famous and moving in the Pan-African tradition. As a young man growing up in a segregated South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, the Pan-African novelist, Peter Abrahams, struggled to anchor himself in a world in which racial taxonomies had marked him as perpetually liminal, located somewhere between blackness and whiteness, a member of a social cast mired in poverty and uncertainty but endowed with genteel culture. That is what it meant to be "colored" in colonial South Africa: not black, not white; separated from the shame and stigma of blackness but denied the privilege of whiteness. As he tells it in Tell Freedom, his 1954 autobiography, Abrahams's childhood and youth were simultaneously characterized by the abjection generated by economic and political deprivation and the desire to acquire a literary culture that would serve both as a form of enlightenment but a path to social mobility. [6] Literary culture promised the liminal "colored" insight into a world outside the orbit of racial segregation and oppression; but in its powerful ideology of race, the colonial state had also come to function as an instrumental promoter of misrecognition and abnegation; even the books it allowed the dominated to access were those that enforced its theories of black inferiority and moral corruption. And so in his youth Abrahams walked across the cities of South Africa looking for the kind of books that would provide knowledge and spiritual sustenance. He sought transcendental meaning in poetry in particular and the imaginary in general. He embraced the literary as the path to salvation, the embodiment of what Ezekiel Mphahlele, his classmate at St. Peter's School in the Transvaal, would aptly recall as the "yearning for far away-places." [7]

Faced with the tyranny of instrumentality and social determinism which was later to become embodied in the ideology of Apartheid, Abrahams was convinced that the world of art was the nesting place of utopia, the other world, above and beyond racial oppression. But could the aesthetic ever become the conduit into modes of understanding outside the instrumental logic of racial domination? Could the literary function as a method of what has now come to be known as a "non-alienated mode of cognition?" or of the reconciliation between "nature and humanity"? [8] For Abrahams, the answer took the form of an epiphany. One day, in the outer rims of Johannesburg, he discovered the Bantu Men's Social Club. Inside this dingy building was a small library lined with the kind of books that promised what Abrahams considered true understanding:

I start with Abrahams' discovery of DuBois's book because I want to call attention to the magnitude of the revelation that came out of this encounter. For Abrahams, the chance encounter with Souls was clearly ephiphanic, the triangulation of previous meanings by a visual image (hence the description of the text as "a fat black book") which would in turn engender a move away from "the self as usually understood, to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question." [9] In other words, for the young South African, the impact of DuBois's book did not emerge from any rational program that it provided on the understanding of racialized situations; what DuBois's book offered was something akin to a subliminal experience: "DuBois might have been writing about my land and people. The mood and feeling he described were native to me. I recognized the people as those among whom I lived" (p. 226). It is significant that the focus here was on "mood and feeling" rather than rational understanding, for while the author of Souls of Black Folks and the young South African reader were separated by thousand of miles and an ocean, what they shared, in the world of words, figures, and images, was a familiar phenomenological experience. Hence the valorization of mood and feeling in this zone of textual encounters—what Fanon was later to call the "lived experience of blackness." [10]

Perhaps DuBois's book did not provide Peter Abrahams with a new language for describing what he construed to be their shared experiences, for while racial domination might have a common vocabulary, South Africa was not the United States. Abrahams was insistent that DuBois's text did not tell him anything he did not already know, that the feelings described in Souls resonated because they were "already native". But Souls, while representing the already known, also provided Abrahams with what he called the "the key to understanding" (226). But how could an understanding come out of a mood and feeling? Clearly, DuBois's text did not provide intuitional knowledge, considered to be the opposite of instrumental reason. In fact, Abrahams was not seeking that kind of knowledge: his turn to reading was an attempt to escape cognitive systems and political programs colonized by the South African State. Up to the point in which he encountered DuBois's text, Abrahams's life, as it is retold in Tell Freedom, was a daily encounter with that colonial state that Hannah Arendt was to associate with totalitarianism and its development of the brutal logic that was to weld race and bureaucracy. [11]

Clearly, what Abrahams valued most in the Souls was "a mood and a feeling" and the tones that would represent an experience already known. What DuBois's text proffered—and this is the gist of the argument I will be presenting here—was not a conceptual schema or political program but that whole region of "human perception and sensation in contrast to the more rarefied domain of the conceptual thought" that has come to operate under the rubric of an aesthetic ideology. [12] Indeed, from its first publication, DuBois texts would function, for a generation of African nationalist writers, as a model of social analysis (as in Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa) but also a mode of dis-alienation from the compromised truth of modernity (as in Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound). [13] By the same token, Africa would become important to DuBois, not because of any rational truths that it embodied, but because of its association with an aesthetic order outside the tyranny of reason immanent in modern systems of thought.

