You are on page 1of 22

Souls

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

"What is Africa to Me?"


Africa in the Black Diaspora Imagination

F. Abioia Ireie
Paysan, frappe le sol de la daba Dans le sol il y a unc hale qiie la Jiyllabe de revenL-mcnt ne denoue pas AimeCesaire, "A TAfrique."' [Peasant, strike the eanh with your daba In the earth, there is a haste thai the syllable of event cannot unravel]

t is an established tact that the African connection has been a major source of distress for Black people in the African Diaspora. The appiieation of a whole series of epithets that devalue the continent, in a structure ofnegative representations of its peoples and its cultures, has functioned to demoralize them to such an extent that even where this did not lead to outright rejection of Africain the effort to separate oneself "in body. mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa." as the narrator in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) puts the matter (167)at the very least, it generated within the Black American consciousness a profound and disquieting ambivalence toward the ancestral continent, a sentiment compounded of anxiety as to the precise nature and implications ofthe connection with Africa that every African American has had to work through for himself or herself, in order to arrive at some form of self-recognition, if not of self-acceptance. The evolution, Proteus-like, of W.E,B Du Bois from Harvard-trained American scholar to Pan-African nationalist who found a final resting place on African soil bears all the traces of this searing process. For no individual has embodied so completely and so dramatically as Du Bois the drama of consciousness and will involved in the historic and existential dialectic between the Black Diaspora and the African homeland. Du Bois has been the object of so many studies, and of so much controversy, that a review of his work might be thought superfluous.- However, the special relevance of his work to our theme makes it inevitable to review him once more, in the bope of capturing the mighty flow of his thought, as it gathered up several currents in its strenuous confrontation with the problems of self-apprehension involved in the black situation in America.
Souls 7 (3 4): 26 46, 2005 / Copyright i 2005 The Trustees of Columbia University in Ihe City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI:1U,1080/10999940500265417

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

27

Cornel West has suggested that a key component of his thought was the germ theory of race and culture, derived (ironically, as he says) from Albert Bushnel! Hart, who was Du Bois's Icachcr at Harvard: ironically because, as West observes. Hart used this theory "to support Teutonic/Anglo Saxon superiority" (West, "The Four Traditions of Response." 2000: 111). But it seems to nic pertinent to draw attention to the even more profound inllucnce ofcontinental European thotighl on Du Bois, as a consequence of the two years he spent in Germany, for it was this experience thai was to provide a foundation ofideas and give concrete direction to his activities as the father of Pan-Africanism. It seems safe to observe that his Gennan sojourn was chiefly notable for the permanent itnprint ttpon his mind of the classic texts of German nationalism. The nexus between Johatin Gottlieb Fichte's exaltation of the national spirit in his "Addresses to the Gennan Nation" and the literature and general culture of German romanticism in which Du Bois became steeped clearly contributed to the retlective turn of his powerful mind. Nor can it be doubted that a major source of his political culture derives from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose preoccupation with the "organic society"- -what he called "the community of existeticc"led to the formulation, in his Philosophy of Righl. of the rational necessity of the State, valorized by him as the highest stage of a historical process that is also the enactment of the logic of universal reason (Hegel. 1967). But it was especially the influence of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who, in two seminal works. Ffagtnents on Recent German literature (1767) and Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind {M'^A), emphasized the originality of national culUires. as evidenced hy language (and especially its expressive manifestations in poetry) and folklore (in particular music), which seems to have run the deepest in the formation of Du Bois'sintellectual temper. The very title of Du Bois's best-known work. The Souls of Black Folk, with its literal rendering in English of the German term Volksgeist. provides an immediate pointer lo this influence. The Gennan experience thus fornis the background to Du Bois's celebration of Black folk culture, arising from his subsequent encounter with the rural South, where, alongside the deprivation and misery of its Black population thai aroused his compassion, he was struck by the distinctive character and expressive quality of their African inheritance. This conjunction of influences and factors lies behind Du Bois's cultural nationalism which led him, as Kwamc Appiah has remarked, "to arlicttlate a racial tradition of black letters as a natural expression of the Herderian view of the nation as identified above all else with its 'poesy'" (Appiah. 1990: 284).'This aesthetic dimension of the Black collective circumstance Du Bois first discovered in the spirituals. But if The Souls of Black Folk reflects in a general way the deep traces upon his intellectual frame and sensibility of the German influences evoked here, it bore testiniotiy to an even more precise stage of Du Bois's spiritual and intellectual adventure, tbat is, his early recognition of the African inheritance as a constitutive and enlivening element of Southern Black life. It is significant in this respect to note the shift of interest and attention and the corresponditig change of tone as Du Bois moved from a dispassionate consideration of the urban Negro of the North to a preoccupation with the rural masses of the South, a transition that is reflected in the striking difference between the scholarly approach of The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899a massive work of urban sociology that anticipates in its methodology the investigative research of the Chicago school represetited by Ezra Park and his disciplesand the tone of passionate engagement that runs through The Souls of Black Folk, published just four years later. The distinctive formsof life that he observed in the rural South displayed to him a visage of Africa that could be associated wilh a collective memory anchored in social practice and cultural traditions. The strange beauty of the spirituals gave aesthetic dimension to this association of a people with a soil, a particular space, and beyond, with a continent. This vast

28

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

hititeriand of awareness that lay behind and ratified Du Bois's enunciation of a deeply rooted collective expression of the Black American gave to the work a symbolic dimension that lifted it well above its documentary character. As Arnold Rampersad has observed, 'The greatness of The Souls of Black Folk as a document of black American culture lies in its creation of profound and enduring myths about the life of the people" (Rampersad, 1990: 88-89). We tiiight speak then ofa prior discovery of Africa by Du Bois even in the Black heartland of America, It was above all this encounter, and the intimation of Africa it provided, that kindled in Du Bois the belief in an immemorial soul of the people, so that he came fully to embrace the race-centered conception of history that was the driving force of nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it is in his celebrated essay "The Conservation of Races" that this conception is most clearly enunciated: What, theti. is a race? It is a vast family of hutnati beings, generally of commoti blood and latigtiage, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accoraplishtnent of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life. (Du Bois in Sutidquist, 1996; 817} This was the definition of race, formulated in the tenns of nineteenth-century organic conceptions of the nation with which Du Bois functioned throughout his long career. It is a conception thai has come under a cloud in our day, thanks to its misuse in Nazism, But its transformation into an aggressive and murderous racistn by the Nazis should not make us forget that in its origins, as derived from Herder, it was in fact a potent liberating force. By stressing ethnic and racial idiosyncracies, by drawing attention to observable differences that gave a distinctive stamp to their forms of expression, the Herderian idea of race as a primary determinant of national groups sought to give recognition to marginalized communities, to endow them with a new nobility that enabled the emergence atnong them of capacities long suppressed. It was a conception that served not merely to celebrate, but also to emancipate.'' It was, however, a conception that involved Du Bois in a profound dilemma inherent in his lifelong quest for a national identity outside of and beyond the American frame of reference. For although the African idea he derived from his encounter with the Black folk culture of the rural South was not altogether an abstract one, there was no African nation based on a common language that set^ed as the expressive bond of the racial comtnunity. Du Bois was thus left with race"cotnmon blood," as he put it in his essayas the fundamental category of self-definition and collective awareness. It is this that has led Hazel Carby to observe: ""Du Bois did not contest the claim that black people should be viewed as race. On the contrary, his intellectual strategy was to utilize the concept of race and to transform it into a means of political unification" (Carby, 1998: 27). Assessments of Dti Bois's thought and career have generally run along this line. Thus, commenting upon his initiative in organizing the 1919 Pan-African congress. Martin Steins observes: "Hoping to revive the spirit of the crusades against slavery and the slave trade, Du Bois drew attention to a world wide black problem:, he wanted the colonial powers to recognize their responsibilities to ensure the advancement of the black race as a whole.. . ." (in Gerard, 1986: 355; italics in the original). These observations underscore a significant fact about Du Bois's thought and career, but require serious qualification, for it was not without some circumspection that Du Bois adopted the political conception of race that has come to be associated with him. He was well aware that, from the scientiftc point of view, race was a highly unreliable category of human classification. Indeed, to judge from his many pronouncements on the subject of race as a biological fact, he would certainly have agreed with everything Kwame

