HOWARD UNIVERSITY

World Imagined Community: W. E. B. Du Bois,

Cosmopolitanism, and the Utopian Desire for

an Egalitarian Social Order

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

of

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the

degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

By

Samuel Obed Doku

Washington, D.C.

December 2014

ii

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE

_____________________________________

Gregory Hampton, Ph.D.

Dissertation Chair

_____________________________________

Kristin Bergen, Ph.D.

_____________________________________

Christopher A. Shinn, Ph.D.

_____________________________________________

Douglas Taylor, Ph.D.

______________________________________

Laura Rosenthal, Ph.D.

Professor for Excellence

University of Maryland, College Park

______________________________________

Christopher A. Shinn, Ph.D.

Dissertation Advisor

Candidate: Samuel Obed Doku

Date of Defense: November 21, 2014

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DEDICATION

Knowledge is the beacon that illuminates dark alleys of ignorance to provide us with the

key to unlock doors to a world full of bright visions and promises. With knowledge, our

humanity is aroused with impassioned zeal and rooted in a firm ground to enable us to help

others reach their full potentials. Knowledge helps us transcend the human rustiness that comes

with crudity and lack of sensibility and replaces it with compassion, understanding, and

forgiveness. I dedicate this dissertation to all those who through their munificent acts of

encouragement helped me to realize my ambition of earning a doctorate degree. I particularly

will like to express my profound gratitude to Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences,

Dr. Segun Gbadegesin; Dr. Chontrese Doswell Hayes and Ms. Betty Goodwin of the Graduate

School, Dr. Vernessa White-Jackson of the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Dr.

Dana Williams, chair of the Department of English; Ms. Erica Lee and Ms. Tanya Hardy,

efficient secretaries in the Department of English; Dr. Sandra Shannon and Dr. Nkonko

Kamwangamalu, formerly director of the Graduate Program who counseled me never to quit in

spite of the hiccoughs. My regards also go to Dr. Jeff Westover, formerly of the English

Department, Ms. Crystal Duncan, who always provided me with assistance regarding my

remission of tuition, irrespective of how tardy I was with my application, Mr. Brian Johnson and

Ms. Melody Morales of Financial Aid, and last but not least, to my wife, Cecilia and my

children, Adelaide, Ronald, and Eleanor, who challenged me invariably to ensure that I not only

stayed the course but also completed the journey. I have come to the end of one journey with this

dissertation, but it is also the beginning of another journey that I have accepted and hope to excel

on it as well, by the Grace of God. Once again, I thank you all.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A dissertation informed by the fiction and non-fiction of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois is certainly

an ambitious project because of the many diverse topics and issues that garnered his attention in

his life time. Although this dissertation focuses mainly on the novels of Du Bois, it has,

nevertheless, proven to be an ambitious undertaking as I delved into hitherto uncharted waters in

dissertation projects with the use of cosmopolitanism in deconstructing his fiction. My hope is

that in such an undertaking, I have made an invaluable contribution to existing scholarship on

W.E.B. Du Bois. As a result, I like to express my appreciation to my Committee members for the

expert manner in which they guided me as I worked on my project. I thank my advisor, Dr.

Christopher A. Shinn, who was so meticulous and precise in his critique during our deliberations,

Dr. Gregory Hampton, Dr. Kristin Bergen, and Dr. Douglas Taylor, who at various times advised

on what would work best for my project. I also thank Dr. Laura Rosenthal of the University of

Maryland, College Park, for her expertise in cosmopolitanism. I thank my former professors in

the Department of English—Dr. Victoria Arana, Dr. Evelyn Hawthorne, and Dr. Eleanor Traylor

(formerly chair of the English Department) who have retired from the faculty of Howard

University, Dr. Thorell Tsomondo, Dr. Hampton, Dr. Bergen, and Dr. Dana Williams as well as

Dr. Christopher Wheatley of Catholic University for helping make my dream become a stark

reality. I also thank my professors at the University of the District of Columbia, including Dr.

Alex Howe, the late Dr. Ernest Hamilton, Dr. Patricia Maida, Dr. Helene Krauthamer, Dr. Elsie

Williams, Dr. Grace Cooper (Retired), Dr. Chester Wright (Retired), and Dr. Mary Cermak

(Retired)..

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ABSTRACT

Although Du Bois’s vast expanse of scholarship resonates with critical themes of

cosmopolitanism in his texts, the majority of cosmopolitan theorists refrain from any extended

treatment of him in critical book-length studies. Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ross

Posnock, Charles Briggs, Ifideoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, and Nico Slate, among others, have

addressed Du Bois’s treatises with the lenses of cosmopolitanism. However, this dissertation is

not just an argument on one aspect of cosmopolitanism, but its argument on cosmopolitanism

details an understanding of cosmopolitanism in Du Bois’s fiction as evolving from universal

humanism to discrepant and black. Chapter One of the dissertation proposes that The Quest of

the Silver Fleece is grounded in Western Enlightenment tradition, which is informed by universal

cosmopolitan humanism. Chapter Two examines discrepant cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess:

A Romance and suggests that there is an evolution in Du Bois’s world view because of World

War I and colonialism, necessitating a dislocation of the West as central to cosmopolitanism in

the novel. Chapter Three analyzes The Black Flame with the lenses of black cosmopolitanism,

with Du Bois effectively combining history and fiction to tell the story of the African American

experience from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to 1954. Pan-African and Pan-Asian ideals

undergird the black cosmopolitan framework of the trilogy. Chapter Four interrogates Du Bois’s

intellectual influences outside America and Europe and focuses on his intellectual and political

influences in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and how those influences helped shape his utopian

desire for an inimitable colored world in which equality and justice could prevail to all through

the lenses of cosmopolitanism. In the Epilogue, Kwame Nkrumah and Barack Obama become

purveyors of Du Boisian cosmopolitan ideals after Du Bois’s death in 1963. The dissertation

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concludes that Du Bois’s novels chart a critical movement from a broad universal humanism to a

discrepant cosmopolitanism and finally to a more distinct black cosmopolitanism with Du Bois’s

utopian desire for an equitable social order “for the darker peoples of the world” still unfulfilled

even in the 21st century.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE…..…………………………………………………………. ii

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………............................................iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………….... iv

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………v

INTRODUCTION: WORLD IMAGINED COMMUNITY: W.E.B. DU BOIS,

COSMOPOLITANISM, AND THE UTOPIAN DESIRE FOR AN EGALITARIAN

SOCIAL ORDER…………………………………………………...............................................1

CHAPTER I: UNIVERSAL COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE QUEST OF THE SILVER

FLEECE…………………………………………………………………………………………24

Appraisal of Universal Cosmopolitan Humanism in The Quest of the Silver Fleece………... 31

CHAPTER II: DISCREPANT COSMOPOLITANISM IN DARK PRINCESS: A

ROMANCE……………………………………………………………………………………...73

W.E.B. Du Bois, Discrepant Cosmopolitanism, and Dark Princess: A Romance …………..80

CHAPTER III: BEYOND THE COLOR LINE: BLACK COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE

BLACK FLAME………… …………………………................................................................121

Beyond the Color Line: Black Cosmopolitanism and Pan-Africanism in The Black Flame..125

CHAPTER IV: DU BOIS AND HIS INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN AFRICA, ASIA,

AND THE CARIBBEAN………………………………………………172

W.E.B. Du Bois and His Intellectual and Political Influences in Africa, Asia, and the .

Caribbean……………………………………………………………………………………….176

EPILOGUE: DU BOIS, NKRUMAH, AND OBAMA AS UNHERALDED

COSMOPOLITANS………………………………………………………………………….212

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………….....226

1

INTRODUCTION

WORLD IMAGINED COMMUNITY:

W. E. B. DU BOIS, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND THE UTOPIAN

DESIRE FOR AN EGALITARIAN SOCIAL ORDER

The dissertation, “World Imagined Community: W. E. B. Du Bois, Cosmopolitanism,

and the Utopian Desire for an Egalitarian Social Order,” contends with various meanings of

cosmopolitanism and their potential applicability to the Du Boisian desire for an equitable social,

political, and economic order for the “darker peoples of the world.” In spite of Du Bois’s vast

expanse of scholarship that seems to resonate with critical themes of cosmopolitanism in his

texts, the majority of critics of cosmopolitanism refrain from any extended treatment of him in

critical book-length studies.1 In a 1904 essay, “On The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois sees

himself as a Negro, so he loses “something of that breadth of view which the more cosmopolitan

races have, and with this goes an intensity of feeling and conviction which both wins and repels

sympathy, and now enlightens, now puzzles” (The Oxford: W.E.B. Du Bois Reader 304-5).

Toward that end, Du Bois sought to win the sympathy of the more cosmopolitan races, but more

importantly, possibly because of the negative connotation assigned to cosmopolitanism early on,

he either deliberately refused to mention the word in any of his texts from then on, or perhaps he

was wary of it because of Karl Marx’s distrust of cosmopolitanism as another means to exploit

the working class on a global scale. Pheng Cheah points out in one of the introductions to

Cosmopolitics, “Whereas cosmopolitanism in idealist philosophy had designated a normative

horizon of world history, for Marx, cosmopolitanism is realized as exploitation on a world scale

through international commerce and the establishment of a global mode of world production”

(26). Despite cosmopolitan theorists glaring omission of Du Bois in their projects, two important

books on cosmopolitanism, Ifideoma Kiddoe Nwankwo’s Black Cosmopolitanism and Nico

2

Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism, feature an extensive treatment of the life and works of Du

Bois. While Nwankwo situates her “black cosmopolitanism” through the residual lenses of the

Haitian Revolution and antebellum figures like Frederick Douglass, David Walker, and Martin

Delaney, Slate visualizes his “colored cosmopolitanism” as one that “appealed to those working

to forge a united front against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression for the

freedom of the ‘colored world’ even while calling into question the meanings of both color and

freedom” (2). More specifically, Nwankwo defines “black cosmopolitanism” as located in the

“liminal spaces between two mutually constitutive cosmopolitanisms—hegemonic

cosmopolitanism, exemplified by the material and psychological violence of imperialism and

slavery (including dehumanization) and cosmopolitanism that is rooted in a common knowledge

and memory of that violence” (13). Nwankwo’s definition of black cosmopolitanism nourishes

the Haitian revolution and by extension, espouses great deeds by other blacks as a point of

departure to claim equality and justice.

While my line of inquiry engages some of the key ideas proposed by Nwankwo and

Slate, it will also advance an argument far beyond the claims and thoughts of the two scholars.

As early as 1897, Du Bois alluded to a cosmopolitan mission, which is grounded in the ideals of

German human “brotherhood” in “The Conservation of Races” because as he puts it in “Whither

Now and Why,” his two-year stay at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin allowed him to

develop his conception of culture in what Axel Schaefer has suggested came from three personal

experiences of “faith, exile, and transcendence” (108). Clearly, the notion of universal human

brotherhood is enshrined in Immanuel Kant’s 1784 seminal essay, “An Answer to the Question:

What is Enlightenment?”

3

Enlightenment is the emergence of man from his self-imposed immaturity.

Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance

of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of

understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without guidance of

another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: have courage to use your own

understanding. (54)

Kant also notes that the quintessential objective of Enlightenment should be freedom: “For this

Enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of

anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason

in all matters” (55). Du Bois, through his writings, advocates for oppressed peoples in America

and the colonized world, for their elevation from their constricted conditions to freedom where

they could realize their talents and potentials for the good of their races. Cosmopolitanism then

becomes a useful thread to knit the analyses of Du Bois’s novels to illuminate his hope for an

egalitarian world order. However, after another visit to Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1936, Du Bois

began to lose faith in German civilization and its high culture that informed many of his

discourses and wondered if Western civilization could have produced the anti-Semitic atrocity

that was perpetrated on a grand scale by the Third Reich.2 Consequently, there is a revision of

his cosmopolitan vision according to the radical changes in the world, shifting away from

Western Enlightenment ideals toward Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, and decolonization.3

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois advocates for a cultural duality in America in which

the Negro would become “a co-partner in the kingdom of culture” in anticipation of establishing

African American culture as being on an equal footing with mainstream American culture (102).

The cultural parity that Du Bois sought for African American culture began, in the words of Ross

Posnock, the quest for Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism.4 For, as Paul Gilroy points out in an

interview with Tommie Shelby, “African American culture is what allows African Americans to

be a world-historic people, to sit at the table and offer the world a conception which is richer,

4

more complex, more compelling, more dynamic than any conception of freedom which has been

articulated previously” (118-119). By calling for a juxtaposition of African American culture

with mainstream American culture, Du Bois, by extension, argued for the inclusion of African

American culture in the greater arena of world-wide cultures for it to be among the high cultures

of the world.