Significantly, DuBois would represent his own discovery of Africa and its history as a form of aetheis, a sensuous and subliminal encounter. Significantly, he was to represent his discovery of the continent, or rather its history, as an epiphanic moment:

Elsewhere, DuBois would conceive the continent not in terms of the great lessons it had to offer the narrative of world history (although he did this in some of his monographs) but in terms of the spell it cast over those who encountered it. It is this spell that DuBois sought to capture in his "Little Portraits of Africa" published in 1924:

For DuBois, then, the discovery of African history was not simply a form of recuperating institutions, practices, and schemas that had sought to exclude the continent from the movement of history; it was also a kind of awakening, the emergence of a repressed truth from the recesses of oppressive cultural systems. Truth was the product of aesthesis—the subliminal encounter with a moving experience—rather than rational self-reflection.

3.

The argument I want to develop here, then, involves the interplay of three forces: The first concerns the role of Africa as an aesthetic (rather than material) category in DuBois's struggle to institute the black as a modern subject. The second is his validation of the aesthetic ideology as the only way in which the modernity of the black could be accessed since other forms of cognition—the moral and the rational, for example—had been foreclosed. The third is the haunting of DuBois's desired modern subject by the figure of Africa, for even when the African American sought identity with Africa as the fatherland, a figure that I will return to shortly, there was always the nagging suspicion that this association also called into question his or her Americanness, thus reinforcing the tragic split subjectivity that DuBois was to describe as double-consciousness in Souls.

All these presuppositions are bound to run against some powerful strains in the literature on DuBois and Pan-Africanism and to reinforce others. For one, given the programmatic and instrumental role that DuBois played in the politics of Pan-Africanism and African decolonization of Africa, evident both in his organization of key conferences and his activism in general, the privileging of an aesthetic ideology would seem to go against his overt political objective. After all, the aesthetic, associated with disinterest and transcendentalism, is often assumed to be the opposite of political and ethical concerns, "variously identified with irrationality, illusion, fantasy, myth, sensual seduction, the imposition of will, and inhumane indifference to ethical, religious, or cognitive considerations. [16]" Alternately, the aesthetic has been seen, in a narrower sense, as "the understanding of art as an object of taste outside truth and morality." [17] Furthermore, while Soul is now remembered for its imaginative, autobiographical parts than its attempt to develop sociology of Reconstruction, there is no doubt that Dubois considered the establishment of a social science methodology imperative to the understanding of black life. Since DuBois's stated goal was the institutionalization of a rational discourse on the condition of blackness in America and the production of ethical positions built on cognitive considerations, aesthetic categories would seem to be marginal to his project.

And yet I am arguing that the most important function of Africa in DuBois's engagement with modernity was predicated not on a rational discourse, but on ethical position that would emerge out of myth, illusion and sensuality, and thus, by implication, a certain kind of aesthetic ideology. Indeed, in his recurrent attempts to imagine an African that might be worthy of the title fatherland, DuBois went out of his way, especially in the early works, to aestheticize Africa. It was only in its aesthetization that the continent could have value for those disconnected from it. And thus, African first entered DuBois's consciousness in the form of song, or rather the fragment of a song, which could come to stand as a synecdoche of ancestral memory. Commenting on the African song that his great grandmother, Violet, used to sing, a song that was passed through the generations, DuBois noted that the melody was his only cultural connection to Africa; but as he put it in Dusk of Dawn, this prismatic glimpse of ancestral memory already signified a "curiously complicated" connection to Africa:

Significantly, DuBois was aware that this melody, rather than forming the vital link to an African past was the mark of an absence. The cultures he absorbed from his mother's people, he emphasized, were "not African so much as Dutch and New England"; the speech was "an idiomatic New England tongue with no African dialect; the family customs were New England, and the sex mores" (p. 115). Africa was neither an inheritance nor a presence but a cultivated identity, a state of being that was cultivated to counter the effects of racialism.