Criticai Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

29

Appiah (1992) had to say on the same subject in the early chapters of his book In My Father's House. What is more, Du Bois recognized that, even in its application as a sociological category, the concept of race was a highly probictnatic one (Dusk of Dawn, pp. xxx-xxx; The World and Africa: 115-116). This must surely explain Appiah's perplexity at what appears to be Du Bois's obstinate and wrong-headed clinging to the idea of race. But the simple explanation why Du Bois could not abandon the idea altogether is that it was forced on him by the circumstances of life in America, within which race had a significance that one simply eould not get around. For Du Bois was perfectly aware that he was dealing w ith race as what we now temi a "social construction," with the effect on his life and consciousness that he sums up thus: "The fact of racial distinction based on color was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined if (653). In the circumstances, DuBois did not merely bow to the implicationsof race as a determination of his situation, but confronted its social dimensions and consequences in an active working otit of his individual destiny. This is the impulse that underlies what Tommy Lott has called Du Bois's "pragmatic essentialism""(Lott. in BetTiasconi. 2001: 66-71). The irony of Du Bois's situation, then, is that he had to embrace the concept of race in order to combat racism in Ameriea. a gesture that recalls Sartre's description of Negritude as "ami racist racism" ("Black Otpheus" in Bemasconi, 2001: 137). Sartre's phrase requires however to be carefully glossed, so that the term "racism'' is understood here not as an aggressive disposition towards a racial antagonist designated in ati irrational and arbitrary manner, but rather as a pathetic and even tragic consciousness of one's originary situation, a recognition of its over-determination that had to be overcome through a mobilization of consciousness. In other words, Du Bois's racial consciousness was compelled as an existential and moral imperative, enlisted as an active force of individual and collective self-fashioning. Thus, as Du Bois explores the question further in Dusk of Dawn, the concept of race takes him beyond the confines of America, to touch upon questions of origins and identity, toembrace that other question posed in the opening lines of Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage." To the question "What is Africa to Me?" Du Bois responds by enunciating the racial/genetic and historieal/ethnic grounds for the conscious alignment of his affections with Africa. Appiah quotes extensively from the passage in Dusk of Dawn that contains Du Bois's response and proceeds to subject it to close analysis, in order to demonstrate what appears to him the logical weakness of its propositions. Appiah's objections require to be rnet, in order to clarify the human import of Du Bois's African affiliations. When Du Bois claims Africa as his fatherland, although he avows that neither his father nor his father's father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning, Appiahexclaims. "What use is such a fatherland?" (1992: 71), But this skeptical rejoinder ignores another crucial section of Du Bois's statement, which needs to be invoked:
On this vast continent were bom and lived a large portion of my direct ancestors going back a thousand years. The mark of their heritage is upon me in color and hair. Theseareobviousthings. but of little meaning in themselves; only important as they stand for real and more subtle differences from other men. Whether they do or not, 1 do not know nor does science know today, . . , But one thing is sure and that is the lact thai since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history, have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory. . . . (Dusk of Dawn. 116-11 7)

The passage occurs in a chapter entitled "The Concept of Race" in which Du Bois retraces his ancestry on both sides ofthe racial divide. What the passage as indeed the whole chapter indicates is that Africa answers first of all his quest for origins, for a rootedness in eommunity that is also a rooledness in time, one that undergirds his sense

30

Souls

Summer/Faii 2005

of selfhood as a fell wholeness. It is this convergence of social experience and personal circumstance, combined with the intellectual influences we have evoked in the shaping of Du Bois's thought as given an early articulation in The Souls of Black Folk, that Arnold Rampersad has summed up in this observation: "The diminution of the myth of freedom. the elevation of the power of slavery, allows us to establish a continuum of African and Afro-American psychology. Times change and the nature and amount of data change, but the black mind remains more or less constant, for Du Bois sees It as irrevocably linked to itsAfrican origins" (Rampersad, 1989: 119). But there is another sense in which the affiliation to Africa by Du Bois has meaning, insofar at it entails a process of self-fashioning. As the subtitle indicates ("an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept"). Dusk of Dawn is an apologia pro vita sua. a work in whicb. in the manner of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Francis Cardinal Newman, Du Bois recounts his spiritual adventure and thus provides a justification for the choices that went into the making of his individual life. Given his existential situation, we ought to grant that, from an ethical and philosophical point of view, Du Bois was bound to an irreproachable act of will, one that entailed the freedom to choose his identity, in the event, he chose to be African in the manner he describes in the follow ing passage: My African racial feeling was then purely a matter of later learning and reaction; my recoil from the assumptions of the whites: my experience in the south at Fisk. But it was nonetheless real and a large determinant of my lilc and character. [ felt myself African by "race" and by that token was African and an integral member of the group of dark Americans who were called Negroes. (115) We might ask whether T.S. Eliot had better reasons for remaking himself as a High Church Englishmanbowler hat, rolled umbrella and allthan Du Bois had for reconnectlon with the ancestral home. The point of course is that Du Bois sought to resolve the dilemma of the double consciousness he so famously gave voice to in The Souls of Black Folk and that runs as a theme through all his work by making a choice that accorded with his deepest human interests and dispositions. If he could not be fully American, then he would be African, in the sense of representing what one might call "the universal Negro," the singular embodiment of this figure in its world historical circumstance. But of course Du Bois did not leave the matter there. For if the circumstances of the American experience imposed a racial perspective on his thought that his own intelligence could not fully embrace, he sought nonetheless to enlarge and legitimize this perspective by an appeal to a more integrative principle of collective awareness and expression. This was supplied by the notion of culture and the ethical imperative it entailed. Du Bois very early on conceived of a Black communal life, including the religious, as a separate and distinctive realm of experience within the general context of American life and institutions. He would have protested against Appiah's description of this legacy as a "residue"; for him, it had a coherence and vitality all its own. Du Bois was thus led, like many cultural nationalists, to a conflation ofraee with culture as a basis for political participation. The point is that the racial exclusion of Blacks from American democracy compelled Du Bois into a reactive racial nationalism, the contradictory pulls of which could not, however, be comfortably resolved, as is apparent even iti this confident and lyrical statement of its informing principle: We are Americans, not only hy birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vasi bistorie race tbat from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatberland. We are tbe first fruits of this new nation, the barbinger of that black tomorrow whicb is

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

31

yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today. We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and hutnor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy, (mvVmg.v, 1996.822) It will he noticed that Du Bois proceeds here to a deliberate reversal of Hegel's infamous characterization of Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy ofHistoty, transforming its negative thrust by reinterpreting it in terms associated with Herder's valorization of folk culture, in order to enforce his statement of Black people's claim to cultural autonomy. There was no possibility of extending this claim to the political realm, for he was aware that there could be no question ofa separate existence of Black people on American soii.^ The invocation ofa shared cultural inheritance derived from Africa originates with a movement of conscious reconnection with the folk that became central to Du Bois's thought. The literary dimension of this gesture has been highlighted by Houston Baker who. cotiimenting on the inllucnce of Du Bois in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, has remarked that Du Bois promoted the movement for "transcribing the values and achievements of an oral, folk experience into the cultured and written forms" (Baker, in AsantcandAbarry, 1996: 201). However. Du Bois accorded equal impottance to those aspects of cultural achievement in Black history that went beyond the common folk. This "high culture" was associated with Egypt, not merely in its monumental aspect, but also as expression of temporal depthor, if one prefers, ofa longue dureewith a quasi metaphysical resonance that goes beyond the cultural connotations the term assumes for Fcrnand Braudcl and his colleagues of tbe French Annales school, Egypt, reclaimed for Africa, reflected and represented the itnmemorial state of the Black race. This theme constitutes the burden of Du Bois's classic work. The Negro, first published in 1915 and later expanded into The World and.iffiea. Both arc w orks of historical and cultural rehabilitation, an undertakitig upon which Du Bois brings to bear a formidable grasp of historical, archaeological, and ethnological infonnation. Apart frotn a lively narrative and expository style, they display an astonishing range of scholarship intended to hold up the argument for an African past of great achievement. Thus, Du Bois tnakes ample use of diverse authorities, with the obvious aim of establishing his testimony on a solid foundation of fact, in order to demonstrate that the African past in his reconstruction is not a mere figment of his Black imagination, but a verifiable historical reality^ With Du Bois. this re-appropriation of the African inheritance issued from a reconversion of the Diaspora consciousness that enabled a ftilsome atid uticotiditional identification with the tnother continent: Africa is a beautiful land; not merely eomely and pleasant, but haunted with swamp and jungle, stemly bcatitiful in its loveliness of terror, its depth of gloom, and fullness or color; its heaven tearing peaks, its sliver of endless sand, the might, width and breadth of Its rivers, depth of its lakes, and height of its hot. blue heaven. There are myriads of living things, the voice of storm, the kiss of pestilence and pain, the old and ever new. new and incredibly ancient, (85) An ecological visionan environmental imagination, if one preferstinged by a certain neo-Darwinism, with its acceptance of nature in all its variousness and all its moods and circumstances, underlies this depiction ofa universe of African historical being, projected as the primordial theater ofa new African endeavor in history, in a re-affirmation of the African will to life.' hi ail this, the folk continued to haunt Du Bois's imagination. The equivalence that he

