Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
the middle ground, at the intersections of thought and action, reason and emotion, scholarship and activism.
Shamoon Zamir’s argument that the empirical and emotional exist dialectically in Du Bois’s body of work introduces an alternative to other critics’ chronological or developmental narratives of Du Bois’s thought on the uses of sociology. Reflecting on the importance of his writing the first chapters of Souls while in the midst of working on The Philadelphia Negro, Zamir identifies a “triumphant” conflict between scientific empiricism and political advocacy, or between “thought and feeling.” He concludes, “if the different approaches represent conflicting understandings, then it is the very contradictions and struggles, not the straightforward triumph of one option over another, that must be accepted as the truth of Du Bois’s thought” (55–56). Dialectical exchange can be seen as the operable mode not only among discrete periods of his career, or texts (Souls and Philadelphia), but also within the singular masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk.12 Thought and feeling, or science and activism, acquire meaning when we understand one in relation to the other. Du Bois makes evident his awareness of this fact in his layering and piecing together of different discursive traditions.
Race, Marginality, and the Formation of National Communities
The Souls of Black Folk is comprised of twelve essays and one short story, addressing a range of topics from the personal, to the sociological, historical, ethnographic, and political.13 According to Gates and West, the breadth of topics and genres mirrors the scope of Du Bois’s accomplishments. They call the book a monumental achievement that charts “the contours of the civilization [the Negro “nation-within-a-nation”]—the arts and sciences, the metaphysical and religious systems, the myths and music, the social and political institutions, the history both before and after Emancipation—that defined a truly African American culture at the outset of the new century.”14 The work’s expansiveness was necessary for Du Bois to successfully portray Negro “civilization” from both internal and external points of view. Sociology gave him a framework through which he could produce an empirical and historical analysis of the state of Black America. Fiction allowed him to explore the post-emancipation dynamics between the emerging intellectual and professional classes and the masses of Black Southerners; and the “sorrow songs,” as Du Bois called African American spirituals, voice the despair, longings, and hopes of Black people who had been historically silenced and subordinated because of the dual stigmas of color and poverty. In all these discursive moments, Du Bois presents himself as a representative subject who exhibits kinship and solidarity with the oppressed from a shared history of oppression, even as the adoption of the social scientist’s identity in the service of racial uplift and activism produces a tension that threatens to unravel the affiliations he so fiercely maintains.
The Souls of Black Folk is not the first work in which Du Bois experiments with the rhetorical approach of simultaneously representing the Negro from “without” and “within,” although he did not necessarily accomplish this through discursive hybridity, as he does in Souls. In “The Black North in 1901,” he tackles the perception that Black communities in the North are homogenous by twinning his analysis of demographic statistics about social patterns such as domestic configurations and employment statistics with a brief psychological sketch of the “average New York negro” that attempts to describe the emotional and psychic resources on which Black people draw in response to racism. In the essay he observes, “they live and move in a community of their own kith and kin and shrink quickly and permanently from those rough edges where contact with the larger life of the city wounds and humiliates them” (reprinted in Green and Driver 151).15 This description emphasizes that social contact across interracial lines is obstructed by a racism that can be palpable in its damaging effects. Du Bois states that racism is a force from which the Negro shrinks and retreats into the protective fold of a homogenous community in an act of self-defense. Yet this observation occurs in as essay in which substantial effort has been made to establish the high degree of social, economic, and moral differences among Blacks in New York’s segregated neighborhoods. The incongruous representation of New York Blacks as both heterogeneous and insular suggests that both juxtaposition to and segregation from a dominant group can render a marginalized community cut off and isolated. Rather than positioning Blacks, the domestic U.S. version of the primitive others, as “out of time,” Du Bois underscores the notion that segregation is directly caused by adverse social and historical forces.
Insights such as these were made possible by Du Bois’s multiple allegiances to scholarly and racial communities. Inspired by the liminality of his own subject position, he introduces the symbol of the veil as a figure for the racial divide. The image can also be read as a symbol of the ethnographer as participant-observer. In the “Forethought” of The Souls of Black Folk, he conjures an image of a narrator unique in his ability to move and communicate across the color line: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (359). This portrait illustrates an ideal relation between ethnographer and audience, characterized by the narrator’s mastery of the nuances of transculturation and the reader’s openness to greater understanding of the racial other, yet it is also a depiction rife with ambivalences. It hints at, for example, the narrator’s liminality through the image of his stepping “within the Veil.” To step within the Veil is to traverse anxiously between, and live partly in, both White and Black worlds, a circumstance that may lend its own insight but that also speaks of alienation. As Houston Baker argues:
The “veil” is Du Bois’s metaphor for what might be thought of as the “edge” of the performative frame, the dissonant rim where safe, colored parochialism is temptingly and provisionally refigured as an anguished mulatto cosmopolitanism. The “veil” hangs in the performative moment like a scrim between dark, pastoral, problematic folk intimacy with black consciousness, and free-floating anxieties of a public mulatto modernism that subjects one to the white “gaze.”16
That dissonant edge, the performative space inhabited by the cosmopolitan Black (or racially hybrid) modern is also a space of undefined possibility for the audience as much as it is for the narrator. The image of the reader viewing beyond the Veil “faintly” both promises and withholds the possibility of his identifying with the author’s Southern Black subjects. This ambivalence over the narrator’s ability to cross racial boundaries easily, or facilitate the passage of others, is rendered still more complexly in other parts of the book.
Du Bois queries the efficacy of scientific authority, for example, by rendering uncertain the possibility of the scientist (himself included) knowing his subjects fully. His description of the Georgia Black Belt, the “center of the Negro problem,” commences with the narrator aboard a train rumbling through Georgia; its movement across the rural landscape allows the narrator to cover historical ground as well, from the slave trade, to the Cherokee nation’s displacement by the U.S. government, and into the present moment of the plantation system’s dissipation and disappearance. Du Bois’s summons the reader—“If you wish to ride with me you must come into the ‘Jim Crow Car’” —playing with the idea of simultaneous closeness and distance (440). While this invitation holds out the promise of a kind of intimacy that would grow commensurate with the reader’s increased understanding of the Black Belt and proposes the closure of a social divide, it also accurately positions the narrator and Black folk in separate racial camps and social strata from Whites and indicts the nation for its failures to live up to its social contract with the Negro. Du Bois continues, “There will be no objection,—already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white …. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine” (440–41). The inability of the White passengers to share the Negroes’ sense of constraint in movement and choice, limits their ability to truly empathize even as they share the same social space. Consequently, Du Bois’s invitation to the reader to accompany him into the heart of the Black Belt, to delve deeply beneath the layers of history and social customs to arrive at a greater measure of understanding, is accompanied by a subtle reminder