There are three key terms here: Africa as "a racial feeling" that is a matter of "later learning" and also a "reaction." DuBois posited the recovery of what one may call an African "structure of feelings" as a counterpoint to the "assumptions of whites." In this sense, African was a constructed technology of identity not a mark of authenticity. Yet he would insist that the fact that an identity was constructed did not negate its reality. In fact, this invented structure of feelings would become a large determinant in his life and character.

One could, of course, pause here to ask why DuBois insisted on the identity of Africa as a reaction against "the assumptions of the whites" when it would have been much easier to legitimize his attachment to the continent through the invocation of a certain idiom of authenticity. There are two plausible reasons why he rejected the jargon of authenticity that was provided by the maternal grandmother's melody. The first, and most obvious one, is that an insistence on an essentialized Africanness would defeat what DuBois conceived to be the most urgent task of his generation, namely to inscribe the African American as an America. This is the reason why he was "firm in asserting that these Negroes were Americans" (115). Indeed, in his early essays, most notably "The Conservation of Races," African had value for DuBois only to the extent that it provided him with the structure through which the Negro could claim a separate racial matrix. African Americans needed Africa the same way white Americans needed Europe, as the foundations of their civilization and racial identity:

But there is a second, more complicated reason why DuBois refused to deploy Africa in the name of an idiom of authenticity: he needed to recover and valorize the continent as an aesthetic object, in the very traditional sense of the word, as a sphere of experience through which the black could realize their connection to the rest of humanity. For if DuBois's goal was to show that the Negro people had a contribution to make to civilization and humanity which "no other race can make," then it also follows that it was in the sphere of art and sensuality that this contribution was allowable. DuBois's consistent claim, which I want to elaborate in the rest of this essay, is that it is in the aesthetic sphere that the African becomes a sign of virtue and moral sensitivity; he works within the Kantian doctrine that that true enlightenment, one transcendental of prejudice, can only be realized through the aesthetic realm. [19]

4.

But in order to understand the work Africa was asked to perform as part of an aesthetic, "non-alienated mode of cognition" in DuBois's work, we need to pause and reflect on why other modes of cognition were considered alienated. The place to start here is "The Conservation of Races," DuBois address to the African Negro Academy in 1897. While most discussions of this essay have focused on the analytical failure or success of DuBois nascent notion of race, I am interested in what one may call the unfinished aesthetic project of this essay, namely the author's awareness that the elaboration of a racial theory that could take account of Africa and the African in the Americas as part of a larger human community, confronted a set of cognitive and explanatory problems in its moment of inauguration. For one, at the end of an nineteenth century dominated by ideas of race, DuBois was aware that the character of the black was mediated by a series of assumptions that called the humanity of the African American into question. The challenge of analysis then was to go beyond "the assumptions of the whites" to establish the real meaning and basis of race and, in the process, to reconcile the everyday reality of black life and the larger ideals of a human community. A proper understanding of the black problem, DuBois suggested, could not be understood through a micro study of "smaller questions of separate schools and cars, wage discrimination and lynch law; rather, the real meaning of race need to be traced within the limits of natural law." [20] In fact, while DuBois was later to invest a lot of energy into developing a sociology of black life, his theoretical work on race was always premised on an attempt to understand it outside its materiality, to develop laws for comprehending its phenomenality. [21] DuBois ambition was to go beyond the materiality of racism to understand it at a higher cognitive level, for only then would its larger effects on the identity of the black as a human subject be understood.