32

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

established between race, culture, and nation, and its association with history, defined the individual as essentially a representative ot the species. As he says, "the history of the world is the history, not of individuals but of groups, not of nations, but of races ("The Conservation ofRaces"). The refinement of the individual mind was therefore meaningless without reference to the full body of life and expression represented by the folk, the authentic bearer of a racial memory transmitted through the common culture. This line of reasoning, as Paul Gilroy has suggested, represented for Du Bois more than an incidental aspect of his intellectual development: the culture of the folk, as he understood it. came to assume more than a purely aesthetic significance, but took on rather a crucial political implication, insofar as the folk could also be considered, in the especial light ofRousseau's myth of the social contract and the popular will, as the fundamental component of the social body and therefore as the ultimate source of political legitimacy (Gilroy, 1993: 111-145). In this view, the national community received an essential grounding and ultimately its validation in the common culture massively and concretely embodied by the folk. Du Bois's understanding of the compact with the folk was not, however, merely intellectual or theoretical, but also, and more importantly, moral and ideological, proceeding from a deep compassion for the disinherited folk, and from a passion for social justice. As Manning Marable has observed, his refusal of oppression and his egalitarian faith determined an emphatic socialist orientation ofhis thinking {Marable. 1986). In this connection, it is imperative to stress that his socialism inclined more towards an English tradition that derives from the utopianism of William Morris than towards the Bolshevik kind. The totalitarian system could not accord with his temperament, despite his debt to the anti-imperialism of Lenin, and his vaunted admiration tor the Soviet Union. His socialist faith gives meaning to his political activism in the global context. It is easy to understand from this perspective how Du Bois"s cultural nationalism in the American context flowed directly into the global anti-imperialism within which his PanAfricanism was framed. To understand this progression clearly, we need to recall the circumstances that led to the holding of the 1919 congress in Paris, motivated by the outrage felt by Black nationalists everywhere at the Versailles settlement, in which the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination to the peoples of Europe was denied to the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. The Pan-Africanism that Du Bois began actively to promote from this point onwards can be interpreted as simply the championing of the national idea projected upon Africa, considered as the geo-political sphere for the expression of the collective will of the black race. Pan-Africanism, then, became in cfTect for Du Bois a defense of the weak and vulnerable peoples of the non-western world, in particular Africa, against the rapacity of the European races and the Western powers.'^ Thus, by placing the colonial problem in its maximal racial perspective and international setting, Du Bois was to pave the way for political independence and the beginning of national development in Africa. This outcome authorizes the view that, perhaps more than any other single individual, Du Bois had a direct hand in shaping the destiny of the African continent. Beyond the practical result of his activities, measured in terms of Black and African emancipation, Du Bois stood for a political and social ideal that we associate with modernity as a legacy of the Enlightenment. For Du Bois can be considered doubly the product of the Enlightenment, first in his historical status as an American, citizen of a nation founded on its principles, and secondly, and much more meaningfully, in his personal adherence to its leading propositions. Despite its conflicting currents, which laid open the way to the ideological devaluation of his race, Du Bois clung to the emancipatory hope the Enlightenment ideal held aloft for all peoples whose humanity had been violated by the historical ascendance of the European races." His ultimate aspiration was to enable black people to enter fully into the inheritance of the Enlightenment, for him a

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

* 33

marking phase not merely of western development but of universal history, consisting in the promise it held for the maximization of life chances for humanity at large.'" As Kwaku Korang has noted, the ultimate significance of Du Bois derives from a reasoned progression in his work beyond the Ethiopianism of Blyden (Korang. 2001): of his integration of the affective element in what Wilson Jeremiah Moses has called "the religious historicism"ofearlier interpretations of Black experience (Moses, 1996; 12) into a framework of ideas within which Black nationalism could be validated in terms both of a universal ethical ideal and a secular, modernizing consciousness. The prophetic role that Du Bois felt to have devolved upon him, and which he affected in his literary style, was assumed and dramatically acted out in the public arena by Marcus Garvey." Garvey has so often been presented as the very antithesis of Du Bois that the common purpose that unites them tends to be lost to view; for despite the wide differences in background and in the methods adopted by each man to the race issue, they were both moved by the vision of the deliverance of Black people from the toils of history.'Garvey was the inheritor of a longstanding cmigrationist tradition, going back to such figures as Prince Hall. Paul Cuffee. John Shaw, Samuel Cornish, and John Russwonn (Redkey, 1969; Clarke. 1974). Into this tradition, Garvey infused a new passion and imparted a peculiar dynamism that was founded upon a strongly articulated African sentiment stemming from his Caribbean background, into whose fabric the enacted memories of the ancestral continent were intimately woven. It is of immediate interest in this connection to note that the "ethiopianism" to which Blyden gave extended formulation in the nineteenth century had remained in Garvey's time a widely diffused element of popular feeling in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. (Shepperson, 1968; Scott, 1978). It is thus significant that, apart from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Garvey acknowledged the influence of Blyden. whom he described as "one of our historians and chroniclers who has done so much to retrieve the lost prestige of our race" (quoted in Blyden, Black Spokesman, ed. Hollis Lynch, 1978: xxxiv).'' Garvey's African sentiment could only have been strengthened by the cultural affinities with his native Jamaica that he divined in the Black populace with which he came into contact upon his arrival in the United States; it was thus inevitable that Africa came to function as the directing idea of the racial and ethnic solidarity he came so forcefully to embody. This is apparent from his speech to the Second International Convention of Negroes in 1921. entitled "The Resurrection of the Negro": We have been camouflaged into believing that we were made free by Abraham Lincoln. That we were made free by Victoria of England, but up to now we are still slaves, we are industrial slaves, we are social slaves, we are political slaves, and the New Negro desires freedom that has no boundary, no limit. We desire a freedom that will lift us to the common standard of all men, whether they be white men of Europe, or yellow men of Asia, therefore in our desire to lift ourselves to that standard we shall stop at nothing until there is a free and redeemed Afriea. (Garvey in Dahbour andishay, 1945:304). The immediate connection that Garvey establishes between freedom for Blacks in America and the redemption of Africa links him with Du Bois and with all the Diaspora Blacksof every age and condition whose thought and imagination have since the beginning of their American sojourn turned to Africa. The nexus between the emergence of modern civilization and the historical experience of the race determined that this redemption was conceived as much in practical terms as it was given expression in a mystical register. Garvey's especial sensitivity to the Black situation ensured that both elements of the Black titopiapragmatic and millenarywould profoundly mark his thinking and his style of action. Here, we might surmise that it is not only the influence of

34

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

Du Bois met !Sina Gotner while at Wilberforce and they were married in 1896. Their first child, Burf^hardt, died as an infant in Atlanta from a typhoid epidemic. Special Collections and
Arclijws, W.h.B. Du !i(>i.\ Library. University iif Massachusetts Aiiihcrsi.

Booker 1. Washington that is at work, but also a peasant sense derived from his background. It is not for nothing that the organization he founded to further his activities was called the "Universal Negro Improvement Association." a name that signals a preoccupation ofa very practical order, further demonstrated in his move to incorporate a shipping cotnpany. the Black Star Line, in order to consolidate his emigration schemes and ensure a total independence of action. The sheer scale of Garvey's project for the return to Africa could not but evoke the Biblical story of Exodus, which thus came to function as a form of sacred reference, imparting to his movement a fervent messianism that resonates in his last message to his followers from his prison in Atlanta: When I am dead, wrap the mantle of the Red, Black and Green around me, for in the new life, I shall rise with God's grace and blessing to lead millions tip the heights of irititnph with the colors ihat you know. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm. look for me all around you, for with God's grace, I shall eome and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies, and the millions in Atrica to aid you in the fight for Liberty. Freedom and Life, (Phih.sophy and Opinions. 239) The affirmative tone of this message, underlined by a symbolism that its author counted upon to exercise an itnmediate appeal for its target audience, derives from a force of vision that Garvey never abandoned even during the most discouraging moments of his career.

