The Plantation Countermelodies of Dunbar and Du Bois: Writing Agropolitical Subjecthood in the Nadir

2019 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-586
Author(s):  
Benjamin Child
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Subject ◽  
Embodied Selfhood ◽  
Radical Processes

Abstract With attention to representations of the land and labor in the postslavery agricultural South of the nadir—a period when American apartheid was at its most violent—this essay uses Paul Laurence Dunbar’s plantation poems and W. E. B. Du Bois’s cotton novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to explore counternarratives of black subjecthood. Agriculture’s focus on productive collaborations with the nonhuman, on cycles of decay and rebirth, and on the potential for self-determination provides a generative vocabulary for conceptualizing nadir-era experiences of the human. Under this model, literature provides a venue wherein the legacies of the plantation might be imaginatively transposed from a Jim Crow necropolitics of violent constraint and dispossession into vectors of agropolitical possibility. To that end, the essay uses Dunbar and Du Bois to propose potentially radical processes of black subject formation wherein physical and imaginative instances of reclamation give rise to fresh mergers of epistemic and embodied selfhood.

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

scholarly journals CLAIMING HUMAN DIGNITY

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence D. Bobo
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The South ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Cultural Racism

In the concluding line of his opening note to Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (1934[2007], p. xliii). Doing so was an intellectually courageous step at the time Du Bois wrote. Jim Crow strictures, after all, were almost fully institutionalized across the South by that time and larger cultural motifs stressing redemption and reconciliation were steadily undoing the meager steps toward uplift and equality for African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Enormous progress notwithstanding, we know that great challenges of enduring inequality and persistent cultural racism remain in our time. The spirit of this declaration and the a priori intellectual posture it embraces have, quite fittingly then, animated this journal from our inception.

Self-Determination between World and Nation

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-621
Author(s):  
Adam Dahl
Keyword(s):  
Self Determination ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Anticolonial Nationalism

Abstract Rejecting the rigid dichotomy between anticolonial nationalism and postnational solidarity, Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire argues that anticolonial leaders in the Caribbean and Africa did not outright reject the nation-state in their quest for self-determination. Instead, they internationalized the nation-state through the construction of new constituted powers that linked national sovereignties together in global juridical, political, and economic bodies. This essay explores a neglected question in this account: What were the constituent powers—the underlying sources of authority —that corresponded to these new global institutions? What, in other words, was the constituency of self-determination? Focusing on C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dahl shows how anticolonial constituencies are at once the referent and effect of claims for self-determination. For James and Du Bois, politically delineating the constituency of self-determination is central to the institutional project of securing nondomination against international hierarchies of empire and enslavement.

From Principle to Right

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-106
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
World Order ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah

This chapter turns to the United Nations, where anticolonial nationalists staged their reinvention of self-determination, transforming a secondary principle included in the UN Charter into a human right. Through the political thought of Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore, the chapter illustrates that this reinvention drew on a distinctive account of empire as enslavement. The emergence of a right to self-determination is often read as an expansion of an already existing principle in which anticolonial nationalists universalize a Westphalian regime of sovereignty. In contrast to this standard account, the chapter argues that the anticolonial account of self-determination marked a radical break from the Eurocentric model of international society and established nondomination as a central ideal of a postimperial world order.

Manufacturing Racial Stigma

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Maryann Erigha
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Career Trajectories ◽  
Racial Stigma ◽  
Negro Problem

The Hollywood Jim Crow creates a resurgence of the Negro Problem previously articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in which Blackness becomes a race stigma in need of remedy. Black directors’ perspectives and career trajectories are steered in a direction to overcome Hollywood insiders’ presumption of the unbankable label—that movies with Black casts or lead actors do not make enough money and are risky investments. Directors brand their movies as human and universal, stating they are relatable to all moviegoers and not just a subsection of Black audiences. Some directors are pressured to work with mostly white or multiracial casts if they are to have increasing production budgets. This retreat from Blackness undermines the notion that Black directors in Hollywood would necessarily bring more Black movies to the screen.

Turning Point

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Self Determination

This chapter analyzes Patterson's remark that “today the oppressed Negro people is seeking integration,” and that “the Negro people are an oppressed nation.” These remarks reflect a bitter internal party struggle that stretched from mid-1944 to mid-1945, leaving in its wake a momentous shift on the much discussed Negro Question, involving a retreat from the Black Belt line of self-determination, presumably since the Negroes were “seeking integration.” This complex and painful debate in mid-1945 was to result in the reinstatement of the old line—then another shift in 1956 in the aftermath of the conniptions caused by the invasion of Hungary and the revelations about Stalin's crimes. All the while, Patterson and his comrades continued grinding away against Jim Crow, though it was understandable that some thought their efforts had been sidetracked by abstruse polemics.

W. E. B. Du Bois at the Grand Canyon

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Claborn
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Grand Canyon ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
The Veil

This article investigates why W. E. B. Du Bois combined existential, racial, and environmental themes in his essay Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. It analyzes how natural beauty gave rise to the combination of anti-racist protest and imported German romanticism in this work and highlights its potential contribution to a better understanding of the intersection of race, romanticism and modernism in the ecocritical tradition. It suggests that Du Bois’s explorations of the double environments of (black) Jim Crow and (white) national parks in the essay foreground practices of segregation across both natural and urban spaces.

The Cost of Liberty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
John Brown ◽  
The Cost

This essay, by Alexander Livingston, analyzes Du Bois’s 1909 biography of the abolitionist John Brown as a work that reveals Du Bois’s beliefs about the meaning and limitations of sacrifice in politics. Published amid a national movement toward the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War, John Brown was an indictment of this mentality, pushing readers to continue the fight for racial equality. As with many of Du Bois’s works, central to the book is the concept of sacrifice by all citizens for the good of the democracy. Using the death of John Brown as a symbol of the sacrificial burdens faced by people of color, Du Bois reframes the racialized economy of the Jim Crow era and recasts black Americans as sacrificial agents instead of victims.

Patterson and Black Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Black America ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the contradictory trends that buffeted black America in the 1960s. On the one hand, the edifice of Jim Crow had begun to crumble, a reality that received legislative sanction in 1964 and, notably, 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. On the other hand, this victory was attained while the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and battle-ready fighters—W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, and William Patterson—were under attack, with courage required to associate with them. Among these were the spectacular rise of the group that came to be called the Nation of Islam, which had been founded decades earlier but only gained traction in the 1960s when the “other” radical alternative—represented by Patterson—was battered and bludgeoned.

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