Now, I realize that critiques of DuBois's theories of race, focusing on his attempts to establish a biological basis for racial, have questioned the validity of his central claims in this essay and pointed to the conceptual failure of his project. [22] But these debates have tended to focus on the rationality of these claims without considering the productive uses of the non-rational. In other words, the usefulness of DuBois's attempt to develop a theory of race cannot be considered simply within the domain of truth or a rational enterprise. Let me elaborate what I mean by this. In the "Conservation of Races," DuBois had argued that that the narrative of human history was the story of races; that individuals were exemplars of racial ideals which "transcended scientific definition" but were "clearly defined to the eye of the historian and sociologist" (p. 40). DuBois had hence evacuated scientific considerations from his discourse on race; his interest was on the visible aspects of cultural difference. Still, he insisted that modern culture was the result of a process of differentiation, and each race was associated with a distinctive civilization, a set of ideals. It is significant here that race was conceived not in biological concepts (though biologism does haunt DuBois's definition), but in terms of ideas and ideals clearly elements at odds with scientific reason.

While it is true that DuBois would gesture toward pseudo biological explanations for human difference, his focus was on what one may call an aesthetic or moral criteria for diversity: The English were associated with the rule of law and common sense; the Germans with science and philosophy; the Romantic nations with literature and art (p. 42). His concern was to isolate a human sense attributable to blacks and hence constitutive of their contribution to a common humanity. DuBois was hence concerned that the black race had not yet "given to civilization the full spiritual message which they are capable of giving" (42). However, the gist of his argument in "Conversation" was that the African American, as the "advance guard of the Negro people" (42), was uniquely situated to contribute to a sensus communis aestheticus: they were a nation "stored with wonderful possibilities of culture" building according to "Negro ideals" (43). For those interested in the rationality of Du Bois argument, it perhaps seduces us to error; but what stands out as significant here is DuBois confinement of the ideals of race to the space of culture or the aesthetic experience rather than logic or rationality.

In spite of this investment in the cognitive abilities of embedded in the aesthetic sphere, DuBois constantly worried, especially in his early works, about the redemptive potential of art and culture for those excluded from the logic of the modern. More specifically, he worried about the possibility of art to provide a transcendental, autonomous realm of self-expression in a culture in which racialism had come to enforce the identity of the black as anterior to the modern event. It is out of this concern that his first reflections on double consciousness first emerge. This is apparent toward the end of the "Conversation of Races" where DuBois was finally forced to confront the double logic of being an American of African descent:

For DuBois, the identity of the African American emerged from a "riddle": the Americanness of the African American could be located in tangible marks of identity; it was inscribed by natural right, laws of citizenship, and political ideals; yet this subject was not recognized as wholly American. An aporia, then, had come to define the Americanness of the black; and it was the incompleteness of Americanness that invited, willingly or unwillingly, a certain engagement with Africa. And yet, once this engagement with Africa had commenced a difficult question arose: what represented the Africanism of the African American? DuBois could provide a sociology or ethnography of the Americanness of the African American but not of his or her Africanness.Africa, then, remained a realm of experience that was intangible and fragmentary, very much like the grandmother's song cited earlier; and yet it needed to be mobilized toward certain political ends, and in this sense, it needed to be made visible. In regard to the meaning of Africa to the African American, DuBois needed to symbolize the imaginary, or to materialize the phenomenal. Here, once again, he would turn to the aesthetic sphere as the place of realization of Africa in America:

The argument that the gift of Africa to American was art is a common one in DuBois's thought; what is new in the passage quoted above is the implication that it is through the perfection of these aesthetic gifts that the black can counter the crude materialism of modernity and, in the process, claim full membership in a broader humanity. Within the realm of the aesthetic, black difference will be acknowledged, valued, and accepted. Why? Because in the realm of taste, crucial judgments are based on the kind of disinterest that forecloses prejudice.

But if the aesthetic realm is the place where we are capable of making judgments that are autonomous of our moral or political practices, the central argument in the Kantian tradition, DuBois still needed to address the question that arises the moment the aesthetic is asked to perform a political function: Do aesthetic judgments necessarily transfer to the realm of politics? Let us recall here the central paradox of an aestheticized politics in modern culture: On one hand the aesthetic has been posited as the realization of ideals that transcended the confinements of modern life; on the other hand it seems inopportune to rehearse cultural ideals as alternatives to social life, especially one defined by rationalized domination. As Martin Jay has noted in another context, when the aesthetic is extended to the domain of politics, its disinterestedness becomes a problem in itself: "For the disinterestedness that is normally associated with the aesthetic seems precisely what is so radically inappropriate in the case of that most basic of human interests, the preservation of life." [23]