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

35

Garveyism can be considered the culmination of tbe "Back to Africa" movement, bringing to a dramatic climax the process of elaboration of a Utopia generated within the embattled consciousness of a people at odds with history. Garvey gave strong articulation to the African-American sense of an age-long exile, marked by ceaseless tribulations. The aspiration for a form of historic respite arising from this condition came to determine a dream of deliverance centered on the image of Africa. It is to this aspiration, in which the thematic and affective link between Diaspora condition and the Utopian impulse emerges clearly, that Gar\'ey gave expression in the Biblical register with his audience had been made familiar by the civilization within which it was enclosed:
Our desire is fora place in the world, not to disturb the tranquilily ol" other men. but to lay down our burden and rest our weary backs and feet by the banks of tbe Niger and sing songs and chant our hymns to the God of Ethiopia, (quoted by Barrett. 1997:77)

Any assessment of Garvey must take into account the stringent character of the situation with which he was confronted, the intensity of the hostility he encountered on all sides, and the numerous material difficulties he faced, factors which did not prevent the enormous impact his movement made upon Black communities around the world. Clearly, his message struck a chord among these people whose sense of desperation he articulated so powerfully. The slogan that he invented, "Africa for the Africansthose at home and abroad," ensured that his movement was in full touch with a universal Black nationalism that came into ascendance in the years between the two world wars. It certainly had a special resonance for the various African nationalist movements that sprang up during the period in various parts of the world. The most remarkable African disciple of Garvey remains of course Kwame Nkrumah, who drew as much inspiration from him as from Du Bois with whom, as is well known, Nkrumah collaborated closely during the decisive stage of the Pan-African movement marked by the historic Manchester conference (Bakpetu-Thompson, 1969; Birmingham, 199S).'^ The worldwide impact of Garvey's movement can be imputed to the fact that it gave vibrant expression to a popular sentiment that, in the nature of things, could not be said to be compatible with a properly intellectual mode of reflection. Moreover, the performative and expansive character of his movement gave it an almost ritual significance, whose symbolism has endured, conveyed at the present time through the three colors (black, red, and green) of the Rastafarian movement (Barretl, 1997). All this seems to suggests an unreflective and irrational impulse running through his activities. The truculent attitude he often displayed in his confrontation with white racism, leading him to deal with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan. has been interpreted by Gilroy as a form of malevolence, the expression of a Black racism that bore a symmetrical relation to its white equivalent, and anticipated in its attitudes and its style the aggressive fascism promoted by Mussolini in Italy and demonstrated with deadly results by German Nazism led by Hitler (Gilroy, 2000,231-37). But to suggest such a connection is to disregard the welldocumenled declarations in which, on several occasions, Garvey denounced Hitler and Mussolini for their racism, anti-Semitism, and their colonial ambitions in Africa.'^ But even while recognizing the pathologies that, given the circumstances, could not but mark Garvey's movement, I believe that we can discern today in his speeches and addresses a high seriousness that must have imparted to them a ring both of a deep passion and of utter conviction. In short, Garvey's utopianism, bound up w ith his dream of Africa, w as not without sincerity and moral appeal, nor indeed an intellectual foundation and therefore, its measure of truth. It is probable that today, Du Bois and Garvey would be designated "public inteltectu-

36

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

als.""' In the particular case of Du Bois, a scrupulous scholarship served to deliver a social message, which was held steadily in view as its primary objective. He provided the model for the many Black intellectuals, often professional academics, whose preoccupation with Africa was reflected in their scholarship and their writings. We must begin with Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, along with its journal, the Journal of Negro Histoiy. helped to establish Africa as an area of scholarly interest. That publication, along with the journal Phylon. published at Speilman College, paved the way for the establishment of African Studies as an academic discipline, and its validation of an African past of achievement that antedates the experience of slavery. As Carter Woodson says, in his review of Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past, "The race has a past and it did not begin on the cotton and sugar plantations of America" (Woodson. 1942; 111-118). His book. The Negro in Our History, published in 1922. is a demonstration of this thesis, for the first three chapters are devoted to what, in the sixth edition. Carter Woodson himself calls "the African background." Beyond its polemical objective, the book represents an effort to reconstruct the AfricanAmerican experience in its full historical perspective by restoring to it the African dimension. Even more, this reconstruction was conceived as a total grasp of the racial experience, the creation of a new historical consciousness enabling Blacks everywhere to achieve a positive form of self-knowledge (Lee. 1958;Goggin, 1993). Among the social scientists for whom Africa has been a central reference of academic work, the names of St. Clair Drake. Martin Kilson, Eliott Skinner, and Manning Marable come immediately to mind (Harrison and Harrison, 1999). All this work provides the scholarly foundation and intellectual pedigree for what has come to be known variously as "Black Studies," "Afro-American Studies." "Africana Studies," etc.. which emerged from the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement. We must also note the clTort of integration of these disciplines by Ron Karenga, and Molefi Asante"s (1987) theorization in various works, beginning with r/ie/t/rocert/r/c/flfefl, of their interrogation of the AfricanAmerican situation, leading to what may be interpreted as a new postulation of Negritude adapted to the post-Civil Rights situation in the United States (Harrison and Harrison, 1999; Aldridge and Young, 2000). In al! these scholarly efforts, the African idea intervenes as a mediating principle of African-American self-knowledge. This is especially evident in the area of literary criticism. Already, in the mid 1960s, the publication of Mercer Cook and Stephen Henderson's The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States (! 969) established in an overt critical gesture the thematic link between African and African-American literatures. With the concept of the Black Aesthetic associated with Addison Gayle, the historical reference provides a base fora distinctive expression that is charged with the full weight of a common experience. But it is especially in the work of the postmodern critics that we encounter the most emphatic acknowledgement of the African connection. Thus, for Houston Baker, the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance carried with it the "sound and space of an African ancestral past" (Baker. 1987: 195). Henry Louis Gates for his part provides, in the long theoretical Introduction to his book The Signifyin' Monkey (1988) the sociological framework of an African imagination to which the cultural history of the African American has given a new complexion and resonance. These studies I have evoked map out in their various ways the conceptual landscape of the African-American intellectual tradition. It is of interest at this time to note that the academic and scholarly recovery of this tradition of African-American reflection now enables an exploration in philosophical terms of the existential framework and inner density of African American experience, as witnessed by the work of such scholars as Cornel West, Lewis Gordon, Lucius Outlaw, and Charles Mills (see Pittman. 1997; Headley,200i).''

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

37

But it is to the imaginative works that we must go in order to grasp the full press and working out of the African sentiment in the Black Diaspora consciousness. It is here that the deep afTectivity that tinderlies this theme receives a focused and complex expression. This begins to emerge in the way the spirituals deploy a subversive Africanism under the guise of Christian orthodoxy. The same observation applies to Phillis Wheatley's manner of "signifyin"" on the thetne of Christian conversion in her well-known poem, "On Being Brought from Africa to America,"'^ Africa assumes a more immediate significatice in poems by African writers in the succeeding centuries. While it is hailed in more or less conventional terms by Frances [larper in her poem "'Ethiopia" (412) and by Paul Lawrence Dunbar in his "'Ode to Ethiopia" (886-887), it acquires an aggressive edge in Gwendolyn Bennett's "Heritage"; here, the African image subtends the theme of racial grievance projected in a frankly anti-Christian/anti western stance; I want to hear the chanting Around a heathen fire or a strange black race. (1227-28) With Claude McKay's sonnet "Africa" (985), we begin to approach a deeper sounding of the African theme In the Black Diaspora itnagination. in this sonnet, Africa is presented reverentially, as the mother continent, albeit as one whose generative powers are spent. The tone receives a spiritual resonance in "Outcast" { 987), in which McKay espouses an ancestralistii we have witnessed in Du Bois by giving expression to a longing for that land "whence my fathers came," in reaction against bondage in West, The poem has a special interest in the way the myth of Guinea reappears in what one might describe as a surreptitious form: "My soul would sing forgotten jungle sotigs/l would go back to darkness and to peace," Here, the image of darkness functions not merely as a conventional reference to the mystic shroud of death, but also, and tnore importantly, to designate an original source of being to which the Black poet's soul reverts: in other words, Africa. This brings us to the classic statement of the African theme in African-American literature, with all the ambivalence that surrounds the theme: Countee Cullen's "Heritage," (1997: 1311-1314), with its celebrated opening line, "What is Africa to me?" We must ftrst note that the poetn is actually a religious poetn. a work of Christian tiicditation, one that is enacted in dramatic terms suggestive ofa "dark night of the soul." The poet's meditation progresses towards the self-dedication that he annotmces about halfway through the work: I belong to Jesus Christ Preacher of humility Heathen gods are naught to me These lines suggest that the spiritual progression as presented in the poem culminates in a rejection of Africa associated with "Heathen gods." But the general movement of the poem renders this rejection problematic, to say the least, for we observe that the poet's gesture is preceded by an exploration of his African antecedents that is announced in the opening lines on a strongly articulated note of celebration: What is Africa to me? Copper sun or scarlet sea Jungle star or jungle traek Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?