Nwankwo excludes Pan-Africanism from her black cosmopolitanism project, and Slate’s

colored cosmopolitanism’s limitations lie in his focus just on Du Bois in particular, and African

Americans and their relationship with India in general. On the contrary, this dissertation treats

Pan-Africanism as part of Du Bois’s cosmopolitan projects through his call for fair trade and

quality education and through his unrelenting stance against colonialism and imperialism. This

dissertation project argues that Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism evolved from a broad universal

humanism in his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece to what James Clifford has labeled

discrepant cosmopolitanism in his second novel, Dark Princess: A Romance, and finally to

Nwankwo’s more distinct black cosmopolitanism in his trilogy, The Black Flame. Clifford has

suggested that discrepant cosmopolitanism is the “displacement and transplantation of diasporic

cultures that are inseparable from specific, often violent histories of political, economic, and

cultural interaction” (36). With Du Bois’s utopian desire for a universal mission for an equitable

social order “for the darker peoples of the world” largely going unfulfilled in Dark Princess, this

project envisions black cosmopolitanism as the framework in The Black Flame. Japan’s critical

quest for empire and the Third Reich’s passion for anti-Semitism compelled a rethinking of what

it would take to attain a cosmopolitan order, so after 1944, the year of the United Nations

meeting at Dumbarton Oaks, Du Bois’s overriding focus was placed more firmly on the concrete

political project of decolonization and Pan-Africanism.5 Germany is included here because

5

although it is not seen as a “colored” nation, it was central to the formulation of Du Bois’s

universal humanism that informs an understanding of his cosmopolitan perspectives on cultural

and social equality and human progress.

Du Bois anticipated a world order in which the ideals of cosmopolitanism would help

create an egalitarian status for the “darker peoples” because, as he points out, “The problem of

the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the lighter races of men in

Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the seas” (The Souls of Black Folk 107). Du Bois

expresses this anticipation of a just world order for the darker races in Darkwater: Voices from

within the Veil, stating, “The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a

Negro, but ‘Negro’ meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world-fellowship. I felt

myself standing, not against the world, but simply against American narrowness and color

prejudice, with the greater finer world at my back urging me on” (9). Here Du Bois draws a

poignant contrast between the Negro he describes in “Notes on The Souls of Black Folk” and the

Negro in Darkwater. The Negro in Darkwater has become a cosmopolitan, so his or her

personality is defined with the lens of “a greater broader sense of humanity and world-

fellowship” even as the greater finer world of cosmopolitans urged Du Bois on. The color

prejudice inherent in racism results in the projection of some minorities as being outside the

realm of national ideals and excluded from being an intrinsic part of national life, a phenomenon

Gilroy discusses in The Black Atlantic. The creation of cultural history, Gilroy argues, becomes

antithetical to the ideals of nationalism and acts as a “counter-culture to modernity” (ix). Gilroy

also suggests in the preface of The Black Atlantic that “[d]ifferent nationalist paradigms for

thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational

6

formation of the black Atlantic” (ix). The intercultural and transnational formation of the

diaspora becomes part of the discursive points in discrepant cosmopolitanism.

Du Bois links American democratic politics, racism, and discriminatory practices with

European colonization to inform the discrepant cosmopolitan framework of Dark Princess: A

Romance. In spite of its melodramatic and courtly romantic nature, Dark Princess is a novel in

which Du Bois envisions a utopian desire for the alliance of the darker peoples of the world. In

the novel, Du Bois decenters the West as central to cosmopolitanism, so discrepant

cosmopolitanism becomes relevant in the analysis of Dark Princess to address race and class

struggles. The literary trope shifts from universal cosmopolitan humanism in The Quest to

discrepant cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess with Towns’s expulsion from medical school and

his decision to move to Berlin. In Berlin, Towns meets Princess Kaultiya, a meeting that

eventually leads to the birth of Madhu in Virginia. Madhu is hailed as the messiah and

messenger, a millennial figure expected to lead the darker and lighter races in America, Asia,

Africa and the Caribbean to freedom. The process of decentering the West as crucial in universal

cosmopolitanism is affirmed by the lynching of Jimmy Giles by the Ku Klux Klan 6 and the

Great Committee’s initial intolerance of blacks, provide moments of greater racial and class

problems inherent in discrepant cosmopolitanism, which, again, according to Clifford, is “the

displacement and transplantation of diasporic cultures that have become inseparable from

specific, often violent histories of economic, political and cultural interaction” (36). Giles is

innocently murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on account of being black because of what Du Bois

called the Negro Problem. Giles’s murder becomes just a microcosm of the violent history that is

an intrinsic part of black culture in America. Towns is expelled because of the influence of

racism, which is brought to bear on the president of Manhattan University. By capturing the

7

essence of racism, imperialism and colonialism in his novels—The Quest of the Silver Fleece,

Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame--Du Bois creates political novels in which he

projects a unification of the “darker peoples” in America and the world. As Claudia Tate argues,

“Du Bois repeatedly relied on the conventions of romance in all of his writings to consolidate his

racial analysis of history and his faith in the inevitability of black liberation, a consolidation that

he repeatedly sexualized in conjugal symbolism” (xix). Du Bois’s consolidation of racial

analysis and his faith in the inscrutability of black liberation, which is sexualized in conjugal

symbolism are powerfully portrayed in Dark Princess.

Furthermore, African American culture is also informed by African spirituality through

the conflicting double that impacts the identity of black subjects. In his formulation of the double

consciousness concept, Du Bois unconsciously characterizes black identity itself as

cosmopolitan: “One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two

unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps

it from being torn asunder”7 (The Souls of Black Folk 102). Bruce Robbins points out that

cosmopolitan theorists “are professionally concerned with culture for it highlights the special

culpability in naturalizing the national interest” (13). As many critics, including Kwame Anthony

Appiah and Gilroy have mentioned, Du Bois firmly believed that race was more of a cultural

construct than a fact of science and biological determinism. While Appiah suggests that Du

Bois’s thinking on race contained internal contradictions, suggesting in his book, In My Father’s

House, that Du Bois inadvertently relied on notions of blood and heredity even as he condemned

race tout court as a biological category, still, for Du Bois, racism was borne out of ignorance

because, as he states in Dusk of Dawn, “The world was divided into great primary groups of folk

who belonged naturally together through heredity of physical traits and cultural affinity”8 (100).

8

Consequently, when Du Bois opens chapter two of The Souls by envisaging a cosmopolitan

theme and extending the so-called “Negro Problem” to the darker and lighter-skin peoples in

Africa, Asia, and the isles of the sea, he critiques a misconception of white supremacists in The

Souls of Black Folk that “education that encourages aspiration that sets the loftiest ideals and

seeks as an end, culture and character rather than bread winning is the privilege of white men and

the danger and delusion of black folk” (The Souls of Black Folk 149).

In what I describe as a sounding trope, Du Bois complains about the murky conditions he

returned to after his two-year stay in Berlin in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. He notes,

“I builded castles in Spain and lived therein. I dreamed and loved and wandered and sang; then,

after two long years, I dropped back into ‘nigger’-hating America” (9). “The nigger-hating

America” saw to it that Towns does not complete medical school in Dark Princess. However, the

nationalistic fervor that informs the cosmopolitan ideals of the Indians, Arabs, the Africans, the

Japanese, and the Chinese in Dark Princess displaces the ideals of a universal humanity that

links cosmopolitan subjects, and the group nearly murders Towns but for the timely presence of

Kaultiya, who becomes a female agent of authority and beauty in the novel. Nationalism

consequently is another problematic that counters the ideals of cosmopolitanism and Du Bois’s

utopian desire for an egalitarian social and economic order for the “peoples” of the world. Du

Bois’s novels respond to modernity because he reconfigures what Gilroy calls “the

interpenetration of capitalism, industrialization, and democracy and directs attention toward

social and cultural changes” (55). In Dark Princess and The Black Flame especially, Du Bois

explores the social and psychic fragmentation of the human condition even as he subsumes the

novels with eschatological themes of the apocalypse with the birth of the black messiah in Dark

Princess. The subliminal dislocation of universal cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess counteracts

9

the aspirations of Du Bois in his 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece in which universal

humanism informed by the Kantian notion of Enlightenment and German romanticism prevails.

Du Bois would proceed to express his faith in a global community, goading him on in his

critique of American racism in Darkwater, but the focus in the trilogy is specifically more on

decolonization and Pan-Africanism in The Black Flame.

In the scholarships of Black Cosmopolitanism and Colored Cosmopolitanism, Nwankwo

and Slate, respectively, do not address Du Boisian cosmopolitan ideals in the realm of culture

and education, even as the former excludes Pan-Africanism from Du Bois’s projects that she

describes as cosmopolitanism. As Posnock points out, “Black Cosmopolitanism is often

overlooked in spite of its emergence from a historical affinity between cosmopolitanism and

egalitarianism” (804). Culture and education are crucial ideals in the corpus of Du Bois, so this

project examines culture and education as critical components of cosmopolitanism in his novels.

Dissertation scholarship on the application of cosmopolitanism to Du Bois’s novels is scarce, if

at all, so this inquiry explores the uncharted territory of exclusion of Du Bois’s novels in that

regard and becomes a contested space for the ideals of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Du Bois’s

universal humanism, which is embedded in Kantian Enlightenment principles, is unable to

establish itself as being capable of providing an ideal and normative space for cosmopolitan

subjects to realize their objective of an egalitarian social and economic order, free of imperialism

and injustice in Dark Princess; however, as Kant points out in the ninth thesis in “Idea for a

Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” merely by writing about a hegemonic

condition and the need for change, creates the possibility of bringing it into fruition. Du Bois

excoriated hegemonic conditions, not only in Black America but also for the dark races in

Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, so through what I term cosmopolitan mental mapping, he was

10

able to dream of protracting the cultures of the colored races, hence, his extension of the Negro

Problem to the dark races of the world.

An examination of black cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame is critical to the

cosmopolitan ideals in Du Bois’s texts on decolonization and Pan-Africanism because Du Bois’s

ideology shifts from 1944 after the second Dumbarton Oaks Conference in October of that year.9

Clifford’s discrepant cosmopolitanism must not be confused with Nwankwo’s black

cosmopolitanism, which deals with the fashion in which the Haitian Revolution of 1791 became

central to a dignified black identity negotiated from the violent historic memories of slavery,

imperialism, and hegemony. It is also critical to note that from a modification in the definition of

Clifford’s discrepant cosmopolitanism, it can be plural when viewed as “an impulse to

knowledge that can be shared with others, a striving to transcend a particularity that is itself

partial but not more partial than similar cognitive particularities of many diverse peoples”

(Robbins 259). At the second Dumbarton Conference, Du Bois and then NAACP executive

director, Walter White were among representatives of the United States, but they supported

China’s advocacy for the inclusion of human rights in the United Nations Charter; however, the

Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States vetoed China’s request. China had been

insistent on the inclusion of Human Rights in the UN Charter because just like blacks and Native

Americans before them, the Chinese were once barred from enjoying the fruits of American

democratic ideals in the 1880s in the United States. Thus, after the Conference, Du Bois arguably

lost hope in seeking egalitarian status for the colored peoples of the world and began instead to

focus more on Pan Africanism, a focus that I interpret through the lens of black

cosmopolitanism. Thus, while applauding the important works of Nwankwo and Slate, this

project also goes beyond them and addresses Du Bois’s engagement with culture, education,

11

economics, and Pan-Africanism as part of an idealizing mission in the variants of universal,

discrepant, and black cosmopolitanisms.

Indeed, cosmopolitanism becomes a cognitive global community that celebrates

difference through a commitment to universal human bonds and goodwill. Robbins notes that

cosmopolitanism is both actually existing and particular, and he provides a prudent frame of

analysis for cosmopolitanism in “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” when he asserts: “Again,

like the nation, cosmopolitanism is there—not merely an abstract ideal, like loving one’s

neighbor as oneself, but habits of thought and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped

by particular collectivities, that are socially and geographically situated, hence both limited and

empowered” (2). The dichotomy of limitation and empowerment of actually existing

cosmopolitanism is evident in Dark Princess. The disparate social affiliations, geographical

localities, and political backgrounds of the characters that conflate to form a cognitive global

community is characteristic of particular cosmopolitan collectivities,10 but what is also obvious is

their different nationalistic commitments; thus, Du Bois abandons and revises his project of an

ideal social order in his second novel. I interpret Du Bois’s revision of the egalitarian social

order for the colored races through the purview of Clifford’s definition of discrepant

cosmopolitanism.

A commonality in the definitions of cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum, Kwame

Anthony Appiah, and Ulrich Beck is that their definitions are informed by universal humanism

drawn from the Kantian school of cosmopolitanism, so they are applicable to The Quest of the

Silver Fleece. Nussbaum delineates her cosmopolitanism as an allegiance to a global community

of human beings that transcends locality. Beck envisions cosmopolitanism as a form of world-

building with an interest in and loyalty to a global humanity rather than in nationalism. Appiah

12

sees cosmopolitanism as a world-wide community that takes individuals rather than nations,

tribes, or races as the guiding principle.11 Clifford’s and Robbins’s definitions of discrepant

cosmopolitanism are applicable to Dark Princess. Clifford also delineates discrepant

cosmopolitanism as a “comparative approach to the histories and tactics of everyday practices of

dwelling and traveling” (36) while Robbins notes that “one can embrace” discrepant

cosmopolitanism as a stimulus to “knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend a

particularity that is itself partial but not more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many

diverse peoples” (259). Nwankwo’s black cosmopolitanism and Slate’s colored

cosmopolitanism, which I have already defined are appropriate for The Black Flame.