DuBois never got to a point where he argued that a disinterested black aesthetic could be an alternative to the struggle for rights and reason; and yet his constant turn to aesthetic questions was prompted and, indeed, seemed most prevalent when the paradoxes of the life world seemed almost overwhelming. The larger problem here was his recognition that while the freedom of the black subject depended on an unequivocal adoption of the integers of modernity, the African American had been written into the narrative of American culture as the unmodern subject. Indeed, central to the idiom of double consciousness in the "Conservation of Races," was the black subject's identity as an unmodern subject in a modern polity. If we accept DuBois's premise that the doubleness of the African American represented its condition of possibility, the way out of the dilemma of doubleness s was not through an abnegation of Americannes but reconciliation and integration with what was elusive but necessarily. A modern identity could not be located in Africa. True, the continent could be imagined or be recuperated as an ideal—represented by the figure of fatherland, ancestral memory, and romantic history—but these essentially aesthetic gestures could not obviate the fact that Africa was part of the appellation and apparition that made the condition of the double possible.

To put it more directly: it was when he was defined as African that the black was excluded from the American. For this reason, if we look beyond DuBois's unquestionable political commitment to the decolonization of Africa, we cannot fail to note that his relationship to the continent was catachrestical: it was defined by a longing and desire for foundations and by a kind of instrumental necessity to separate the advanced guard of blackness (the African American) from its pre-modern sources. The designation of the continent as the fatherland in Dusk of Dawn was an apt representation of the doubleness of this relationship, for it seemed to make the figure of Africa both inescapable in the making of the African American subject, yet one with the potential to reinforce the separation of this subject from the American national narrative. In the circumstances, Anthony Appiah is right on the mark when he describes DuBois's description of Africa as the fatherland as representing the "pathos of the chasm between the unconfident certainty that Africa is 'of course' his fatherland and the concession that it is not the land of his father or his father's father"; for this reason the turn to Africa marks the limit of his "conceptual resources."  [24] My interest, however, is in the deployment of Africa as a "non-conceptual' resource, one that appeals to the senses rather than the mind. Conceived this way, Africa was intended to mediate an imaginary past and a modern future. In both cases, this attempt to deploy Africa as both the sign of a past and a horizon of expectations would both hinder and enable Dubois quest for a modern way of being black.

But in order to understand the role of African as a hindrance to black modernity in DuBois schema, we need to take seriously his politics of time, especially his continuous insistence on the meaning of Africa as the depository of the past and the African American as the vanguard of the future. The problem of the twentieth century, noted DuBois in "The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind," was "the relation of the civilized world to the dark races of mankind." [25] And although he recognized that civilization had been born in African nineteen centuries before "the Christ-child" (p. 48), DuBois assumed that whatever Africa had come to represent at the dawn of the twentieth century in the high period of imperialism was the antithesis of the ideals of a modern civilization. Under colonialism, Africa had become the figure of alienation, sui generis: it represented the "center of the greater Negro problem—of the world problem of the black man" (48). Or, as DuBois put it more clearly in "The African Roots of War," it was in the colonization of Africa that the "terrible overturning of civilization" had taken place. [26]

Nevertheless, there is a certain doubleness to DuBois location of the black problematic in Africa: DuBois was, of course, thinking of the ways in which Africa has come to function as the symptom of the failure of the universal narrative of modernity, functioning as a place where the great ideals of the nineteenth century—progress and civilization—had collapsed on themselves through colonization. On the other hand, however, Africa is part of the Negro problem because in order for the African American to claim an American identity—clearly the most pressing political and cultural project in the 1890s—it was imperative for this subject to dissociate itself from Africa.

This explains the schizophrenic nature of DuBois's engagement with African in the early writings, which tend to swing from deep anxieties about the stigmata of the uncivilized to rhapsodic romanticism. Here we would see Africa imagined as the fatherland that was also not the land of the father, an imagined space in many ways, but also part of what one may call DuBois's negative dialectic, a place where the black problem could be posed and elaborated but not resolved. [27] In his early essays DuBois would turn to Africa to help him think through the existential crisis of the African American, but he did not posit the continent as the place for the resolution of this crisis. In "On Being Ashamed of Oneself," for example, he would call attention to the dialectic of blackness as the shift between "attempts to build up a racial ethos and attempts to escape from ourselves." [28] DuBois's complaint was that attempts to escape what he called the "trammels of race" always came up against established philosophical doctrines (73).