38

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

It may be thought that the primal images that carry forward the poet's mediation in the succeeding lines are meant to represent the untamed landscape of the ancestral continent, but they serve rather to dramatize the maelstrom of the poet's emotions, divided as he is between his racial and ethnic feeling on one hand, and his Christian affiliations on the other. It soon becomes clear that the quest for deliverance in religious terms as delineated in the poem rests on a feeble orthodoxy, for the poet seems unable to make an unequivocal claim to the Christian heritage. The opening lines, with the refrain that accompanies it, evinces such evocative power that the conventional religiosity of the poet's dedication becomes unavailing against the powerful undercurrent of feeling the African theme generates: One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved. Spicy grove, cinnamon tree. What is Atriea to me? In their very expressiveness, these lines establish the dominant emotional key of the poem, a key upon which the African sentiment is rung in such resonant terms that the Christian devotional theme becomes ultimately subdued. When we turn to Langston Hughes, we encounter a handling of the African theme that spans a wider range of sentiment and vision. In "Afro-American FragETient" {Collected Poems, 129), Africa is experienced as the enigma lodged within the deep recesses of the black racial consciousness: So long, so far away, is Africa's Dark face It is important to note that the phrase "Dark face" thrown into relief in the text by enjambment, serves to emphasize the obscure appeal of the subject to the poet. Another poem, "Dansc Africaine" (28), exhibits a more vigorous apprehension, with the poet striving to represent his African nature in sensual terms, as a somatic itnprint upon the self A night-veiled girl Whirls softly into a Circle of light. Whirls softly . . . slowly Like a wisp of smoke around the fire And tbe tom-toms beat And tbe tom-toms beat And the low beating of tbe tom-toms Stirs your blood The dominant note here is that of a triumphant primitivism, though the poem also attests to a movement towards a rcconncction with the sources of life, in conformity with the ideology and prevailing idiom of a dominant modernism.''' It is to this element that Langston Hughes brings a special refinement in the poem in which he seems to me to have offered the most authentic expression of his African sentiment, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." I've known rivers I've known rivers aneient as the world and older tban theflowof human blood in
htiman veins.. . .

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois


I've known rivers Ancient dusky rivers

39

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (23) The primordialism of this poem is projected through the image of the river as symbolic both of the ceaseless How of time and of the vital energies that the poet divines in the manifested universe to which he relates in explicit racial terms ("ancient dusky rivers"). The evocative appeal of the poem is predicated upon an African sentiment, and it was to be transmitted to Leopold Sedar Senghor. who came to amplify the theme and give it an especially ample resonance in his poem, "Congo," in order to locate it within a specific universe of African apprehension. The reference to Senghor is a reminder of the powerful influence exerted by the literature of the Harlem Renaissance upon the Black francophone poets of the Caribbean and Africa, beginning with its direct promotion of the so-called Indigenist movement in Haiti, and culminating in the Negritude movement in Paris (Cobb, 1979; De Jongh, 1990). It is useful in this connection to point out the Caribbean evocations of Africa that reflect the visible cultural presence of Africa in the region. We might mention here Jacques Roumain's "Guinea." which connects with the passage in the long poem "Bois d'ebene" ("Ebony Wood") in which this presence is acknowledged in anguished terms: Africa, I have kepi your memory, Africa you are within me like the thorn in the wound like the guardian fetish at the center of the village. (in Kennedy. 1989:25) Lorna Goodison"s "Guinea Woman" (2000) is an embodiment of a generative principle of the Caribbean people rooted in Africa, while Sinione Scharz-Bart's Fluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle {The Bridge of Beyond) restores the narrative strategies of the racial memory that ensures a sense of origins and endorses a vision of the future. In Praisesong for the Widow. Paule Marshall (1984) celebrates the enlivening quality of the African inheritance in the fmal dance and restoration to the fullness of self of her heroine. With Kamau Brathwaite's Masks, as 1 have tried to show elsewhere (Irele, 2001: 154-167), the African theme is carried further through its enactment of a physical return and reliving of the African experience, and it is the force of this immediate reconnection that determines the messianic quality of Brathwaite's ancestralism. nowhere so clearly in evidence as in his "Sun Poem." It is of special interest in the light of these references to examine the evolution of the Caribbean ancestral sentiment associated with Africa in the work of Derek Walcott. given the pronounced ambivalence that seems to have marked its earliest expressions. Beginning with "A Far Cry from Africa" {Collected Poems, 1986. 17) in which he situates himself at the ambigtiotis edge of the racial divide ("How can I turn from Africa and live?"), Walcott makes constant reference in his poetry and plays to the African component of his mixed racial and cultural ancestry. In these references, Africa, as image and idea, is often presented in a thematic and textual counterpoint to his western historical and cultural legacy: And 1. whose ancestors were slave and Roman, have seen both sides of the imperial foam.

40

Souls

Summer/Faii 2005

Walcott's racial concerns come together in Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), an expressionist representation of the conflicts and obsessions that inhabit the Afro-Caribbean mind, projected through allegorical characters drawn from the folk tradition. Dream on Monkey Mountain thus presents itself as a parable of Caribbean experience, a play that highlights the social and moral odds against which the descendants of African slaves struggle in order to create what the West Indian scholar Orlando Patterson calls "a conscious cotnmunity of tnemory." Walcott's treatment of the African theme in the play seems at ftrst sight to be conditioned by the intertextua! framework suggested by Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Jean Genet's Les Negres. The formal relationship of Walcott's play to these works determines its thematic development and atnbiguous tone of the play. forthc symbolism and dramatic progression in Walcott's play may be said to culminate in an emphatic repudiation of Africa. It seetns to me however that this is a gesture that is deterrnined primarily by Walcott's preoccupation with the specific Caribbean predicament as this relates to the experience of the principal character, Makak, the need he felt to advance a reconciliation of the Caribbean subject with the immediate environment, with a given and defined landscape of existence and endeavor. At the end of the play. Makak recovers a certain integrity of himself as Felix Ikibaln. an integrity defined by his specific Caribbean identity and its creative possibilities:
Lord, I have been washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the ocean. The branches of my fingers, the roots of my feet, eould grip nothing, but now, god, they have tbund ground, , . . Other men will come, other prophets will come, and they will be stoned, and mocked, and betrayed, but now this old hermit is going back home, back to the beginning. To the green beginning of this world, (326),

But the African image is not banished for all that from the poet's mind, for Walcott seems to have felt a compulsion to return to this image as it inhabits the Caribbean consciousness, a theme that he finally confronts in one of the most memorable sequences in his long poem Ometvs (1990). the scene in Book Three of the poem in which his hero Aehille meets Afolabe, his African forbear. This meeting occurs in the second of two episodes that recount a descent, first into history, then into what may be called the racial Unconscious, enacted in a dream sequence in which Aehille crosses the bridge of metnory that spans the years of the original separation from the ancestral homeland and the ambiguous present of Caribbean existence. The flow of the Congo River down which he journeys is thus backward, toward that pristine time of a primal existence and awareness:
Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes, skipping eetituries. ocean and river, and Time itself. (134)

These lines enact nothing less than an epiphany, leading to a reawakening of consciousness in Walcott's protagonist: "And Aehille felt the homesick shame/and pain of his Africa." A good part of that pain involves the loss of his name, that is, ultimately, of an individual grasp of the world: "The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave/us; trees, men. we yearn for a sound that is missing" (137). it is this lack that the African ancestor attempts to remedy in the dialogue that ensues between him and his Caribbean descendant:
No tnan loses his shadow except it is in the nighl and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow of sunrise, he stands on bis own name in that light. (138)