Cosmopolitanism as a critical trope is profound in analyzing the novels of Du Bois with different

perspectival lenses because it encourages an ability to engage Du Bois’s protestations against

racism, his debunking of imperialism, and his castigation of colonialism. As Gunther Lenz

correctly points out, “It is only through the multiplicity and flexibility of literary forms and

discursive strategies that Du Bois authorizes and reaffirms his anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-

imperialistic cultural and political critique” (70).

Du Bois unfolds an affection for universal humanism that one can interpret as

cosmopolitanism in The Souls of Black Folk when he writes, “Work, culture, liberty,--all these

we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each,

and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human

brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race” (Reader 106). Du Bois in The Quest of

the Silver Fleece yearns for that cosmopolitan ideal of global humanity and racial unification as

the white New England school matron, Sara Smith, features as the epitome of culture that she

transplants in to Blessed Alwyn and Zora. Dark Princess is a melodramatic novel in which Du

13

Bois, like in the rest of his four novels, finds his creative voice and uses it as an avenue to

critique racism and colonialism, but it is also a romance novel with realistic elements. Du Bois

captures the romance between Towns and Princess Kautilya in courtly nomenclature, a romance

that echoes the courtly romance between Oronooko, the African Prince and his Princess, Imoinda

in Thomas Southerne’s 18th century drama. Besides, the corruptive nature of politics in Chicago,

which is spearheaded by corrupt black politician, Sammy Scott and his sidekick, Sara Andrews;

the Ku Klux Klan’s vicious murder of the Pullman porter, Giles, and the concatenation of the

Asians, the Africans, and the Middle-Easterners to seek liberation from colonialism and Towns’s

addition, place the nomenclature of Dark Princess on a discrepant cosmopolitan and modernistic

landscape. Dark Princess is also fervent in Ethiopianism as the conjugal consummation of

Kautilya and Towns results in the birth of the black messiah, Madhu.12

A close reading of Du Bois’s novels unfolds their axiological richness, as one is able to

analyze the novels through the conceptual lenses of beauty, taste, and aesthetic quality. Through

such a close reading, African American rhetorical devices such as signifying, sounding,

narrativization or narratology, repetition, and call-and-response all play critical roles in the

analyses of Du Bois’s fiction and non-fiction as such. Through a combination of his creative

imagination and historiography, Du Bois is able to critique hegemonic conditions in the so-called

colored world to accentuate their continued presence in anticipation of, as Kant has argued,

creating the possibility of engendering change. For example, in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward

an Autobiography of a Race Concept, Du Bois notes: “So in America, not the philosophy of

Jefferson nor the crusade of Garrison nor the reason of Sumner was able to counterbalance the

race superiority doctrines of Calhoun, the imperialism of Jefferson Davis nor the race hate of

Ben Tillman” (139). Furthermore, Du Bois creates an argument with an imagined character,

14

Roger Van Dieman in chapter six in which through a series of repartee, he vilifies racism,

colonialism, and class taxonomy that milks the poor to the advantage of the wealthy. Du Bois

asserts in response to Dieman, “I see absolutely no proof that the average ability of the white

man’s brain to think clearly is any greater than that of the yellow man or of the black man”

(143). In the words of Arnold Rampersad, “Du Bois sought out the power of art because of an

increasing sense of the limitation of empirical social science and academic historiography” (55).

Thus, a close reading of the fiction of Du Bois with the lenses of cosmopolitanism constitutes an

immanent part of the dissertation project.

Chapter one of the dissertation, “Universal Cosmopolitanism in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece,” examines Du Bois’s focus on the Western Enlightenment tradition, which is informed

by universal cosmopolitan humanism. Du Bois saw The Quest of the Silver Fleece as an

economics novel in which he critiques the avarice, callousness, and manipulative tendencies of

capitalism. The dissertation project argues that the novel’s universal cosmopolitan humanism

appears through the iconoclastic New England educator, Sara Smith, who becomes an

embodiment of culture to her students, including the protagonists, Bles Alwyn and Zora.

Moreover, the school and cotton also symbolize universal cosmopolitan ideals in The Quest. In

the chapter, I argue that although many critics have read The Quest of the Silver Fleece as a

contending space between North and South, what the critics have neglected to focus on is the

Hellenistic and the broader Western context of the novel from which came the metaphor of the

silver fleece. The chapter engages Immanuel Kant’s definition of universal cosmopolitanism to

unravel The Quest of the Silver Fleece as a novel in which Du Bois appropriates universal

humanism as it is rooted in Hellenism and the Western Enlightenment tradition.

15

Chapter Two, “Discrepant Cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess: A Romance,” examines

discrepant cosmopolitanism in relation to Du Bois’s extension of the “Negro Problem” in the

context of American democratic politics to a broader framework of Pan-Africanism and Pan-

Asian ideals. The chapter argues that by connecting African American culture to

cosmopolitanism, Du Bois’s proclamations about race and class struggle and his lamentations on

the poverty afflicting many colored nations are associated with discrepant cosmopolitanism. Du

Bois links American democratic politics, racism, and discriminatory practices to European

colonization to shape the discrepant cosmopolitan framework of Dark Princess. Du Bois draws

the characters in Dark Princess from the darker races, spanning Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and

Arabs with Towns representing the black race. In Dark Princess, the lines of difference of the

darker races are drawn with culture, so it is only after Towns has convinced members of the

Committee by singing the Negro spiritual, Go Down Moses that the group finally becomes

appreciative of his talent as an intelligent representative figure of his race and accepts him as a

member of the Committee. The actually specific, often violent interaction of the histories of

politics, culture, and economics that is inseparable from that of displaced and transplanted

diasporic cultures that inform discrepant cosmopolitanism are witnessed in Du Bois’s critique of

the education of aristocracy because it prompted the exclusion of the masses of men and women

from getting a university or college education. Moreover, Du Bois excoriates the greed of

capitalism by linking domestic economic expansion to colonialism and imperialism and to the

two World Wars of the twentieth century.

Chapter Three, “Beyond the Color Line, Black Cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame,”

analyzes The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color with the lenses

of black cosmopolitanism. After publishing The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess: A

16

Romance in 1911 and 1928 respectively, Du Bois would wait until his twilight years before

publishing his final work of fiction, a historical fictional triad evocatively called The Black

Flame. The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are the three

volumes that he published in 1957, 1959, and 1961 respectively. In the trilogy, Du Bois

effectively combines his protracted historical knowledge with his poignant imaginative ingenuity

to tell the story of the African American experience from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to

1954. The year 1954 was a watershed moment in American legal history because 1954 was the

year in which the Supreme Court upheld Brown versus Topeka Board of Education to

desegregate schools in the country. Previously, the 1896 law of Plessy versus Ferguson had

sanctioned segregation as the law of the land. However, The Black Flame also focuses on the

hierarchy of power in the world as it relates to the darker races, so Manuel Mansart, the

protagonist, constantly ponders the relationship between race and power and the ethical

consciousness of individuals.

Du Bois, in The Black Flame, excoriates capitalism and its economic manipulation of the

masses as a cosmopolitan problematic. He asserts in The Ordeal of Mansart, “The Corporation

was the Frankenstein of the 20th Century, contrived by the lawyers of the 19th Century. By 1950

in America it would be Robot ruler of Man. It had neither Body to be kicked nor Soul to be

‘damned;’ but in the present century, it owned the Earth and enslaved Mankind” (261).

Furthermore, Du Bois exposes the avarice of the colonizers, as a representative group of the

White race meets in the Caribbean and plans a perpetual subjugation of blacks and poverty-

stricken whites. At the meeting, the Committee elects Cecil Rhodes as its leader to spearhead its

ambition of controlling capital through the execution of a four-fold program, whose anti-

cosmopolitan outlay includes the “beating of Negroes back to the kernels, manipulating and

17

cajoling white labor and the consolidation of capital into imperial control, guiding world trade,

and monopolizing gold and credit” (The Ordeal of Mansart 89).

Chapter Four, “Du Bois and His Intellectual Influences in Asia, Africa, and the

Caribbean,” interrogates Du Bois’s intellectual influences outside of America and Europe and

focuses on his intellectual influences in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and how they helped

shape his utopian desire for an inimitable colored world in which equality and justice could

prevail to all through the lenses of cosmopolitanism. Jameson has written eloquently on Utopia

and its applicability to actually-existing political agendas and to the realm of Realpolitik. In an

effort to analyze Du Bois’s works effectively on Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the actually-

existing political agendas of the time and the notion of Realpolitik, are critical to understanding

the roles the ideologies played in the decolonizing struggles of those nations. In that context,

Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism became a counter-culture of hegemony that heightened the

pace in leading India and African nations south of the Sahara to gain independence from imperial

powers. Broadly speaking, Du Bois saw Pan-Africanism as an intellectual understanding and

cooperation among all colored groups for spiritual and industrial emancipation that he believed

would lead to the dynamism and progress of the “colored” races. David Levering Lewis has also

mentioned that “in Du Bois, the African idea found an intellectual temperament and

organizational audacity enabling it to advance beyond the evangelical and literary to become an

embryonic movement whose cultural, political, and economic potential would assume, in the

long term, world-wide significance” (38).

In “The Future of Africa,” Du Bois confesses his ignorance and later, love of Africa as a

result of his study in Germany. He writes, “As a boy, I knew little of Africa save legends and

some music in my family… I heard of a few great men of Negroid blood, but I built up in my

18

mind a dream of what Negroes would do in the future even though they had no past” (The World

and Africa 305). Obviously, Du Bois’s earlier thought on Africa as a continent without a past

could have been formulated from his reading of Hegel and other Enlightenment thinkers.

However, his two-year sojourn in Germany and later his association with Franz Boaz remarkably

assisted in Du Bois having a more truthful conception of Africa: “In the last decade of the 19th

century, I studied two years in Europe, and often heard Africa mention with respect. Then, as a

teacher in America, I had a few African students. Later, at Atlanta University, a visiting

professor, Franz Boaz, addressed the students and told them of the history of the Black Sudan. I

was utterly amazed and began to study Africa for myself” (The World and Africa 305-6).

Du Bois’s study of Africa at Atlanta University culminated in his decision to attend the first ever

Pan-African Congress held in London under the auspices of Trinidadian lawyer, Henry

Sylvester–Williams in 1900. At that meeting, Du Bois was appointed the Secretary. Following

the 1900 meeting, Sylvester-Williams relocated from London to Port-au-Prince to signify the

abeyance and dislocation of the Movement.

When Sylvester-Williams died in 1911, Du Bois attended a World Congress of the Races

in London in the same year and returned with an indomitable desire to revive the Pan-African

movement. The intervening years rendered Du Bois incapable of doing anything about the Pan

African idea because of World War I. Du Bois’s dream, however, came into fruition in 1919

when he organized the first Du Bois-led Pan African Congress in Europe in 1919. At that

meeting, Du Bois met the Senegalese intellectual Blaise Diagne, M.E.F. Fredericks, an attorney

from Sierra Leone; and Guadeloupian intellectuals Graftien Candace and Isaac Beton.13 In

subsequent conferences, Du Bois would meet other African intellectuals like Ghanaian lawyer

and author of Ethiopia Unbound, J.E. Caseley-Hayford, whom he first met at a meeting of West

19

African intellectuals in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1924.14 He also met Nigerian intellectual and

first president after independence, Nnamdi Azikiwe. Du Bois met a Ghanaian intellectual who

also became Ghana’s first president after independence, Kwame Nkrumah in 1945 in

Manchester, where Du Bois had been invited by Padmore, the organizer of the 1945 Pan-

African Congress, who became a long time disciple of his. Of all the African intellectuals he

met, however, Du Bois became fond of Nkrumah and anointed him as his successor.15

The Epilogue, “Du Bois, Nkrumah, and Obama as Unheralded Cosmopolitans,” discusses

Du Bois as an intellectual who was branded a communist, leading to a self-imposed ostracization

in America before leaving for Ghana in 1961. Although Du Bois states in his Autobiography

published posthumously in 1968 that he was not a communist, because of activities one can

describe as cosmopolitan, he was labeled an enemy of the nation, an agent of a foreign

government (Russia) and was indicted. The result was that his passport was confiscated for over

eight years, obviating his attempts to attend the debut Non-Aligned Movement Conference in

Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 as well as Ghana’s Independence in 1957. Thus, the Cold War

politics that pitted the United States against the then Soviet Union became, in the realm of

Realpolitik, a serious problem in which Du Bois was caught in the middle of its firepower. As

Tate states in the introduction to one of the editions to Dark Princess, “In 1961 Du Bois

officially joined the Communist Party, perhaps as a public display of his anger at U.S. betrayal as

a repudiation of the possibility of U.S. democracy” (xvi). Finally, in spite of the antagonisms

against Du Bois, the arguably cosmopolitan zeal that led him to reconfigure the Pan-African

Movement became his saving grace as he, in 1961, accepted Nkrumah’s invitation to edit the

Encyclopedia Africana. He accepted it, announced his support for communism, renounced his

20

American citizenship, and left for Ghana where he died on the eve of the March on Washington

in 1963.