It is, of course, important to note that all this agonizing on the place of Africa in the modern polity was not so much about the continent itself but on how its presence or absence in the narrative of history impinged on the relation of the African American to the national narrative and what Nathaniel Huggins famously called the "deforming mirror of truth." [29] One of DuBois's major anxieties was that the process of modernization, rather than draw the black subject more and more into the mainstream of the national ethos, had become a form of exclusion; no invocation of a heroic African past could repress what he considered to be self-evident—that the black was, to use the language of later political economy, underdeveloped. As a sign of this underdevelopment, Africa could not serve as the foundation of a new modern identity. Indeed, DuBois would constantly argued that one of the most urgent reasons for settling the status of the African American, as a modern American subject, was to prepare them to play a primary role in the modernization of African. Africans could not modernize themselves.

And yet, modernity was itself a conflicted term in DuBois's thought: He was a strong advocate of modernity in the cultural sense and of modernization as a societal process; but like many intellectuals of his generation he was a strong critic of the materialism which he associated with the narrative of capital. Indeed, Souls needs to be read as DuBois's systematic attempt to desegregate modernity as a cultural sphere, modernization as a social process, and the reifying world of capitalist production. Given this separation of spheres of modernity, it is not surprising that Du Bois considered the African, in the field of culture and art, to be more advanced than the rest of the world. At a crucial point in his life and project he seemed to posit the ideality of culture as the desired path to true modernity. It was in the aesthetic state that the African could enter the narrative of world history and the African American an American national history.

Like many Pan-Africanists of his generation, DuBois posited culture as the antidote to the crass materiality of the age and posited the black as the custodian of sweetness and light. A few examples will suffice. In Chicago, on March 17, 1930, DuBois debated the white supremacist, Lothrop Stoppard. The subject of the debate was straightforward: "Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?" For DuBois, who believed vehemently that there was a close association between culture and human freedom, the central thesis was that blacks had been denied access to culture on the assumption that they were incapable of acquiring it; denied the capacity for art, the African American had been exiled from the human community. [30] DuBois conceded that there was a time when the black was culturally incapacitated, but the movement of time and progress was bound to lead to cultural self-awareness. What he was not in doubt about was the inseparable relationship between culture—as a spiritual and moral category and a "qualitative analogy"—and the validation of the human person (p. 51). He was to repeat the same claim in a 1938 commencement address at Fisk University where his mythical Saint Orgne the Damned bemoaned the imprisonment of black discourse in the language of Negro business, preachers, and writers who "still to a large extent talking the language of the early nineteenth century," the uncultured language of a materialism unleavened by culture. [31]

This critique of the language of the nineteenth century might appear strange since DuBois's central paradigm, including the valorization of culture in his discourse, were drawn essentially from the nineteenth century. The key, of course, is that in calling attention to the limits of the early nineteenth century, a period which, in his judgment still spoke the language of early, as opposed to advanced, capitalism, DuBois was claiming his credentials as a late nineteenth century man of letters. The significant point, though, is that his Saint Orgne, like Carlyle's Jocelyn of Brakeloud, would prescribe the spiritualism of culture as the solution to the problems of the age, building a community in which material needs were regulated by the larger spiritual interest. [32] Saint Orgne, we are told, married "a woman not for her hair and color but for her education, good manners, common sense and health"; in midsummer he was "bound for Africa on a mission of world brotherhood" (p.112).

5.