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

41

Walcott affinns in these lines an essential dimension to the self that is manifested at the noontide of being. This reading is confirmed by the ritual re-insertion of Achille into the mythic and epic past, in what is presented as both a ceremony of reunion and of a scene of self-recognition; Achille saw the same dances That the iniired warriors did wilh their bamboo stick As they scuttcrcd around him. lifting, dipping their lances Like divining rods turning the earth to music the same chac-chac and ra-ra, the drumming the same, and the chant of the sced-eycd prophet to the same from the blurring ankles. The same, the i^ame. (143)

Walcott points us here to the originating impulse of his poem in Caribbean folkways. deriving inspiration and meaning from a new responsiveness on his part to the African inheritance.-" For the ceremony of welcome and reintegration acquires its full significance by locating the poem's protagonist at the symbolic and affective confluence of a remembered past and a living present. In theAfolabeepisode, Walcott works through the ambiguity of his earlier stances to a new understanding of the African dimension of his Caribbean sensibility, of his historical and cultural being. What the narrator in Omeros calls Achille's "homesick shame and pain of his Africa" hovers in the background of Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998), a work that can be interpreted as the fictional enactment of the quest for an autonomous sphere of being that Black people in the African Diaspora have had to pursue throughout the course of their American existence. By its very title. Paradise announces itself as an allegory of the Black condition in America; in this respect, the novel offers an interesting variation on the Exodus theme. In the first place, deliverance is sought through a movement further inland in the continent of exile, rather than movement out. The migration to the West in the novel recreates the great American phenomenon celebrated by the great historian of the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, except that in this case, it features an attempt to establish a community of pure Blacksthose who had suffered from the "disallowment"within the wide open spaces of America.'' The African idea seems to play no part therefore in the conception and execution of this Utopian enterprise. But the dissolution of the community dramatizes the impossibility of the attainment of the black Utopia in America. This is underscored by the curious inversion on which the story is built, for the Utopian community of Ruby mirrors the American white society, with all its contradictions, reproduced among its Black inhabitants with a special starkness, a fact that operates in the end to defeat the Utopian hopes of the founders. It is against this background that we must interpret the African reference implicll in the alternative dream of home proposed by Rev Misner;
Can't you even imagine what it musi feel like to have a true home? I don"! mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home . . . your own home, where if you go past your great-grcat-grand parents, past theirs, and Iheirs, past the whole Western history, past the beginning to organized knowledge, past pyramids and poisoned arrows, on back to when rain was new; before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!there, right there where you know your own people were bom and lived and died.... That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home? (Paradise, 213)

42

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

Beyond the personal and social dramas that impel the narrative progression of Toni Morrison's novel, the passage sums up the deep import of the African idea, with its Utopian projections, as it has shaped the responses of the Diaspora Black community to its uncertain condition in America. It articulates in mythic terms the insistent longing for home, the deep nostalgia for origins, in the fullest sense of the word, for which Africa stands as the abiding image in the Black Diaspora consciousness and imagination. It facilitated the emergence of an ancestralism that developed into the sense of an integral and original being outside and beyond the historical processa collective being rooted in the recesses of an African essencefor which, in his tnagnificent poem. Cahicrd'un retour an pays nalal (Notebook ofa Return to the Native Land). Aime Cesaire (1996) has provided the term "Negritude." For all the ambiguity that the term evokes., this concept represents most clearly the cycle of reciprocities between Diaspora self-re fleet ion and the new African consciousness in its emergence as a modern phenomenon.

Notes
1. In Cadastre, reprinted in La Poesie. 1998. 189. 2. For the most comprehensive studies, see the biography in 2 voltimes hy David Levering Lewis, \992 and 2000. and the studies by Arnold Rampersad (1976, rpt. 1990), and Manning Marable (1986). Du Bois is of course central to the various sttidies of Pan-Africanism by the following: Philipc Decracnc (1959), Colin Legum (1962). Vincent Bakpctu-Tlionipson (1969), Ayodele Langley (1973), Emmanuel Geiss (1974), and Esedebe(l9S(), rc\. 1994). 3. Appiairs iemaik oeeurs as part of a general consideration oi'the relationship hetween literature and concepts of race and naiion thai came to be current vvidi the work of the Romiinlics. The spcciHe process involved in Herder's association ot eullure willi iiaiion has heen summeti up hy Vassilis Lamhropoiilos in these terms; "Herder is a paradigmatic modem figure in that he ttimed his attention to those types of discourse thai had been reeenlly assoeialed with ihe aesthetic, and completed the definition of the project of modernity by aesihelicizing the public as national eiilture" (Lambropoudos. 1993: 70; see also Berlin. 2000). 4. In his uork. Jhc \ecessaiy Nation. Gregory Jusdanis ofters a rc-assessment of nationalism in this positive light by Invoking its Utopian and translbrmalivc poicnlial. Thus he wrilcs: " Nalionalism highligius the capacity of culture to serve as a means for political action and, ultimately, soeial change. C ultural nationalism enables a people to see itself as separate from others, to pursue a polilieal program of jnslice and aiiloiiomy. and Ui promote a program of modernization. In this sense nationalism is a crealive force, allowing social movements to imagine thenrselves as achieving greatness, pursuing self-govemmcnl, and building a society of citizens'" (Jusdanis, 2001: 11). 5. As the unhappy experience of the Seminole Indians had tnade clear, the prospect of a separate and independent state of Blacks in America would never have been tolerated by ihe while majority. 6. As Kenneth tioings has remarked, many of the ideas expressed in Du Bois's hook were to prove seminal lo the work of later scholars on Alrrican antiquity, such as Cheik .Anta DIop. Basil Davidson, and even Martin Rernal (Inlroduction to Du Bois. The \egn>. 2002: 11). 7. The primordialism that informs the mysliqtie cii race in Langston Hughes"'; "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," as indeed the thematic elaboration of the Afriean iheme in tiie poetry oflhe I larleni Renaissance, can be traced to this source of inspiration in Du Bois. 8. The chapter entitled "Andromeda" in The WorUI and .Africa (22fi-2(iO) gathers up the elements of his anti-colonialism in an impassioned indiclment oflhe European colonial powers. 9. For a crjtieal re-appraisal of the FnlighleiimeiU from this poini of view, see Sala-Molins (1992). 10. Ou Iiois's atiachmenl to the Lnlighlenment ideal runs through all his work and is ell retlected in his essay "JelVerson Davis as a Represenlalive ofCivili/alion" (in David Levering Lewis, 1995: 17-20). 11. On Garvey. see in parlieular the 1983 biography by Tony Martin. 12. William Ackah has observed in this regard: "Interestingly in terms of political philosophies, ihe two men were ofsimilar mind. DL Bois was a rather eeleetie figure but his desire to see Africa strong and independent, for blaeks to he economically self-sufficient, in the diaspora and for black etilture to be promoted through art and literature to elevate the race resonates throughout his work. Marcus Garvey's journal, the Negm World and the activities of the Universal Negro Improvement Society (UNIA). were dedicated to advancing the cause of black men ant! women all over the world, something that Du Bois certainly had empathy with"" (Ackah, 2001:23).