Following Du Bois’s demise in 1963, it would be forty-five years before another black

leader would overtly embrace the ideals of cosmopolitanism in a similar fashion as Du Bois.

President Barack Obama, like Diogenes, the Greek philosopher regarded as the father of

cosmopolitanism, declared himself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, in Berlin in 2008 as

a result of which he became a nemesis to a section of American politicians. More importantly,

Obama’s winning of the 2008 presidential elections became a symbolic realization of Du Bois’s

foreshadowing of the black messiah in Dark Princess and the attempt through cosmopolitanism

to include oppressed peoples in the attainment of what Tavia Nyong’o calls the “national Thing.”

Nyong’o observes the problematic that disjointed the instantiation of cosmopolitanism in Dark

Princess with the same exclusionary tactic grounded in provincialism in American democratic

politics to deny minority subjects. Nyong’o notes that Americans, who hitherto never envisioned

a black man being elected to the presidency of the United States, received a stark lesson in

cosmopolitanism when Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States. As

hope for a so-called post-racial America went on the upswing, many were quickly reminded of

the pessimism unleashed by some black conservative intellectuals, of whom the most fiery and

vicious were Stanley Crouch and Barbara Dickerson. These conservatives claim that because of

Obama’s cosmopolitan heritage, he should be excluded from membership into the African

American community (Nyong’o Introduction 4).

This approach contributes to Du Bois’s impact on projects informed by cosmopolitanism

in particular and American literary scholarship in general. In this sense, I suggest alternative

ways of reading Du Bois’s texts as informed by cosmopolitanism to add to the important variety

21

of scholars on the subject of modern cosmopolitanisms. This project is also suggestive of the

salience of extrapolating Du Bois’s cultural, educational, economic, educational, and Pan-

African and Pan-Asian treatises with the thematic design of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, while

some scholars of cosmopolitanism have demonstrated the material meaning of the concept as a

marker of uplift from the denigration inflicted by the concept of Africa as a dark continent as

well as the ossification imposed on black subjects through slavery and segregation in America

and colonization in Africa and Asia, they have largely left unexplored in dissertation projects the

application of cosmopolitanism as a competing theme in dislodging the hegemonic gaze branded

on the oppressed in Du Bois’s treatises. Therefore, this project addresses the chasm in the

critique of Du Bois’s scholarship to provide a fresh and an alternative way of re-reading Du

Bois.

Finally, this dissertation concludes that Du Bois’s quest for an egalitarian social order for

the “darker peoples” of the world, interpreted through the prism of a forceful vision of universal

humanism and discrepant cosmopolitanism, fell short in its aspirations but was still

transformative and generative for Du Bois’s own rich and evolving political thought, leading to a

more distinct black cosmopolitanism. Du Bois’s revolutionary vision for cosmopolitanism still

encouraged African and Asian nations in their struggle for freedom from European colonization.

However, before his death in Ghana, he expressed his belief in the leadership of Nkrumah (the

first president of Ghana) to carry on with the mantle of traditional and continental Pan-

Africanism and to bring its ideals to fruition into the world at large. Thus, this dissertation

project concludes that cosmopolitanism as competing lenses in Du Bois’s novels evolved from a

broad universal humanism to what Clifford has labeled discrepant cosmopolitanism to finally

Nwankwo’s more distinct black cosmopolitanism, with Du Bois’s utopian desire for a universal

22

mission for an equitable social order “for the darker peoples of the world” largely going

unfulfilled, even in the 21st century.

23

NOTES

1. On why African American culture is cosmopolitan, see Gilroy’s interview with Shelby 116-

35. See also Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, 70, 289.

For Du Bois as a cosmopolitan, see “Kwame Appiah--Du Bois and Cosmopolitanism.” Youtube.

2. For more information on Third Reich anti-Semitism, see Lewis 99-400.

3. For an informed discussion on Du Bois and the Africa and Asia connection, see Mullen and

Watson xxi.

4. See Posnock on the uses of cosmopolitanism, 802-818.

5. See Carol Anderson 35-39; see also “Dumbarton Oaks” in W.E.B. Du Bois: An

Encyclopedia, 63.

6. The Ku Klux Klan’s lynching of Giles is conscripted in the notion of Althusser’s Repressive

State Apparatus. See Althusser’s, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 91-114.

7. See Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk, 101-106.

8. For more information on race construction, see Du Bois, chapter 5 in Dusk of Dawn; W.E.B.

Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” 31-70.

9. See Carol Anderson for an excellent appraisal of the San Francisco Conference, 35.

10. See Robbins for a detailed analysis of the concept of discrepant cosmopolitanism, 246-264.

11. Many definitions of universal cosmopolitanism are similar to Nussbaum’s. See Robbins 1-

2; Cheah 21.

12. See Aptheker, Introduction to Dark Princess: A Romance, 24.

13. Traditional Pan-Africanism is distinct from continental Pan-Africanism. See Drake’s

Kake’s analysis of traditional Pan Africanism, 441-514; Kake` 249-262.

14. For activities involving the Comintern, see Padmore 276.

15. See Du Bois, “A Future for Pan-Africa: Freedom, Peace, Socialism,” 297.

24

CHAPTER I

UNIVERSAL COSMOPOLITANISM

IN THE QUEST OF THE SILVER FLEECE

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) is a complex delineation of the African American

experience that extends “the Negro problem” into a universal cosmopolitan realm, conveyed in a

literary epic that is rich in symbolism and which is informed by Western Enlightenment

traditions, including Hellenism and Hebraism. The views of critics on The Quest are

simultaneously varied, profound, and even parochial, but no critic has yet analyzed the novel

with the interpretive lenses of an epic, informed by universal cosmopolitanism. Du Bois himself

saw The Quest of the Silver Fleece as an “economic study of some merit.”1 Aptheker argues that

“the novel remains an interesting effort at a realistic portrayal of the impact of cotton, racism,

and peonage on the nation as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done about the same time with

meat and wheat” (553). Gregory U. Rigsby, in an introduction to the 1969 Arno Press edition of

the book, writes, “[T]he lasting value of The Quest of the Silver Fleece is its expression of

Negritude. The real silver fleece is not in the cotton fields, but in the souls of black folk.” Rigsby

also notes that Du Bois’s presentation of Zora as “a child of the swamp who displays a strange

intuitive insight” is of a Negritude characteristic. Rigsby suggests that “Zora’s concern for

‘Negroness’ forces itself upon the reader’s imagination and leaves him remembering The Quest

of the Silver Fleece not as an ‘economic study,’ but as a black novel well entrenched in the

tradition of Negritude” (Intro. 4).

Many critics also read The Quest of the Silver Fleece as a novel in which Du Bois

explores the problematic and contending space between North and South. Arlene Elder, Maurice

25

Lee, Lawrence J. Oliver, Keith Byerman, Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, in one way or the

other, have argued about the intent of Du Bois to pit Northern industry and tenacity against

presumably decadent Southern values in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.2 As Elder has suggested,

“The Quest of the Silver Fleece is the fictional working out of the Negro problem in American

racial history; his understandings are long-held concerns of Du Bois; its symbolic structure is his

attempt at an artistically effective framework for presenting his convictions about social,

political, and economic tensions, North and South, black and white” (15). Still some critics have

also analyzed the novel in terms of radical socialism with Mark Van Wienen and Julie Kraft, Joy

James, Kate Baldwin, Alys Eve Weinbaum, and Nikkhil Pal Singh all extoling the virtues of Du

Bois’s radical democratic socialism.3 Wienen and Kraft claim that “The fullest expression of Du

Bois’s early socialism comes in his first novel, his 1911 romance novel The Quest of the Silver

Fleece, which offers both a specifically socialist critique of US economics and an alternative

economic model originating in cooperative, southern black folkways” (67). However, what the

critics have neglected to expand upon in any detailed manner is the broader global context--4

from which Du Bois derived the metaphor of the silver fleece. The silver fleece is a play on the

Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts.

The inclusion of Greek myth in an African American struggle reflects Du Bois’s

appreciation of Hellenism and Greek civilization and establishes for him, a vision of

cosmopolitan humanism for the study of the Negro Problem. Du Bois illustrates an admiration

of the Greek tradition early on his career with the publication of “Of the Wings of Atalanta” in

which he uses the Greek tradition as an example in explaining the possibility of the South

becoming a decadent civilization if it resorted to greed at the expense of seeking knowledge:

Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull Boeotia;--how

swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him who out-raced her; and

26

how the wily Hippomenes laid three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a

shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand,

fled again, hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew over

river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his arms fell around her,

and looking on each other, the blazing passion of their love profaned the

sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta,

she ought to have been” (The Reader 140)

Du Bois’s conclusion, “If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been,” suggests

Du Bois’s disenchantment with a city whose citizens’ focus was to enrich themselves regardless

of the means they took in attaining it. Ulrich Beck envisions cosmopolitanism as a form of

world-building with an interest in and loyalty to a global humanity rather than a study in

nationalism. This chapter addresses The Quest of the Silver Fleece as an example of Du Bois’s

early consent to universal cosmopolitan humanism, which is rooted in the Western

Enlightenment tradition.

The universal cosmopolitanism that informs the analysis of The Quest can be found

insipiently in German cosmopolitan vision. Du Bois studied at Friedrich Wilhelm University, so

it is possible that many of his professors were some of Germany’s devout cosmopolitans. As a

result, they could have introduced Du Bois to the notion of “universal brotherhood” that German

scholars like Johann Gottfried von Herder and Goethe adored. Beck suggests that Heinrich

Heine, another German scholar, considered himself as an avatar of cosmopolitanism, and during

an epoch when many Europeans thought cosmopolitanism as too vast an ideal to be appropriated,

he prophesized that “in the end it [cosmopolitanism] will become the universal conviction among

Europeans with a greater future than German chauvinists who belonged to the past” (Beck 1).

Heine critiqued a German patriotism that harbored “hatred for all things foreign—a desire no

longer to be a world citizen or a European but merely a narrow German” (Beck 1). In contrast,

Heine visualized cosmopolitanism as “the most splendid sentiment and sacred idea Germany has

27

produced. It is the humanity, the universal brotherhood of man, the cosmopolitanism to which

great minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, and all the educated people of

Germany have always paid homage” (Beck 1). The relationship among some of the characters in

The Quest, including Sara Smith, Blessed Alwyn, Zora, and later, Mrs. Vanderpool as well as

Mary Taylor early in the novel, can be classified as grounded in German humanism as preached

by Heine as well as Immanuel Kant’s notion of universal cosmopolitanism, which he saw as a

“perfect union of mankind.” Pheng Cheah has pointed that “[w]hat Kant calls ‘universal

cosmopolitan existence’ refers to nothing less than the regulative idea of ‘perfect civil union of

mankind’” (23).

The limitation imposed on The Quest of the Silver Fleece when read solely as a

contending narrative between North and South reduces the global perspective of Du Bois’s

universal cosmopolitan vision. Cornel West and Ross Posnock are among scholars who have

posited that Du Bois’s “writings are best understood as a critical reformulation of Pragmatism

propelled by the experience of racism in the United States and the influence of European

philosophical traditions” 5 (4). Still, others such as Arnold Rampersad have proclaimed that the

Puritan ambience of Great Barrington in New England, where Du Bois was born and raised, had

a life-long impact on him, so although he “outgrew the dogmas of Puritanism, he never outgrew

its ethics”6 (6). Du Bois might not have outgrown the ethics of Puritanism, but the cultural values

he appropriated in the propagation of his multi-cultural principles are arguably rooted in German

romanticism and idealism. Axel R. Schaefer has argued that Du Bois “combined three views of

culture in a fragile amalgam which broadly mirrored his personal experience of faith, exile, and

transcendence.” Schaefer points out that Du Bois’s perception of culture is grounded in

a classical humanist conception which regarded culture as embodying universal

moral values beyond racial and class divisions; a romantic conception of culture

28

which sought to uncover authentic cultural expressions and gifts of defined racial

groupings; and a pragmatist historicist conception which saw culture as a dynamic

component in the contingent historicist constructions of moral norms,

socioeconomic structures, and political order. Together they formed the leitmotif

of his scholarship. (108)

Du Bois believed that only a faithful adherence to humanity would goad the world on to

transcend color prejudice, and it this strong belief in humanism that informs his universal

cosmopolitanism. Schafer notes that while Du Bois’s faith in humanism “cemented his

adherence to European high culture, his sense of exile made him receptive to the teachings of

German romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich

Schleiermacher, who emphasized the need for authentic cultural self-expression against

alienating forces of cold and calculating civilization” (108). Du Bois’s German influence is

clearly extant in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Du Bois used literature in capturing “the need for authentic self-expression against

alienating forces of cold and calculating civilization” in The Quest of the Silver Fleece where

Blessed Alwyn and Zora stand up against the alienating frontiers of dastard civilization mounted

by Colonel St. John Cresswell and his son, Harry. This chapter claims that because of Du Bois

belief that only a faithful adherence to humanity would relieve the globe of its color prejudicial

problems, a belief rooted in Christian principles, and African American values grounded in

Judeo-Christian spirituality,7 they help in the formulation of perfect civil unions among

humankind; therefore, they ground The Quest in cosmopolitan humanism according to the

Western Enlightenment tradition, including Hellenism and Hebraism. Rampersad has noted that

Du Bois’s dalliance with various beliefs and worldviews made him oscillate between “Matthew

Arnold’s Hellenism and Hebraism, but he ended by adding to the Puritan God of his youth the

deified ideals of Greek intellectualism” (86). From this perspective, Zamir has pointed out that

29

over the last several years, “a new and remarkably widespread academic interest in Du Bois has

developed. The recent scholarship has not only deepened and consolidated existing approaches

to his life and work, it has [also] opened up new avenues of investigation” (4). One of the new

avenues of investigation is a close reading of The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) as grounded

in universal cosmopolitan humanism and informed by Hellenism.

