The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant

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.

American Archias: Cicero and The Souls of Black Folk

While scholars have long noted the classical influences apparent in the style and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, there has been little sustained discussion of the nature of these influences and their manifestations in his writings. This article seeks to correct that absence through an examination of the influence of Cicero’s Pro Archia poeta on Du Bois’s most well-known work, The Souls of Black Folk. Though Du Bois mentions many other authors in Souls, the Pro Archia is the only work of another author mentioned by name as a source for Du Bois’s thought. Extrapolating from this explicit reference to the Pro Archia as well as numerous other references to and influences by Cicero’s works throughout Du Bois’s oeuvre, I posit a two-fold influence of the Pro Archia on Souls as Du Bois draws upon the dual argument in Cicero’s work. First, Du Bois seeks to defend the civil rights of African Americans, drawing on Cicero’s argument for the legal status and citizenship rights of the poet Archias. Both Cicero and Du Bois go beyond mere legal argumentation, however, to provide a defence of the necessity of the liberal arts and a celebration of poets and their work.

Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness in The Souls of Black Folk

The chapter takes up Du Bois as a contemporary of Conrad and Freud, but one who was listening to memory, song, race, and the unconscious in ways that they could not. It reads Du Bois as a theorist of sound through his strategies of resonance, asking how music, for Du Bois, is a sonic trace of slavery. Using musicology and archival documents, the reading is an intensive engagement with the aurality of Du Bois’s strategies of composition, including musical notion and collage. Ultimately, the reading recuperates gender and the feminine at the heart of The Souls of Black Folk as a work of listening and mourning.