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

43

13, Garvey thus illustrates in a peculiar way the role of anglophone West Indians in the Pan-Negro movement, beginning wiih J, J, Thomas (author of/^w(/at7/r. first published 18S9, rpt 1969 ), Sylvester Williams (convener of the first pan African Congress held in London in 1900 see Mathurin, 1976}; C.L.R, James, perhaps the besl known of them all. and George Padmore, who became a close collaborator of Nkrumah, A parallel can be drawn tor the Iraneoplione Caribbean with such figures as Anlonin Finnin and Jean PriceMars, both Haitians (Garret. 1963; Antoine, 19SI; Dash. 19X7). For the early expression of [ilack nationalism in the French colonies of Maninique and Guadeloupe, see Fran^'ois Maiiehuelle (1982). 14, Thus it is thai the independent nation of Ghana adopted (iarvey's Black Star as its emblem, as ihe ullimate symbol ofthe historic and alTective eonneelion Nkrumah discerned between Africa and its Diaspora in the New World, Garvey's impaet on Afriean nationalism in South Africa has been amply lioeumenied by Vinson (2001), The extent of Garvey's iiilluence ean be measured further by the aelivities of francophone African nationalists in Paris in the thirties, in particular the following: KojoTovalou-Houenou, wiih his Ligue Universelle pour la Defense da la Race Noire (See Eniile Zinsou and Ltie Zoiimenou, 2(K)4); Lamine Senghor ;md his Comite de Delensc de la Raee Negre, which also published the jotirnal Ln toix de.s Negres; and Tiemoko Ciaran Kouyale. who founded Le Cri ilcs \cgrc.s (see .Ayo Langley, 1973: 1979; De Witte, ! 985). The hold of Garveyism tipon the sentiments of HIacks of all categories in France is evoked by Claude McKay in his novel Bunjo. whose plot revolves around the lives orBlaek seamen and doekers in Marseilles in the years between the two world wars, 15, For example, in this statement by Marcus Garvey : "We are not againsl the Germans in the sense that we dislike them, hut we are against the peculiar ambitions of Hitler, just as we are against ihose ofthe madman Mussolini. In a choice between a future Italian or German F.mpire or British thai is to rule the world, we prefer ihe British Fmpire. Il is more human, more eonsiderate and more liberal all things eonsideied comparatively. The Italy of today is not the eultured Italy ofthe past. Under Mussolini it is the most barbaric country in Etirope, and we can also say that the Germany of the past is not the Germany of Hitler. The Gennany of Hitler is intolerant, so that no sensible Negro could prefer either of ihose to the British. Mussolini must be smashed wiih his mad idea of a new Roman Empire, Germany must be prevenleci from regaining the African colonies. , . ," ("Italy and Germany" The Black Man. .lulyAugnst, l')36: pp. 1), Tlic Jamaican newspaper, I'laiii Talk of August 20, 1938 reported that the ""Left Review" of London published the answers o f 148 writers and poets of Cireat Brilain on fascism, .^mongthem were Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore. and Miilk Raj.Aiiand, the Indian writer, (1 am grateful to Professor Rupert Lewis ofthe University ofthe West Indies, Mona. Jamaica, tor eommunieating these texts to me). \b. Indeed, Garvey considered himself an intelleetual in this sense, as testified by ihe lollowing statement from ;i speech he delivered at Halifa,\, Nova Seotia. in the Fall of 1937: "1 am a public lecturer, but I am PresiLlej!t-{Jeneral ofthe Universal Negro Improvemeni Association, As a public lecturer I endeavour to help educate the ptihiic, particularly o f t h e raee. as I meet the public , , , if ihe public is thoughttui it will be benelltcd by the things I say. I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite objeet of helping the people, espeeially those o f my race, to know, to understand, to realise themselves" (Quoted as Epigram to Robert Hill and Barbara Bair. eds,, 1987). 17, Although .Africa was never an immediate focus of his work, Alain Loeke occupies a position of eminence in the intelleetual formulalion ofthe Black experienee (see Locke. 19S9), 18, Gates and MeKay, eds,. The Norioii A ill ha logy of African American Literaliin: 412, For the poems Ljuoted in this seetion, all page references are to this edilion, 19, For a discussion ofthe reformulation of modernist primitivism by the llarlcm Renaissance, see Norih (1994) and Lemke(199(<), 20, Joseph Farrell (1999) has argued that far from being a Caribbean transposition of Homer's Iliad, Walcott's poem eschews the epic tone and register o f its classieal Greek model in order lo emphasize its grounding in the folk experience. 21, This episode in Toni Morrison's novel is based on historical fact whieh Redkey has summarized in these terms: "Nationalist separatism led to the foundation of several all-blaek lowns across the .South, and in 1890. a black leader attempted toereatean all black slate in what is now western Oklahoma, Migration within the United States, however, was not notably successful for blaek peasants. They v\anted land above all. bul whites wanted the same kind, and racial prejudice usually assured white predominance. Many blaeks who moved West became even more unhappy when the change did not improve their status," (15) Redkey provides in Chapter Three of his study fuller details of this westward movement to Oklahoma and the attempt lo found a Black State, as well as its collapse, leading to a disillusionment with America and a renewed urge for emigralion to Africa . what he ealls an "African fever" (100 IT and passim).

44

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

Works Cited
Aekah, William. 2002. "Do the Tics Still Bind: Reflections on Pan-African Consciousness and Identity in iht; Twentieth Century."'.4/f7c Qiiurlerly. Vol. 41, No 1-2. New Delhi. Indian Couneil for Cultural Relations, Aldridge, Dolores P.. and Carlene Young, eds. 2000. Otfl of the Revolution: The Development ofAfricana Studies. Lanham: Lexington Books. Antoine. Jacques. 19X1. Jean Price-Mars and llaili. Washington. D.C: Three Continents Press. Appiah. Kwame Anthony. 1990. "Race." In Crilical Terms for Lilerary Study, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Chicago: University ol'Chicago Press, 274-287. - 1992. /n My Father's House: Africa in Ihe Philosophy ofCidli/re. New York: Oxford University Press. Asante, Moiefi Kete. I9S7. The .'{froceiiiric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. and Abu Abarry. eds. 1996. African Inlellecliial Heritage: A Book of Sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Baker, Houston A. 1996. "WEB Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk."" In Asanle and Abarry, eds, 193201. 1987. Modernism and Ihe Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University ol" Chicago Press, 1987. Bakpetu-Thompson, Vincent. \'-)ll. Africa and Unity: London: Longman. Bakpetu-Thompson, Vineent. 1969. Africa and Unity: The Evolmion ofPanafncanism. London: Longman. 1987. The Making of The African Diaspora in Ihe Americas. 1441-1900. London: Longman. Barretl, Leonard. 1997. The Rastafarlam. Boston. MA: Beaeon Press. Berlin, Isaiah. 2000. Three Critics of ihcEnlightenment: Vico. llamman. Herder. Henry Hardy, ed. Princeton: Prineeton University Press. Bemasconi, Robert, ed. 2001. Race. Oxford UK and Makien, Mass: Blackwell Publishers. Bimiingham, t)avid. 1990. Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nalioiialism. Revised edition. Athens. OH: Ohio L^niversity Press, 1998. Blyden, Kdward Wilmoi. 1887. Chrisiianiiy. Islam and Ihe Ne^ro Race. London. 1887. Reprinted Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. \91%. Black Spokesman: Selected Letters ofLdward Wilmoi Blyden. Hollis Lynch, ed.. Millwood. NY: KTO Press. Carby, Ha/el. 1998. Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Hanard University Press. Cesaire, Aime. 1998. Cahier d'un relour au pays nalal. 1939; Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956. Trans. Mireille Rosello, Notebook of a Return to My Native /.H(y Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Press. 1996. 1994. La Poesie. Daniel Ma.ximin and Gilles Carpenlier. etis. Paris: Seuil. Clarke . John Henrik. 1974. "The Caribbean Anleeedenls t)f Mareus Garvey."" In Marcus Garvey and The Vision of Africa. John Henrik Clarke, eds.. New York: Vintage Books. 3- 14. Cobb, Martha. 1979. Harlem, Haili and Havana. Washington. D.C: Three Continents Press. Cook, Mercer, and Stephen Henderson, 1969. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United Stales. Madison: Wisconsin UP. Cullen. Countee. "Heritage."" In (jates and McKay, eds. 1977. 1311-1314. Dahbour. Omar and Micheline R. Ishay, Editors. 1995. The Noiionalism Reader. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Dash. Michael J. 1987. Literature and Ideiilo^- in Haiii. London: Maemillan. Deeraene, Philippe. 1959. Le Panafrcainisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. De Jongh. James. 1990. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem und The Lileraiy Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oe Witte, Robert. 1985. Les minivemeiiis ne^ires en France. 1919 1939. Paris: L"Harniattaii. Du Bois. W.E.B. 1899. The Philadelphia \'ef>ro. Reprinted with Introduction by Elijah Anderson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1996. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Rpl Henry Louis Gates. Jr. andierri Ihime Oliver, eds.. New York: Norton. 1999. 1915. The Negm. Rpt.. with Introduclion by Kenneth Goings. New York: Humanity Books. 2002. 1965. The World and Africa. New York: International Publishers. 1940. Dusk of Dawn. Reprinted with Introduction by Irene Diggs. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 1996. Writings. New York: Library ofAmerlea. 1995. "The Negro's Fatherland"" in David Levering Lewis, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Henry Holt and Company). 653-654. 1996. The Oxford WFB Du Bois Reader. Eric. J. Sundquist. ed.. New York: Oxford University Press.