Du Bois implies in his autobiographies--Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, Dusk of

Dawn, and My Autobiography--that his two-year sojourn in Germany had a dramatic impact on

his study and on his life. Similar to the disenchantment that engulfed Blacks after Emancipation,

Germans were so disappointed with the failure of their 1529 Peasant Rebellion that they resorted

to revolutionary idealism through cultural liberation. Du Bois was conscious of the tardy

political, social, and economic liberation of blacks in America after Emancipation, so Negroes in

America found themselves in the same tangential quagmire of social and economic stasis that

mesmerized the Germans after the failure of the Peasant Rebellion. In 1529, peasants in

Germany revolted in the first realistic effort at socio-economic liberation, but the rebellion was

quelled, prompting “Alexander von Humboldt to call the failure of the rebellion pivotal for

German history while Georg Lukacs argues in Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern 1947) that the entire

development of Germany was determined by this event” (Slochower 180). As Harry Slochower

argues:

To compensate for its economic-social bondage, German thinkers developed the

concept of Kultur-freedom where the greatness of German thought was seen in its

not having any connection with material reality. It evolved systems of ‘pure’

metaphysics, music, mysticism, and mythology from Kant’s invocation of the

moral law within and the starry heavens above, to Max Werber’s notion of

science as a vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf) and Karl Mannheim’s position that

intellectual viewpoint is non-partisan …To be sure, Germany’s idealistic version

of freedom contained element of internationalism. But, divorced from political

realities, it lent itself to becoming the tool of universal expansionism. (180-81)

30

The Quest of the Silver Fleece is at once a proliferation of metaphysics, music, mythology, and

mysticism that revolves around cultural liberation with cotton (the Silver Fleece) serving as its

central force; it is also an epic in which the swamp symbolizes the African American experience

in which poetic justice is served to schemers to give Du Bois’s first novel its universal

cosmopolitan and humanistic thematic framework.

In an analytical review of The Quest, Rampersad views the plot of the novel as a simple

story, whose cyclical plot is a complicated, even complex love story that innocuously begins in

the swamp and beautifully ends in the swamp, with Zora popping the question, “Will you--marry

me, Bles?” Rampersad notes that The Quest is “a novel of many ideas and themes subsidiary to

and even beyond the question of race” (151). Noting the epic dimensions of The Quest of the

Silver Fleece and Dark Princess, Rampersad suggests:

Du Bois fiction is the gravely serious story, recited in at times too lofty a tone and

language, of a young (black) man of quality embarking on the most perilous of

journeys within a grand landscape, on the success of which depends the future

salvation of his race or nation—salvation on a relatively small scale in The Quest

of the Silver Fleece, on a worldwide scale in Dark Princess. (Bloom 85)

Among its many themes and ideas, according to Rampersad, are romance, realism, naturalism,

Calvinism, and proto-feminism. Maurice Lee points out that although some critics regard The

Quest as a failure because of what they term as “problematic politics” (Byerman), “generic

confusion” (Rampersad) and “contradictory musings that are intellectually lax” (Kostelanetz),

Lee argues that The Quest is a novel in which “Du Bois’s mediation of romance and realism is

skillful and strategic; it engages and challenges major American texts, and that, with careful,

even subversive attention to issues of language and form, Du Bois appropriates novelistic

discourse for his own artistic and political ends” (389). Byerman also sees The Quest in “the

tradition of the sentimental romance novel in which Du Bois subverts the Southern romantic

31

novel.” Byerman questions Du Bois artistic ingenuity and asserts that “because of the phrasing of

Du Bois’s prefatory in The Quest, he realized his limitations as an artist” (59). This chapter

argues that The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a literary epic that supports universal cosmopolitan

humanism based on the European Enlightenment tradition with the doctrines of Hellenism and

Hebraism forming the syncretism of the novel’s epic hero and heroine, Blessed Alwyn and Zora.

Cotton and the swamp become mythic symbols that delineate the depth of the African American

experience.

Appraisal of Universal Cosmopolitan Humanism

in The Quest of the Silver Fleece

The analysis of this chapter is grounded in an appropriation of the cosmopolitan thinker’s

notion of cosmopolitanism as an opportunity to be embraced. Such accommodation of

opportunity, arguably, is encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s apt definition of universal

cosmopolitanism as a “perfect civic union of mankind” and the German ideal classification of

cosmopolitanism as the appropriation of the humanity and the universal brotherhood of man. A

close reading of this chapter grounds The Quest of the Silver Fleece in a universal cosmopolitan

humanistic framework and a literary epic to contribute to existing knowledge and scholarship on

Du Bois’s first novel. The chapter suggests that the conclusion of The Quest, L’Envoy, functions

as an apostrophe, which is grounded in Hebraism, probably to make an argument for black

American culture as cosmopolitan because Du Bois was aware of the cosmopolitan deprivations

imposed on minority subjectivity. In an essay, “On The Souls of Black Folk” Du Bois notes:

“Because I am a Negro I lose something of that breadth of view which the more cosmopolitan

races have, and with this goes an intensity of feeling and conviction which both wins and repels

32

sympathy, and now enlightens, now puzzles” (The Reader 304-5). The “intensity of feeling and

conviction which both wins and repels sympathy and now enlightens” that Du Bois alludes to in

his 1904 essay is a cosmopolitan discourse that is grounded in the Western Enlightenment

tradition. Du Bois appeals to a transcendental power to help excise the pain and affliction of

African Americans, just like the Israelites did when they were in bondage in Egypt. In such a

scenario, Du Bois’s drawing of parity between the suffering and affliction of African Americans

and the Israelites make a cosmopolitan reading of the novel possible because as Appiah has

pointed out, “The new cosmopolitan reading practices are often undergirded by the same instinct:

we travel in books to learn ‘mutual toleration,’ even the sympathy and concern for others” 8

(203). Thus, it is possible that Du Bois’s intention in The Quest is what Bernard W. Bell has

dubbed a Judeo-Christian vision of history that informs African American values. In such

rendering, The Quest is useful as a nostrum to illuminate the idealistic path of future black

leaders on the extent to which moral enlightenment as exemplified by Alwyn and Zora could

help in the building of exemplary characters. Du Bois states in the conclusion:

Lend me thine ears, O God the Reader, whose Fathers aforetime sent mine down

into the land of Egypt, into this House of Bondage. Lay not these words aside for

a moment’s phantasy, but lift up thine eyes upon the Horror in this land;--the

maiming and mocking and murdering of my people, and the prisonment of their

souls. Let my people go, O infinite One, lest the world shudder at

L’Envoy briefly captures the history and literature of African Americans to signify the epic

subplot of The Quest, as Du Bois succinctly states the subtitle of the novel as, “The American

Negro: His History and Literature” and repeats it on the second page. L’Envoy recalls Mark

Anthony’s speech after Brutus has assassinated Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to signal

the European Neo-Classical tradition and echoes Exodus to capture the dimension of The Quest

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of the Silver Fleece as an epic journey from slavery to freedom. In his review of the features that

render African writing profound, Bernard W. Bell notes:

Traditional white American values emanate from a providential vision of history

and of Euro-Americans as a chosen people, a vision that sanctions their individual

and collective freedom in the pursuit of property, profit, and happiness. Radical

Protestantism, Constitutional democracy, and industrial capitalism are the white

American trinity of values. In contrast, black American values emanate from a

cyclical, Judeo-Christian vision of history and of African-Americans as a

disinherited, colonized people, a vision that sanctions their resilience of spirit and

pursuit of social justice. (A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature 257)

The emergence of African American values from the Judeo-Christian vision of history

informs the Hebraic values in the novel while Du Bois’s introduction to Greek in high school

made him become fascinated with the Greek intellectual tradition early on in his career. The

Quest of the Silver Fleece illuminates the influence of Hebraism and Hellenism on Du Bois, a

position that helps to situate the analysis of the text as an instantiation of universal

cosmopolitanism, grounded in the European tradition and German romanticism. Hellenism and

Hebraism can be classified as cosmopolitan tropes because they emphasize an attainment of

humanity and the individual’s resolve for redemption. In Chapter four of Culture and Anarchy

(1867), entitled “Hellenism and Hebraism,” Matthew Arnold notes that the ultimate aim of both

Hellenism and Hebraism is redemption, reached through pragmatism and humility, respectively.

As Arnold points out, “The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual

disciplines, is man’s perfection or salvation… Still, they pursue this aim by very different

courses. The uppermost idea of Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea

of Hebraism is good conduct and obedience.” Furthermore, Arnold posits that the Greeks believe

that visceral feelings “hinder right thinking” while Hebrews believe somatic feelings “hinder

right acting.” In order to reach the state of perfection both cultures strive for, Hellenism

advocates for an ideal beauty while Hebraism calls for purity of character. Arnold reveals that

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“[t]o see things as they are is to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which

Hellenism holds out before human nature.” In order to achieve this attractively ideal state of

existence, “Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of wakening to a sense of sin, as a

feat of this kind.” On the other hand, German romanticists believed in folk culture and “the

distinct civilizational gift of each racial group and their search for social regeneration through a

process of ethnographic recovery of cultural traditions” (Schafer 108). Toward that end, Alwyn

and Zora attain redemption in the novel by seeing things as they really are and through their

honesty, dignity, and sheer diligence. They envision the silver fleece in its splendor; they

appreciate the beauty of the culture of suffering, pain, and redemption that inspire their people to

be industrious. Additionally, Zora and Alwyn unfold a profound appreciation of the Hellenistic

ideals of truth and goodness and the Hebraic virtue of self-control and humility.

The plot of The Quest of the Silver Fleece begins with Du Bois satisfying an important

epic convention, in media res and titles the first chapter “Dreams.” Although night has fallen, the

characters are not dreaming; rather, Du Bois focuses on a romantic depiction of the swamp. Later

on in the novel, Du Bois titles another chapter as “The Place of Dreams” to illustrate Zora’s habit

of going into the swamp to daydream. “Dreams” consequently is a chapter suggestive of Du Bois

having begun his novel from media res. He writes in anthropomorphic discourse to open chapter

one:

Night fell. The red waters of the swamp grew sinister and sullen. The tall pines

lost their slimness and stood in wide blurred blotches all across the way, and a

great shadowy bird arose, and wheeled and melted, murmuring, into the black

green sky. (13)

Du Bois reveals his enchantment with Romanticism and the impact of German Romanticists on

him with a romantic depiction of nature in the novel’s opening lines to prefigure the liberation,

regeneration, and renewal of the Negro. In an address in 2008 at Brigham Young University,

35

Richard Hacken analyzed his address with the forest motif as a groundswell of German culture,

Romanticism, and national ideals:

Through the centuries, forest motifs have evolved to support various social,

political, and cultural themes and counter themes. The imagined forest is a

contradictory forest. To early German tribes, the forest was an object of

worship—a temple of holiness—while to others it was the home of evil and

danger. For later thinkers it stood as a model of immortality and regeneration.9

It is critical to note that Du Bois reference to the “tall pines” in the swamp is a symbolic allusion

to a history of an idea that needs to be studied. As Hacken suggests, “the central object of study

is not the forest itself, but the history of an idea, the reflection of the forest in the German

psyche.” In the same vein, Du Bois’s treatment of the swamp that contains the forest and woods

performs a similar function in the psyche of Southern blacks. Elder notes the evil nature in the

swamp’s symbolically bifurcated characteristics of good and evil. Elder views Du Bois opening

in chapter one with the swamp as symbolizing “danger, despair, and loss of vision” (Bloom 24).

However, the swamp is also emblematic of the universal imagery of the phoenix that symbolizes

perpetuity and regeneration of life. The imagery of the “great shadowy bird arising, wheeling,

and melting, into the black green sky” echoes the proverbial and spiritual Egyptian bird, phoenix

that lives for 500 years and then burns, only to regenerate itself from the ashes to live for another

500 years. From that premise, Zora, later on in the novel, sees ‘the Way’ in Washington, DC and

becomes ‘the way’ in Toomsville. Alwyn is elevated in Washington, DC by the Republican

political machine and then crushed, only to become a renewed man on his return to Toomsville.

