The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

Missionary Cultures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.

scholarly journals Double Consciousness in Today's Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-125
Author(s):  
L.E. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Black America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity.

The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-195
Author(s):  
Emily Coit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Mode Of Action ◽  
William James ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

Chapter 5 shows how Henry Adams's Education intervenes in a conversation about the agency of the educated elite amongst Harvard-affiliated thinkers including William James, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles William Eliot. Identifying Du Bois as a New England liberal, the chapter notes that both he and Eliot call 'college-bred' men to duty and advocate for liberal education in a sincere, direct mode. Adams's Education opposes such arguments partly by being ironic. Observing that its celebrated ironies are crucially constituted by sincere statements from liberal thinkers, the chapter shows that The Education takes up words and ideas that are salient in Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Its ironic rewriting of elements from that text flamboyantly exercises (and thus consolidates) the power that belongs to its author. Disparaging action grounded in consensus, collectivity, and sincerity, which he associates derisively with Boston and Harvard, Adams advocates an alternate mode of action that inheres in irony, doubt, indirection, and individual disruptiveness. In enacting this mode, The Education demonstrates its formidable potency. But Adams's showy performance of power via inaction nevertheless becomes a key source for the twentieth-century narrative about impotently passive 'genteel' thinkers.

scholarly journals Double Consciousness in Today’s Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
L.E. Walker ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Black America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity.

On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Laski
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Linear Time ◽  
The State ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Past ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future haunted by bondage; thus Africans can have no place in American democracy. Jefferson’s future is what Du Bois terms the “present-past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—positioning the past after, not before, the present—and posits intergenerational responsibility as a democratic value alongside equality and liberty. And yet, even as he advocates a temporal double consciousness that blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might paralyze political action.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

scholarly journals “The Lord Breathed On The Face Of Underworld”: Maximilian Voloshin and Kabbala

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
K.Yu. Burmistrov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
Written Sources

The acquaintance of Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1877–1932), one of the central figures in the history of Russian culture in the first third of the twentieth century, with the tradition of Western European esotericism, as well as with the concepts of Jewish Kabbalah, is still poorly understood. At the same time, it is known that they played an important role in his worldview and creativity. The article offers an analysis of several topics related to Kabbalah, which had a noticeable impact on the work of Voloshin. Particular attention is paid to the problem of establishing written sources of borrowings and interpretations of Kabbalistic ideas, clarifying concepts, as well as ways of transmitting elements of Kabbalah among European and Russian esotericists. Through the study of various works of Voloshin, his diary entries, drafts and correspondence, the names of esoteric authors who are especially important for the study of this topic have been identified (E.P. Blavatsky, A. Fabre d'Olivet, A. Franck, Eliphas Levi and etc.). Through a thorough analysis of the methods of perception and transmission of the ideas of Kabbalah among European esotericists, it was shown that, strange as it may seem, the result of studying such sources and their interpretation by Voloshin was a fairly accurate and adequate use of Kabbalistic concepts both in theoretical works and in poetry.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Keisha Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Educational Advocacy ◽  
Barber Shops

Participants in the discourse on AMBS are best situated to assess their own and others’ experiential claims within a specific place and as part of a particular process of educational advocacy. The former is comprised of barber shops, laundromats, libraries, and other accessible, decentralized, community-based arenas that have a history of incubating anti-racist and other politics of resistance. The latter emphasizes the importance of public schools while challenging the quality of such schools available to black children. Such advocacy is ultimately successful when it abides by the two-fold norm that good public schools foster black self-determination in the face of intersecting oppression and also prepare black children of all genders to continually evaluate what life in a democratic polity looks like.

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