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

45

Esedebe, P. Olisawunche. 1994. Pan-Afrleanism: The Idea ami Movemenl. 1776-1991. Second tdition, Washinglcin D.C.: Howard University Press. [arrcll. Joseph. \9^9. "Walcoifs Omems: The Classical Epic in ii Poslniodcrn World." In Epic Traditiom in ihe Coiiieniporary World. Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne WotVord, eds. Berkeley: University ol"California Press, 270-296. Garvey, Marcus. 1974. Philosophy ami Opiniom of Mart-us Garvey. F.iJitcd by Amy J!icqtii;s-Giir\<;y. introduclion by Hollis Lynch. New York: Atheneum. "The Resurrection ofthe Negro." in Omar Dahbour and Mlcheline R. Ishay, Edilors. The Nalioncdism Reader. Atlantic Highlands. N,J. Humanities Press. 1995. 302-305. Gales, Henrv' Louis Gales. Jr. I'>K8. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press. Giiles, Henry Louis, and Nelly Y. MeKay. 1997. General eds. The Norton Anlholo^y of .'ifrican .'imerii an Liieraiiire. New York: W.W. Norton. Garrel, Naomi. 1963. The Renaissance of Haitian Poetiy. Paris: Presence Africaine. Garvey. Mareus. 1974. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcu.s Garvey. Amy Jacques-Garvey, ed., Introduclion by Hoilis Lynch. New York: Atheneum. 1995. The Ressureelion of llic Negro." In Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay. eds., The Nalionalism Reader. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 302-305. Geiss, Immanuel. 1974. The Pan-African Movement. Trans. Anna Keep. London: Methiien. Gerard. Albert. Ed. 19S6. European Language Writing in Suh-Saharan Africa. \o\. 1. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Gilroy. Paul. 1993. The Black Atlaniic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. IW)^). Against Race\ Imagining Poliiicat Culture Beyond Ihe Color Line. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press. Goggin, Jaequeiine. 1993. Carter G Woodson: A Lift' in Black History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Goings, Kenneth. 2002. Introduetion lo Du Bois, The Negni. Goodison, l.orna. 2(K)0. Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems. Manehester: Careanel. Harrison Ira E.. and Faye V. Harrison, eds., 1999. African-American Pioneers in Anthriipolog\\ Urbana and Chicago: University o f Illinois Press. Headley. Clevis. 2001. "Race. African American Philosophy and Africana Philosophy." in Philosophia Africana, Vol. 4. No. 1, Mareh, 43-60. Hegel, Georg Friedrich. 1967. Philosophy of Righi.Trdi\?.J.M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press. Herder, .lohann Gottlricd von. 1992. SelecledEarly Works. 1764-1767. Addresses. Essays. Drafts: Fragments On Recent German Literature. Ernest A. Men/e and Karl Menges, eds. Trans. Ernest Men/es and Michael Palma. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. I96f^, Rt'fleclions on The Philosophy <if The History of Mankind. Introduction by hrank L. Manuel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill, Robert and Barbara Bair. eds. 1987. Man us Garvey: Life ami Lessons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hughes, Langslon. 1998. The Colleclcd Poems. Arnold Rampersad and Dmid Roe.s.sel, Hds. New York:

Knopf.
Irele, \'. Ahiola. 2001. The African Imaginaliun: Lileialiirc in Africa ami the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press. James. C. I., R. 1977. .\krtimah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Bushy. Jusdanis. Gregory. 2001. The Necessaiy Nation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kennedy. HUen Conroy, cd., 1989. The Negriiude Poels. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. Korang, Kwaku Larbi. 2001. "As I Face America: Race and Africanity in W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk." In W.E.B. Du Bois and Race C. Fontenot and Mary Alice Morgan, eds., with Sarah Gardner. Macon. GA: Mercer University Press. 166-86. Lambropoulos, Vassilis. 1993. The Rise of Eunicentrism: Anatomy of Interprelation. Princeton: Prineclon University Press. Langley, Ayodele J. 1973. Pan-Africanism and Salionalism tn West Africa. 1900-} ^^45. A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. London: Oxford University Press. 1979. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. 1856-1970. London: Rex Collings. Lee. Ulysses. I95S. "The ASNLH. The Jntirnal of Negm History and American Scholarly interest in Afriea" in Africa Seen hy American Negroes. 401-18 Legum. Colin. 1962. Panafricanism: A Short Political Gtiide. London: Pall Mall. Lemkc, Sieglinde. 1998, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins ofTramailanlic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press ed., 1995. WE.Il Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 2000. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Ft/uality and the American Ccntuiy. 1919-1963. New York:

46

Souls

Summer/Fall 2005

i-knry Hnlt.
Locke. Alain. I'>S9. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Leonard Harris, cd. Philadclpliia: Temple University Press. Loll, Tony. 200L "Du Bois's Anthropological Nolion of Race." In Bemasconi, 59-84. Marchuelle. Francois. I9y2. "Le Role des Antilliais dans I'apparition du nalionalisme cuiturel en Atrique noire francophone. " Cahier d'Etiides Africaines Ml, 375^0R. Marable. M;inning. 1986. W.E.B. Dn Bois: Black Radical Democrat. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Marshall, Paulc. 1984.1'raise.son^ for the Widow. New York: Dultoii. Marlhurin. Owen Charles. 1976. Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-.ifriean Movenieni. IH69-1911 Westporl, CT: Greenwood Press. Marlin. Tony. 1983. Marcus Garvey. Hero: A First Biography. Dover, Mass.: Majority Press. Mills. Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Morrison. Toni. 1970. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1993. I99H. Paradise. New York: Alfred Knopf. Moses, William .Icremiah Moses, ed. 1996. Classical Black Nationalism: From the .American Revolution til Man-US Garvey. New York: New York University Press. North, Michael. 1994. The Dialect of Modernism: Race. Language and Twentieth Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Pittman. John, ed. 1997. African-American Perspectives and Philo.sophica! Traditions. New York and London: Routledge. Presence Africaine. 1958. Speeial Number, Afriea Seen hy .American .Negroes. Paris: Presence Africaine. Rampersad, Arnold. 1989. "Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk" in Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersand, eds., Slaveiy and the Lileraiy Imagination. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. 104 124. l'>76. The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois. Rpt, New York: Schoeken Books, 1990. Redkey, Edwin S. 1969. Black Exudus: Black Nationalism and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890-1910. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sala-Molins, Louis. 1992. Les misejvs des liimieres: sous la raison. I'oulrage. Paris: LalTont. Trans, by John Conteh-Moi^an as Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. Forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. "Blaek Orpheus." In Bemasconi. ed. Raee. Maiden. M A : Blaekwell, 115-142. Schwar7-Bart. Simone. 1972. Phiie et veni sin- Telumee Miracle. Paris: Seuil. Trans. Fiarbara Bray as The Bridge of Beyond. London. UK and Exeter, N.H.; Heinemann Educational Books, 1982. Scott. William. 1978. "And Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Its Hands: The Origins of Ethiopianism in .AfroAmerican Thought. 1767-1896" L'?<)/ Vol. 11. No. I, 1-14. Senghor, Leopold Sedar. 1970. "Ncgritudc: A Humanism of the Twentielh Century," in Wilfrid Cartey and Marlin Kilson, eds. The African Reader: Independent Africa. New York: Random House. 1991. The Collected Poetry. Trans Melvin Dixon. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia. Shepperson. George. 1968. "Cthiopianism: Past and Present." In C. G. Baeta. ed., Christianity in Tropical Africa. London: Oxford University Press. Sundquist. Eric J., ed. 1996. The Oxford WEB Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxtbrd University Press,. Vinson. Robert Trent. 2001 2001. In the Time of the Americans: Garveyism in Segivgationist South Africa. 1920-1040. Doctoral dissertation, Howard University. Walcott. Derek. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 1986. Collected Poems. I94H-I9M. New York: Farrar. Strauss and Girou\1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar. Strauss and Giroux. West. Cornel. 2000. "The Four Traditions of Response." In James A. Montmarquet and William H. Hardy, eds. Reflections: An Antholog}- of African American Philosophy. Belniont. CA: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning. 109-125. Woodson. Carter G. 1922. The Negro in Our History. Ninth Edition. Washington. D.C.: The Associated Publishers, 1947. 1942. Review, The Myth of the Negro Past by Mehilte Herskovits. Journal of Negro History,

XXVII, I l l - l l S .
Zinsou. Emile, and Luc Zoumenou. 2004. Kojn Tovalou Houenou. precurseur. 1887el modeniiti'. Paris: Maisoneuve & Larose. 1936:pannegrisme

You might also like