After being educated under the influence of the New England school matron, Sara Smith,

who is the embodiment of culture in the novel, Alwyn goes on a quest and leaves for

Washington, DC to work on discovering that Harry Cresswell has deflowered Zora. In DC, after

passing the clerical examination of the Treasury Department with an excellent score of 93

36

percent, there is still bureaucratic feet-dragging and influence shuffling to employ him because

of “the problem,” so Senator Smith, Sara’s brother, helps Alwyn to get the job. The mind-

boggling question, however, is, Why did Du Bois have “Dreams” as the title of his first chapter?

Did he have a psychological novel in mind? Indeed, it is possible that The Quest of the Silver

Fleece can be interpreted psychoanalytically, but what is obvious in the novel is that, by

beginning the first chapter with his protagonists having the ability to dream, Du Bois creates for

his characters the desire and subjectivity to entertain what Sigmund Freud calls “wishful

fulfillments” and “unfulfilled desires.” Du Bois creates characters who can dream and fulfill their

wishful desires because such a possibility is a universal phenomenon, so dreaming in the context

of universal cosmopolitanism brings the probability of its realization. Dreaming, then, comes

with the liberation of ideals that unfold the humanity of individuals and which universal

cosmopolitanism engenders. Universal cosmopolitanism, according to Martha Nussbaum, is an

allegiance to a global community of human beings that transcends locality. Before Alwyn meets

Zora, he dreams of such an encounter in chapter one. As a matter of fact, it is probable that Du

Bois himself dreamt of a cosmopolitan humanist world in which tolerance of difference in the

forms of race, creed, color, political and religious beliefs, and economic independence would

become a normative strand that conjoined the white and dark and brown and yellow races to live

in a world in which universal cosmopolitan ideals were normative. Obviously, some considered

such a dream as Utopian and impossible to achieve. However, as Fredric Jameson has pointed

out, merely by dreaming about such a possibility, one can open the floodgates for its future

occurrence,10 and Du Bois pursued just such an ideal.

Mary Taylor, a teacher from New York, who goes to teach at Sara Smith’s school in

Toomsville, displays a great sense of humanism by embracing difference on her arrival in

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Toomsville in a conversation with Alwyn in which the universal cosmopolitan landscape of the

novel is observed. On her arrival at Tooms County, Mary saw from close proximity the

cosmopolitan affinity of the Negro Problem. Du Bois writes that on Mary’s arrival, she “felt out

of the world, shut in and mentally anemic; great as the ‘Negro Problem’ might be as a world

problem, it looked sordid and small at close range” (28). Mary’s vision of the Negro problem as

microcosmic, allows her to have a cosmopolitan mind-set in her relationship with her students

although she had initial reservations of going to Toomsville to teach black children. Mary

confides in her brother, John Taylor, who is a speculator on Wall Street: “You ought to know

John, if I teach Negroes I’ll scarcely see much of people in my own class.” But John chides in:

“Nonsense! Butt in. Show off. Give them your Greek—and study Cotton. At any rate I say go”

(27). Mary must give her students Greek, and in return, the children will teach her all she wants

to know about cotton because Du Bois created the metaphor of the silver fleece to draw parity

between African American culture and the Greek tradition and also to draw attention to the

Negro Problem.

Mary begins her study of cotton with a sea metaphor. At Tooms county, she sees the

ubiquity of cotton as a salient cosmopolitan commodity and “remembered that beyond this little

world it stretched on and on—how far she did not know—but on and on in a great trembling sea,

and the foam of its mighty waters would one time flood the ends of the earth” (29). Du Bois’s

use of the sea in his novels spells danger or death. However, the sea also is symbolic of life and

humanity’s hopelessness when confronted on a journey in which the sea is furious. On such a sea

of life, the raging storm of the sea renders humanity useless in its fight against it. Homer was the

first poet to use the sea metaphor in The Odyssey where the sea symbolizes the chasm between

the power of man and the power of the Greek gods. Ancient Greeks could have been excellent

38

seafarers, but when pitted against such a vast expanse of seemingly endless water like the sea

that is sometimes calm, sometimes raging in fury, the power of man is rendered futile, so the

Greek gods stepped in to help those they love. Probably Du Bois’s use of the sea metaphor here

again is his way of applying the Hellenistic tradition to his work.

In the conversation with Alwyn, Mary mentions cotton to him, and his eyes lit with

effervescence, for to Alwyn, cotton was more than a commodity; it was the personification of

life. Du Bois points out that “cotton was to him a very real and beautiful thing, a life-long

companion, yet not one whose friendship had been coarsened and killed by heavy toil” (31).

When Mary first sees the blossoming of cotton at Tooms County, she gives it the moniker,

“Silver Fleece” because of its sprawling beauty that spread like a sea of white Ocean and its

ability as a fiduciary source of opulence. However, undergirding the metaphor of the “Silver

Fleece” is the symbolism it connotes from its derivation from the Greek myth of Jason and the

Argonauts. Jason stole the fleece from its rightful owners after killing Medusa, its protector. The

symbolism of the fleece becomes an extended metaphor in the novel as the Cresswells

persistently steal from and cheat the diligent black folk out of their cotton bolls.

The metaphor of the silver fleece also reveals Mary’s desire to study the growth and

cultivation of cotton as her brother had told her when Mary gave him the news that she was

going to the Black Belt to teach. Mary’s study of the silver fleece begins when Alwyn reveals to

her that cotton is “prettiest when the bolls come and swell and burst, and the cotton covers the

field like foam, all misty—“On hearing that, “the poetry of the thing began to sing within her,

awakening her unpoetic imagination, and she murmured: ‘The Golden Fleece—it’s the Silver

Fleece!’” (31). Mary’s mention of the Golden Fleece prompts Alwyn to ask her to tell him the

full story of Jason and the Argonauts. On hearing the story, Alwyn poignantly remarks, “All you

39

is Jason’s. All you golden-fleece is Jason’s now” (35). Alwyn is armed with a passionate

conviction that Jason was a thief in the old myth, but in the myth of the silver fleece, the new

myth, the Cresswells are now the thieves. Elder notes: “To Mary Taylor, the Jason myth

embodies the values of ambition, daring, and heroism; to Bles, the ‘stealing’ of the Fleece

represents an immorality basic to an outlook which values property and power over people”

(Bloom 29). The conversation between Mary and her student, Alwyn is couched in Hellenistic

discourse to reveal Du Bois’s appreciation, even admiration of the Greek tradition and its

extension to explain the Negro Problem so that others will develop an interest in studying it.

Their conversation is also touted in the realm of universal cosmopolitanism as it blurs the black

and white dichotomy between the two, compelling Mary to come to the epiphany that “in this

pleasant little chat the fact of the boy’s color had quite escaped her; and what quite puzzled her

was that this had not happened before” (31). The conversation reveals the veritable reality in the

cosmopolitan quest of embracing difference for the focus to be riveted on things of common

interest. As Du Bois substantiates, “Now, for one little half-hour she had been a woman talking

to a boy—no, not even that: she had been talking—just talking; there were no persons in the

conversation, just things—one thing—Cotton” (31).

The universal cosmopolitan framework of The Quest is rooted simultaneously in its form

and structure as a literary epic because it engages traveling and involvement in the cultures of

localities. The Quest satisfies the conventions of European epics because it recounts the

adventures of a hero and heroine of almost mythic proportions who epitomize the historical traits

of their people. According to Ross Murfin and Suprya M. Ray, “Today, the term epic may be

used more generally to refer to any event involving heroic actions taken in broadly significant

situations” (145). Both Alwyn and Zora leave the South for the North, where Alwyn’s

40

excellence on the civil servants entrance examination wins him a position as a clerk in the

Treasury Department. While in DC, he meets an old acquaintance, Sam Stillings who invites him

to watch a concert at the Presbyterian Church. During the concert, he is so enamored by the

voices of the singers that he openly expresses his appreciation and admiration, quite against the

conventional wisdom in DC, compelling Tom Teerswell to comment that “plantation melodies

are the specialty” of Alwyn (254). Here what transpires is that Alwyn is quickly reminded of his

Southern roots, making him be a kind of ethnographer in the North. What Teerswell detests in

Alwyn becomes the traction for Caroline Wynn, his future fiancée whom he met in the offices of

Senator Smith.

Alwyn’s Southern upbringing and roots make him a unique breed in DC because

“Southern country Negroes were rare in [Caroline’s] set, but here was a man of intelligence and

keenness coupled with an amazing frankness and modesty, and perceptibly shadowed by sorrow”

(254). Caroline Wynn later invites Alwyn to her apartment for a meeting with the ‘group’ or

‘inner circle’ in DC whose universal humanism lies in their willingness to embrace one another,

regardless of the different shades of blackness informing their cultural heritage: black, brown, or

yellow. Du Bois points out:

They formed a picturesque group; conventional but graceful in dress; animated in

movement; full of good-natured laughter, but quite un-American in the beautiful

modulation of their speaking tones; chiefly noticeable, however, to a stranger, in

the vast variety of color in skin, which imparted to the throng a piquant and

unusual interest. Every color was here; from the dark brown of Alwyn, who was

customarily accounted black, to the pale pink-white of Miss Jones, who could

‘pass for white’ when she would, and found her greatest difficulties when she was

trying to ‘pass’ for black. Midway between these two extremes lay the sallow

pastor of the church, the creamy Miss Williams, the golden yellow of Mr.

Teerswell, the golden brown of Miss Johnson, and the velvet brown of Mr. Grey.

(256).

41

In this scenario, Du Bois dismisses any significance of color affiliation as being important to the

group and their guests and dislocates colorism in the affairs of the inner circle, for “they were

used to asking one’s color as one asks of height and weight; it was simply an extra dimension in

their world whereby to classify [the culture of] men” (256).

Du Bois dislocation of color as tenuous among members of the inner circle is a guiding

rationality in cosmopolitanism as every hue is embraced and treated according to talent and

diligence. When in the course of their deliberations, Alwyn hardly hears the mention of the

“Negro Problem” that is dear to his heart, he felt like going to tell them “Ho! What of the

morning? How goes the great battle for black men’s rights? I have ‘came’ with messages from

the host, to you who guide the mountain tops” (258). The Negro problem is dear to Alwyn’s

heart because it is cosmopolitan. As Du Bois states in his opening lines in chapter two of The

Souls of Black Folk, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the

relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of

the sea” (The Reader 107). Although Alwyn does not get the opportunity to deliver his message

from the ‘host’ to the inner circle, he would get it later on at a debating club, Bethel Literary.

After Alwyn’s encounter with the DC inner circle, Stillings invites him to the Bethel Literary,

where he engages his Democratic opponent in a debate. In a polemic to his opponent’s address

titled “The Democratic Party and the Negro,” Alwyn rebuts the Democrat’s argument by

claiming his birthplace as Alabama and narrating the constraints inhibiting the progress of blacks

in the Black Belt, “of the lying, oppression, and helplessness of the sodden black masses,” and he

also “reminded them of the history of slavery” and then pointed to Lincoln’s picture and of

Sumner’s” (262). His pointing to Lincoln’s and Sumner’s pictures is a reminder that the

Republican Party was the party that freed blacks from enslavement, and Charles Sumner was the

42

first politician to author the first Civil Rights Act for Negroes in 1873.11 With that performance,

Alwyn announces himself as the true messenger from the South, so when the Republican Party

was looking for a black man to help it win the South, where the incumbent President was trailing

his Democratic opponent in that year’s election, Alwyn is recommended for the herculean task.

The incumbent President wins his reelection, and Alwyn is promised a cabinet portfolio

as Treasury Secretary. However, the Senate refuses to confirm his nomination because Alwyn,

unlike Esau, was unwilling to “sell his birthright for $6,000” for the position. Alwyn’s decision

not to seek the position is a decision Caroline Wynn refuses to understand. Caroline is only

interested in position, fame, and wealth, and any man who stands for courage, truth, goodness,

honesty, and love is to her, a neophyte, unschooled in the sophistication of life; consequently,

she breaks up with Alwyn for his refusal to support and defend the Republican Education Bill. In

a conversation with Alwyn, Caroline notes: “You are young yet, my friend…that good Miss

Smith has gone and grafted a New England conscience on a tropical heart, and---dear me!—but

it’s a gorgeous misfit” (265). The “gorgeous misfit” is the training of Alwyn in a culture

grounded in European tradition of Hellenism and Hebraism because of his honesty, pragmatism,

and due diligence. Alwyn’s tropical heart is an inference of his African heritage as a black

American. The transplantation of New England culture on to Alwyn’s tropical heart is a curious

potpourri that also is applicable to the Swamp, where the silver fleece is grown, but it is also a

place where there are “wandering Negroes, and even wild beasts in the forests—malaria” (206).