The argument I have presented so far has articulated but also blurred the distinction between three ways of thinking about the aesthetic ideology. The first one, which I have discussed in relation to the deployment of Africa in DuBois's discourse, is one that presents the aesthetic as the form of the sensual and sensational. Considered by many critics as mystifying, idealist and ahistorical, this kind of aesthetic is not conceived to have any political value; it is part of what Tony Bennet would consider to be "really useless 'knowledge; the aesthetic is the process by which the real problems of the world are laundered." [33] The second one is the idea of the aesthetic as a "non-alienated mode of cognition": In this view, the aesthetic gives us access to forms of experience that are foreclosed by the forces of modernity. [34] The third notion of the aesthetic at work here is the one related in general to issues of taste and culture, where questions about art are ultimately ways of transcending a world that is found to be dominated by crude materialism. Although the common practice in theories of art has been to separate all three ways of thinking about the aesthetic in order to establish the authority of one over the other, they tend to gravitate around two sets of problems which bring them, eventually, into the same conceptual orbit—transcendentalism and ideology. In the first instance, all theories of the aesthetic are predicated on the notion that it is only by transcending something (moral claims or materialism, for example) that art can dis-alienate itself from its conditions of possibility, reach out to alternative realms of experience, and thus provide a critique of modernity outside its normativity. The second area in which these ostensibly diverse theories of the aesthetic diverge is in their concern with the relationship between "real events and philosophical discourse," between nature and freedom, between being and becoming. [35] Here, the aesthetic is seen as "a reintegrative and redemptive attempt to restore unity....to a social totality that has been shattered by the disintegrative forces of capital." [36]

It is here, at the point where the aesthetic is asked to integrate the alienated in the sphere of human freedom, that DuBois re-enters our picture, for it is quite clear that by the 1920s he had finally found a way of overcoming the gap African American desire and the elusive African fatherland. During this period, modernism and its primitivism would endow Africa with both cognitive and aesthetic authority and provide DuBois with an alternative to the civilizational code that he had embraced in the 1890s. The argument I want to make here is simply this: if Africa had caused nervousness in the 1890s because it stood as the a mark of the uncivilized, modernism had not only turned it into the cause celebre of the early 1920s, but had actually come to associate the continent with an alternative civilizational authority. To be primitive was no longer to exist outside civilization; on the contrary, the primitive was now seen as the custodian of an alternative mode of social life, one that was immune to the disease of civilization and its discontent.

Consider, as an example, DuBois famous description of his first visit to Africa in 1923 as described in Dusk of Dawn:

One in the center gave curious little cackling cries to keep up the rhythm, and for the spurts and the stroke, a call a bit thicker and sturdier; he gave a low guttural command now and then; the boat, alive, quivering, danced beneath the moon, swept a great curve to the bar to breast its narrow teeth of foam—"t'chick-a-tickity, t'chick-a-tick~ity," sang the boys, and we glided and raced, now between boats, now near the landing—now cast aloft at the dock. And lo! I was in Africa. (118-119)

What we have here is a full display the familiar language of modernism in its encounter with Africa; black bodies were represented in their full sensuality, as sources of raw energy, and earthliness. More significantly, African is conceived as the embodiment of a sphere of experience conceivable through song and dance, and it is in this respect that the identity of the black as a cultured subject is realized:

The more he traveled into the heart of Liberia, the more DuBois, the nineteenth century man of letters and connoisseur of high art, begun to embrace the ideology of modernism and its claim that the life of the primitive brought us closer to the ideals of happiness, thus succeeding where industrial civilization had failed:

Finally, the journey into Africa would confirm the important dicta that when it came to modes of knowing and living, there was, indeed, an alternative path to knowledge and happiness:

But these images of African primitivism are not merely echoes of the fashions of modernism. For DuBois and other African intellectuals in the 1920s the rise of modernism and its legitimation of African primitivism as an alternative to industrial civilization is significant for two reasons: The first one is that DuBois's central complaint, as early back as the 1890s and especially in Souls, was that industrial civilization had failed its mandate of enhancing life and happiness and, as is well known, he continuously sought to establish a space, albeit a romantic one, in which the resources of modernization would be reconciled with what one may call humane ideals. In this sense, Africa seemed to proffer a world in which such ideals thrived untroubled. The second point is simply that DuBois did not want to become one with the primitive to find happiness: "No. I prefer New York. But my point is that New York and London and Paris must learn of West Africa and may learn" (128). I think that what primitivism enabled DuBois to do was a grammar for reconciling African difference with the ideals of high culture that he had been promoting since he first appeared before the American Negro Academy in 1895. After all, European high culture had made African primitivism fashionable by placing it at the center of the ideology of modernism. But perhaps more significantly, the discovery of Africa enabled DuBois to marshal non-cognitive resources—those associated with art and culture—to reintegrate the African American into American national history and the black into the universal narrative of history.