Du Bois’s juxtaposition of peregrinating “Negroes and wild beasts in the forests” is to suggest

the dichotomous nature of the swamp, a harbinger of both good and evil, an apocalyptic

juxtaposition in which good tries to tame evil. This echoes the German Romantic writer, Novalis

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whose projection of Utopia in his novel, Novices of Sais is a wilderness to be tamed, of nature to

be domesticated, where companionable souls—

sought to awaken the spent and lost tones in the air and in the forests…tamed

unruly streams…dammed forest floods and cultivated the nobler flowers and

herbs…taught wood and meadows, springs and crags to join together in pleasant

gardens…and cleansed the woods of savage monsters, the misbegotten creatures

of a degenerate fantasy.12

Wilson J. Moses has also pointed out that Du Bois’s mythic yearnings originated from

two sources—Ethiopianism and European interpretive mythology:

Ethiopianism may be defined as the effort of the English-speaking Black or

African person to view his past enslavement and present cultural dependency in

terms of the broader history of civilization. It serves to remind him that this

present scientific technological civilization, dominated by Western Europe for a

scant four hundred years, will go under certainly—like all the empires of the past.

It expresses the belief that the tragic racial experience has a profound historical

value, that it has endowed the African with moral superiority and made him a

seer. (Bloom 61)

On the other hand, European interpretive mythology, according to Jean Seznec, is the “practice

of examining Greco-Roman mythology with the intention of either discovering within it, or

assigning to it, Christian meaning.” (Bloom 61). The entire novel becomes an extended metaphor

for German romanticism, European interpretive mythology, and Ethiopianism. The Medea and

Elspeth juxtaposition in the novel is another exquisite example of Du Bois combination of

Ethiopianism and European myth. Euripides’s Medea is a Greek tragedy in which Medea makes

an indirect reference to Africa through her invocation of the “Sun-god” and the “Earth.” When

Alwyn asks Elspeth for the magic cotton seeds, she responds in an imagery predicated on Africa:

“I’se got the seed—I’se got it—wonder seed, sowed wid the three spells of Obi in the old land

ten thousand moons ago” (75). Reference to Africa regarding pre-slavery times (Ethiopianism) is

a familiar theme in Du Bois’s fiction. In this sense, Matthew Towns’s mother, Kali, in Dark

Princess becomes a sequel to Elspeth. After the Senate’s refusal to confirm Alwyn and Caroline

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Wynn’s break up with him, he resigns his position as a civil servant and leaves for the South to

redeem himself. It is important to note that the goal of Hebraism and Hellenism is redemption

except the means of attainment is different for the two—Hebraism attains redemption through

humility and good conduct while Hellenism reaches that goal through pragmatism. As

Rampersad observes:

At the center of the epic is a black couple, Blessed Alwyn amd Zora Cresswell,

who rise from virtual serfdom in Alabama to attain a sense of manhood and

womanhood consistent with the highest ideals of intellect and character, pride in

their race, and the recognition of love and labor as the crowning glories of the

human condition. (Foreword 6)

Alwyn’s quest to the North also has its mythic yearnings. In Washington, DC, Alwyn

becomes the voice of his people in the South. In Slochower’s theory on myth, he states that in

Greek mythology, the quest for origins assumes the form of a challenge to the social order;

therefore, the protagonist or hero must undergo the process of self-examination before he can

become the creative voice of his people. When the Republican Party asks Alwyn to defend the

Education Bill that would undermine the education of black children attending DC public

schools, he thought carefully about it, before deciding to go against the wishes of Caroline Wynn

and the Republican Party. In a revelation, he tells his fiancée, “Carrie, I want to do the best thing,

but I’m puzzled. I wonder if I’m selling my birthright for six thousand dollars” (316). During

those moments of critical self-examination, Alwyn receives a letter from an anonymous person

(it turns out later that Zora wrote those lines to him) with the last quatrain of “Invitus,” a poem

written by the British poet and editor, William Ernest Henley, quoted in it: “It matters not how

strait the gate, How charged with punishment the scroll: I am the master of my fate, I am the

captain of my soul” (318). “Invitus” is the Latin equivalent for “unconquered.” Henley wrote the

poem during a solitary moment in his life after the amputation of one of his legs. In his nadir

45

moment, he received another letter from his doctor, seemingly to amputate the other leg to

prevent it from being infected. He consulted another doctor who treated the amputated leg

effectively so that the other leg did not have to be amputated. ‘Invitus” is in four quatrains, and it

serves to encourage people in moments of melancholy. Here Zora encourages Alwyn to be self-

reflective and courageous enough to do the right thing so that at the end of it all, he can boldly

declare that he does not subscribe to mediocrity because he is “the master of his fate and the

captain of his soul.”

In a conversation with Caroline Wynn, Alwyn suggests to her that he (Bles) is the best

person to defend the black race. Although Du Bois does not state the contents of Alwyn’s exact

address at the high school Commencement, readers learn from Caroline Alwyn’s reading of the

morning newspaper that Alwyn has viciously excoriated the Republican Party (322). Slochower

notes that in mythic discourse, “the myth addresses itself to the problem of identity, asking ‘who

am I?’ and proceeds to examine three questions that are organically related: ‘Where do I come

from?’ Where am I bound? And what must I do now to get there? In mythic language, the

problems deal with Creation, with Destiny and with the Quest” (15). Alwyn’s quintessential

concerns are with ‘the problem’, so by extension, the Negro Problem becomes subsumed in

myth. Alwyn’s three-year sojourn in the North is the quest; his destiny unfolds after his

castigation of the Republican Party machine as a result of which he has to return to the South to

deal with the problem of Creation—the swamp. As Slochower observes, “The myth also contains

the tradition of re-creation. Unrest, disquiet and revolt are as much part of man’s history as is the

tradition of idolatry. The culture hero in mythopoesis chooses his tradition, rejects the stultified

in favor of the creative roots in the past” (15). Alwyn rejects the Republican Party and Caroline

46

Alwyn and chooses to return to his roots in Tooms County to help improve the living conditions

of blacks in the South by helping in the cultivation of the Silver Fleece in the swamp.

The swamp is not only symbolic of superstition, alienation, and idolatry as the home of

Elspeth, the witch, but also it symbolizes the history of the Negro. The swamp in its uncultivated,

virgin state is akin to the beginning of creation, the golden age of humanity until Elspeth came to

occupy it when it became a symbol, as Rampersad points out, for “sloth, superstition, paganism,

and moral delinquency. It keeps blacks wrapped in the old miasmal mist of their pre-American

past” (120). Elspeth symbolizes the pre-American past of blacks as her witchcraft enables her to

foretell future events and cast spells on those who may incur her ire. As a result, the swamp

simultaneously symbolizes African tradition and European ideals. Du Bois juxtaposes the

salience of the principle of Kantian Enlightenment, German romanticism, and African

spirituality at the beginning of chapter six where he underscores the importance of universal

cosmopolitanism:

Far away the wide black land that belts the South, where Miss Smith worked and

Miss Taylor drudged and Bles and Zora dreamed, the dense black land sensed the

cry and heard the bound of answering life within the vast dark breast. All the dark

earth heaved in mighty travail with the bursting bolls of cotton while black

attendant earth spirits swarmed above, sweating and crooning to its birth pains.

(54)

In his exposition on universal enlightenment in Political Writings, Immanuel Kant surmises that

the way was being cleared for individuals to endeavor to elevate themselves from the path of

obscurity to enlightenment (58). Alwyn and Zora attain such an enlightenment in The Quest of

the Silver Fleece. As Hacken observes in his important address,

It is in the forest that forest-tale characters often lose their way and then find

themselves again as their life’s purpose becomes clear. The forest in question is

not a small tract of woodland. It is always immense, unbounded and unknowable.

The fairy tale forest of Germany has power to change hearts and destinies. It is a

meritocracy that distributes justice without regard to social class.

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Similar to the fairy tale forest of Germany that has power to change hearts and destinies, the

swamp in the Black Belt also has power to change hearts and destinies. Alwyn breaks up with

Zora in the swamp and reunites with her in the swamp. After Elspeth’s demise, the new

generation led by Zora and Alwyn purchases two hundred acres of the swamp land from Colonel

St. John Cresswell, where they plant and cultivate the Silver Fleece. Thus, before Elspeth’s

demise, the swamp represents the Negro in antebellum America. After her demise and the

purchase, the Negro is liberated to buy and own property, so the swamp becomes a period of

regeneration for blacks. Zora buys part of the swamp to enable black subjects to plant cotton, a

crop whose versatility and importance span the entire universe, hence, its symbolism as

cosmopolitan. The swamp is also a place of dreams, as any time Zora wants to dream, she goes

into the swamp; thus, the swamp signifies hope and the promise of some future happiness. In a

Freudian reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Good Man Brown,” Guerin,

Labor, Morgan, Reesman, and Willingham see the forest in the short story “as a place of wild,

untamed passions and terrors”; therefore, it has the attributes of the Freudian id. 13 A similar

reading is applicable to the forest in the swamp as it is where the white men go to drink and

indulge in amorous activities in The Quest of the Silver Fleece when Elspeth, the Medea figure,

was alive.

Cotton’s usefulness transcends the borders of every nation as it is used in the manufacture

of clothes and dresses, so it is not only a crop that symbolizes universal cosmopolitanism, but

also, it symbolizes humanism through the love, labor, pulchritude, and dignity of the black labor

class. Again, as Rampersad notes, “[C]otton is the symbol of virtue and self-reliance for the

black people. The communal acceptance of the burden of atonement is prefigured in the labor of

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Bles and Zora, before their estrangement, to grow a crop of the ‘silver fleece’” (The Art and

Imagination 121). To blacks in The Quest, cotton is their heart and soul; it is the source of their

joy and sorrow, labor and suffering, and the embodiment of all that is wonderful and amazing in

life. To satiate the world’s demand for cotton, the laborers work tirelessly because to them,

cotton is poetry and music in motion due to their sheer love for the Silver Fleece.

Du Bois opens chapter six in a phraseology that captures the cosmopolitan dimensions of

cotton:

The cry of the naked was sweeping the world. From the peasant toiling in Russia,

the lady lolling in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and the Esquimaux of

Alaska; from long lines of hungry men, from patient sad-eyed women, from old

folk and creeping children went up the cry, ‘Clothes, clothes!’ (54)

The universal cosmopolitan appeal in the opening of chapter six takes into consideration the

industry of Russian peasants, the casual lady peregrinating on the streets of London, people

performing ceremonial rituals in Africa, and the Eskimo in Alaska to illustrate that wherever one

lives on the globe, one needs clothes to wear, and the clothes are manufactured from the silver

fleece that serves as the raw material. As blacks work sedulously to satisfy the insatiable demand

for cotton to clothe the naked of the world, they are oblivious to anti-cosmopolitan characters

like the Cresswells, Colton the sheriff, and John Taylor, whose obsession with sustaining the

status quo of Southern white supremacy over black subjects serves as a cataract that blinds their

vision of Justice in the attainment of high culture by blacks.14 The anti-cosmopolitan zeal of the

Cresswells, Colton, and Taylor also bars them from appreciating the poetic beauty of the bolls

and the cathartic impact of the work songs of the laborers. Du Bois describes the sight and sound

of the laborers in action in alliterative discourse:

After the miracle of the bursting bolls, when the land was brightest with the piled

mist of the Fleece, and when the cry of the naked was loudest in the mouths of

men, a sudden cloud of workers swarmed between the Cotton and the Naked,

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spinning and weaving and carrying the Fleece and mining and minting and

bringing the Silver till the Song of Service filled the world and the poetry of Toil

was in the soul of the laborers. Yet ever and always there were tensed silent

white-faced men moving in that swarm who felt no poetry and heard no song, and

one of these was John Taylor. (54-55)

Yet before Zora’s acceptance of her communal atonement, she must also go on her own quest to

the North, a quest that is precipitously antithetical to that of Alwyn.

After confessing to Alwyn that Harry Cresswell had defiled her as a result of which

Alwyn considered her impure and fled to the North, Sara sends Zora to go and live with Mrs.

Vanderpool as her maid. Before she goes to live with Vanderpool, Zora unfolds her deep love for

Alwyn in a conversation with Sara. Zora tells Sara, “You were born in ice, in clear strong ice;

but I was born in fire. I live—I love; that’s all” (182). Here Du Bois probably is alluding to

Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./From what I have tasted in

desire/ I hold with those who favour fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I

know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would

suffice.15

Zora’s self-referential proclamation as an avatar of fire is a simple categorization of herself as

burning in loving sensation for Alwyn who at the time had deserted her to Washington, DC after

learning of her so-called impurity. In spite of Mrs. Vanderpool’s earlier aversion to the aspiration

and attainment of high culture by black folk, she becomes overly impressed with Zora when she

moves in with her. In the company of Mrs. Vanderpool, Zora moves North to New York and

then to Washington, DC, where she is encouraged to read voraciously to help develop her

creative skills. Du Bois points out that with Mrs. Vanderpool, Zora’s “language came to be more

and more like Mrs. Vanderpool’s; her dress and taste in adornment had been Mrs. Vanderpool’s

first care, and it led to a curious training in art and sense of beauty until the lady now and then

found herself learner before the quick suggestiveness of Zora’s mind” (247). Zora, as an

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autodidact, buries herself in books to learn more and more about the world. Zora’s insatiable

reading leads to a universal cosmopolitan humanism in the development of her intellect as “her

heart cried, up on the World’s four corners of the Way, and to it came the Vision Splendid”

(251). Similar to Du Bois who dines with Shakespeare and Plato and Dumas in The Souls of

Black Folk, Zora “gossiped with old Herodotus across the earth to the black and blameless

Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendor of the swamp;

she listened to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia--”16 (251). Zora’s gossip

with Old Herodotus is an allusion to lessons Zora has learned on Greek and African history as

Herodotus was a Greek, largely regarded as the world’s first historian and story teller who also

wrote on Africa.