About the Author

Simon Gikandi is a Professor of English at Princeton University.

[Notes]

1. The literature on the aesthetic ideology is extensive but my argument has developed out of some of the more controversial works in this tradition: Tony Bennet, Outside Literature (London: New York: Routledge, 1990); J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (College Park: Penn State University, 1992); Paul de Man, The Aesthetic Ideology (Minnneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); see also the essays collected in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1994).

2. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, p. 3.

3. See "Of Alexander Crummell," in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books, [1903] 1990), p. 157. Further references to this edition will made in parenthesis in the text.

4. The argument I present here is part of a larger study on "Race and the Ideology of the Aesthetic."

5. For the role of negativity in the Hegelian notion of unhappy consciousness, see Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 37. For the significance of Hegel to Dubois's thought and method, see Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E. Du Bois and American Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 14. On Du Bois and the uses of alienation see Thomas C. Holt, "The Political Uses of Alienation: E. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940," American Quarterly 42, 2 (1990): 301-23.

6. Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954). Further references to this book will be made in the text in parenthesis.

7. Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber, 1959), p129.

8. These questions are posed by Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 1-2; one of the most elaborate discussion of the relationship between the aesthetic and understanding can be found in the introduction to Bernstein's The Fate of Art, pp. 1-16.

9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 462, 464. My understanding of the relation between the epiphanic and modern identity has been enhanced considerably by Taylor's book.

10. "L'expérience vécue du Noir" translated rather erroneously as "The Fact of Blackness" in Black Skin, White Masks trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 109.

11. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1948] 1966), pp. 187-21.

12. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 13.

13. See Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (New York: Negro Universities Press, [1916] 1969); and J. E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopian Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation London: Frank Cass, [1911] 1969). If Souls has two sides to it (an analytical and figurative or rhetorical side) then we must turn to the African texts influenced by it to see the kind of distinctive political roles played by method and strategy. I do this in another part of this project where I specifically address Du Bois and the anxiety of influence in the Pan-Africanist text.

14. Preface to Black Folk Then and Now (New York: 1939)

15. Quoted in Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford, 1994), p. 121.

16. Martin Jay, " 'The Aesthetic Ideology' as Ideology; or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?," Cultural Critique (Spring 1992), p. 45. For a discussion of the vexed relationship between the aesthetic and politics, see also Anthony J. Cascardi, "Aesthetic Liberalism: Kant and the Ethics of Modernity," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 45, 176 (1991), 11-23; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Modernity," in Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology, 124-49; and Dave Beech and John Roberts, "Spectres of the Aesthetic," New Left Review 218 (July/August 1996): 102-27.

17. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 3.

18. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers [1944] 1984), p. 114. Further references to this edition will made in parenthesis in the text.

19. For this debate see Preben Mortensen, Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), pp. 160-62

20. "The Conservation of Races," in the W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39. Hitherto referred to as "Conservation."

21. For the opposition between materiality and phenomenality, see de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 70-90.

22. See, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House (New York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), pp. 28-46.

23. Martin Jay, "'The Aesthetic Ideology' as Ideology;" p. 44.

24. Appiah in In My Father's House, pp. 41,42.

25. "The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind," in W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, p. 48. Hitherto "Present Outlook" with page numbers in parenthesis.

26. "The African Roots of War" in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995), p. 643.

27. For the term see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995).

28. "On Being Ashamed of Oneself," in the Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, p. 72. Hitherto "On Being Ashamed" with page numbers in parenthesis.

29. Nathaniel Huggins, "The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History,"

30. "Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?" in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1920-1963, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. Further references to this edition will be made in parenthesis in the text.

31. "The Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned," in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks, p. 109. Further references to this edition will be made in parenthesis in the text.

32. See Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: New York University Press, 1977).

33. Bennet, Outside Literature, p. 143-66.

34. Cascardi and Bernstein, op. cit; articulate this view most forcefully.

35. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 4.

36. Cascardi, p. 12.