Initially, Zora began as a primitive young girl who at the age of twelve was filled with

idealistically somatic impression about black subjectivity: “Zora, a child of the swamp, was a

heathen hoyden of twelve untrained, wayward years” (The Quest 44). “We black folks is got the

spirit. We’se lighter and cunninger; we fly right through them; we go and come again just as we

wants. Black folks is wonderful” (46). Zora’s proclamation that black folks got the spirit is an

allusion to Ethiopianism and delineates Du Bois intent in the novel by combining African

spirituality, European mythology in the forms of Hellenism and Hebraism, and German

romanticism. Du Bois also extends his poetic presence in Zora to include literature, philosophy,

and geography. The more Zora reads, the more enlightened she becomes; through her reading,

she becomes knowledgeable about the French Revolution and enjoys reading literary works by

Balzac and Dumas. She also reads the Bible and acquaints herself with the trials and tribulations

of Jeremiah even as history books inform her of the inglorious ambitions of Mary of Scotland

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and the courage of Joan of Arc. Above all, reading helps Zora to become enlightened and edified

as a result of which she wins the respect of even Kings:

She saw the drunken Goths reel upon Rome and heard the careless Negroes yodel

as they galloped to Toomsville. Paris, she knew,--wonderful, haunting Paris: the

Paris of Clovis, and St. Louis; of Louis the Great, and Napoleon III; of Balzac,

and her own Dumas. She tasted the mud and comfort of thick old London, and

wept with Jeremiah and sang with Deborah, Semiramis, and Atala. Mary of

Scotland and Joan of Arc held her dark hands in theirs, and Kings lifted their

scepters. (251-2)

The universal cosmopolitan imagery that Du Bois subsumes Zora in is the “Vision Splendid,”

and it prefigures the great work she would accomplish for Negroes in Toomsville on her return.

After Mrs. Vanderpool divulges to Zora that Mr. Vanderpool has been nominated to the position

of U.S. Ambassador to France and wanted to know if Zora would accompany them, with a

promise to further her education in one of the renowned universities in Europe, Zora declines and

decides to return to Tooms County. Unbeknownst to Zora, Mrs. Vanderpool wrote a check of

$10,000 for her, part of which she later uses as security deposit to purchase the swamp land.

When later on, Colonel Cresswell wants to cheat Zora and collect the land from her, she becomes

her own attorney and successfully defends herself.

The girl-child who started as a twelve-year-old product of the swamp returns as a fully

blown cosmopolitan subject, full of enlightenment and humanity. When she takes Alwyn to her

cabin in the swamp, he sees an impressive metamorphosis of the lass he left in a hurry for DC:

The room was a unity; things fitted together as if they belonged together. It was

restful and beautiful, from the cheerful pine blaze before which Miss Smith was

sitting, to the square-paned window that let in the crimson rays of gathering night.

All round the room, stopping only at the fireplace, ran low shelves of the same

yellow pine, filled with books and magazines. He scanned curiously Plato’s

Republic, Gorky’s Comrades, a Cyclopedia of Agriculture, Balzac’s novels,

Spencer’s First Principles, Tennyson’s Poems. (399)

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The books are a curious mix to delineate the universal knowledge of Zora from the Philosophy of

Plato to the fiction of Balzac to portray her development from a primitive and innocuous young

girl to a universal cosmopolitan figure, filled with a desire to serve. Rampersad notes that the

careful selection of the books Zora reads that includes Balzac novels denotes a poetic presence of

Du Bois in Zora: “Only near the end does the reader discover that Du Bois has a lofty place for

literary fiction in his ideal vision of the world. In his black heroine’s library, side by side with the

writings of Plato, [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson, and [Edmund] Spencer, among others, one finds

copies of Balzac’s novels” (“Foreword to the 1989 Edition” 1). However, earlier in the novel, Du

Bois mentions that Zora gossips with Alexandre Dumas, the French novelist who wrote The

Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The books are also a mélange of cosmopolitan

variety in substantiation of Zora’s love for liberal arts and interest in industrial training. She

carefully selects the books to reflect her cultural elevation as well as her epistemological and

philosophical leanings. In both New York and Toomsville, Zora meticulously selects books that

would be sources of her wisdom and intellectual edification. The books on the shelves in her

cottage in the swamp are an erudite collection Zora proudly refers to as her university (399). Du

Bois extends the cosmopolitan sensibility that sees him transcend the Veil in The Souls of Black

Folk to Zora in The Quest. Du Bois states:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm

with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in

gilded halls. I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come

graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the

Veil. (The Reader 157)

In a similar cosmopolitan fashion, Zora’s engagement with Plato, Balzac, Gorky, Spencer, and

Tennyson unleashes her love of the arts, so she becomes knowledgeable to dwell above the Veil.

Zora’s reading of Plato is possibly Du Bois’s response to the debate as to where he

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borrowed his dialectics style from. In the Republic, Plato developed the dialectic, a method of

logical argumentation that addresses conflicting ideas or positions. When used in the plural,

dialectics refers to any mode of argumentation that attempts to resolve the contradictions

between opposing ideas.17 In the realm of novelistic conventions that are grounded in Western

literary tradition, Du Bois allows Zora to read Alexandre Dumas to demonstrate his knowledge

and affection probably for The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) and The Three Musketeers (1844),

melodramatic novels in which the tension between good and evil is emphasized. Although The

Quest of the Silver Fleece is not read as a melodramatic novel, some of the characteristics

associated with melodrama play out in the novel. Melodramas have heroes and heroines whose

impeccable morality contends with abominably evil antagonists. Romantic plots are

compromised by crafty villains as well as by happy endings in which poetic justice requires that

evil be punished and good rewarded. Zora’s reading of Alfred, Lord Tennyson is suggestive of

Du Bois’s retention of the concept of an ideal life away (in place and time) from the busy life of

a complex contemporary society.

The plot of Tennyson’s Idylls of King (1859), an epic, is grounded in Arthurian lore. In

the narrative poem, Tennyson rejects the idyll’s pastoral mode with the ideal life. Zora and

Alwyn live such an ideal life in The Quest while Edmund Spencer’s affection for the epic genre

prompted him to write many epics that are considered as monographs in English literature,

including Amoretti (1595) and The Faerie Queene (1590). Spencer was an English Renaissance

writer who wrote “golden eclogues,” which are a form that features a child who brings about a

regeneration of nature and the return of a golden age. Zora functions as a child who develops to

bring about a regeneration of nature and the return of a golden age with her purchase of the

swamp and the cultivation of the silver fleece in it in Toomsville. Furthermore, Honore de

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Balzac and Maxim Gorky are part of Zora’s collection. Balzac is noted as one of Europe’s

exponents of realism of which Father Goriot (1835) is an example while Gorky was one of

Russia’s writers credited with social realism, which is a mode of representation characterized by

class struggle. At the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, Gorky called on writers to

“make labor the principal hero of our books.”18

Du Bois also introduces the epic conventions of deus ex machina to emphasize the epic

quality of The Quest. Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase literarily meaning ‘god from a machine’

and is used to describe a nonhuman force that intervenes to resolve a seemingly unresolvable

conflict in a literary work.18 When Zora purchases the land, she returns to the black church to

seek volunteers to come and help her clear it. However, a charlatan black preacher, filled with

jealousy and through a callously malevolent machination, forbids the church members from

going to assist Zora to clear the land. Although many of the congregation members promise to go

and help Zora, on the weekend designated for the clearing, nobody shows up. Suspicious, Zora

hears that the black preacher is having a revival in town, so she goes there to inquire the raison

d’etre of the sudden change of mind of the prospective volunteers. Zora is at the revival when all

of a sudden, “a sharp cry arose far off down toward the swamp and the sound of great footsteps

coming, coming as from the end of the world;” the footsteps are those of the band following an

old man, “tall, massive, with tufted gray hair and wrinkled leathery skin, and his eyes were the

eyes of death” (393). The old man moves closer to Zora and says “what Zora wanted to say with

two great differences: first, he spoke their religious language and spoke it with absolute

confidence and authority; and secondly, he seemed to know each one there personally and

intimately so that he spoke to no inchoate throng” (374). The “old man” deals meticulously with

the iniquities of some members of the congregation. He directs his gaze on the black preacher,

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accusing him that, like Dr. Faust, the preacher has sold his soul to the devil for a pittance:

“You—you—ornery hound of Hell! God never knowed you and the devil owns your soul!”

(374). The old man then promises the congregation of salvation and leads them to the swamp to

help Zora with the clearing. This act of deus ex machina adds to the cosmopolitan humanism of

The Quest even as it clearly substantiates the epic dimensions of Du Bois’s debut novel.

Furthermore, the presence of the old man in the church could be Jesus Christ himself since He is

the only one who promises salvation and echoes the vignette in Darkwater: Voices from within

the Veil, “Jesus Christ in Texas.”

The Quest is replete with instances of poetic justice, which becomes a cosmopolitan ideal

because it ensures that good deeds are rewarded, and evil deeds are punished. Because acts of

deviousness such as scheming, lying, rebelling, and discrimination subvert ideals of rational

cosmopolitanism, poetic justice becomes a useful literary convention in any analysis that focuses

on cosmopolitanism. Thus, Harry Cresswell’s wife, Mary gives birth to a still-born monster as a

result of the “sins of his fathers.” Harry first contracts syphilis, so his wife gives birth to a

deformed child. Mr. Vanderpool dies from apoplexy on the arrival of the Vanderpools in France

for him to assume his position as the United States ambassador to that country. Apparently, Mr.

Vanderpool dies because Mrs. Vanderpool blackmails Mary Cresswell by betraying her to

Caroline Wynn, and Colonel Cresswell is compelled to leave part of his estate to his illegitimate

black daughter, Emma and to Sara’s school that he and his son vehemently oppose in the novel.

In addition, Du Bois continues with administration of poetic justice when Tom Teerswell, a

black journalist who uses his position to undermine the efforts of Alwyn, as a result of jealousy

that is borne out of Caroline Wynn’s rejection of him in favor of Bles, is also punished.

Consequently Teerswell is not allowed to marry Caroline Wynn after she jilts Bles; it is Sam

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Stillings who is rewarded by marrying Caroline. Johnson, who is the Uncle Tom in the novel is

killed when he is caught carrying one of the weapons used in killing some members of a white

mob going to attack the liberated black community Zora and Alwyn have created in the swamp,

and so too is Rob who refuses to listen to the counseling of Alwyn to hide his gun, so together

with Johnson, they are framed and killed.

The Judeo-Christian vision of history Bell claims informs Black American values is also

vivid in the novel. As a matter of fact, what Arnold classifies as Hebraism, Bell calls Judeo-

Christian vision of history. In DC, Zora hears of Alwyn’s engagement to Caroline Wynn as a

result of which her heart is broken. Alwyn’s initial rejection of Zora results in the latter’s visit to

the Congregation Church where she hears the preacher extolling the virtues of the New

Testament: “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world,” quoting from St.

John chapter one, verse 29 (294). The preacher continues: “Life is sin, and sin is sorrow. Sorrow

is born of selfishness and self-seeking—our own good, own happiness, our own glory. As if any

one of us were worth a life! No never” (294). Included in the preacher’s sermon is the following

invocation:

Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away sin. Behold the Supreme Sacrifice that

makes us clean. Give up your pleasures; give up your wants; give up all to weak

and wretched of our people. Go down to Pharaoh and smite him in God’s name.

Go down to the South where we writhe. Strive—work—build—hew—lead—

inspire! God calls. Will you hear? Come to Jesus. The harvest is waiting. Who

will cry: ‘Here am I, send me!’ (294)

On hearing the sermon, Zora overcomes her grief, and in spite of Mrs. Vanderpool’s promise that

she would take her to Paris, where she would have the opportunity to study for five years, Zora

makes up her mind to return to the South to help in the redemption of her people.

Sara, the New England school matron in Tooms County, is the epitome of culture in the

novel whose universal humanism is rooted in the Kantian Enlightenment tradition because of her

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belief in using education to liberate her black students. Alwyn starts schooling at the age of

fifteen while Zora begins at twelve at the Sara Smith School, which was not unusual at the time

the novel was published in 1911. Sara has the cosmopolitan desire to see the souls of everyone

get enlightened—be they white, black, brown, or yellow—as her school becomes the purveyor of

the ideals of culture, which is an important feature in universal cosmopolitanism. Du Bois points

out that in Sara’s “imagination the significance of these half-dozen gleaming buildings perched

aloft seemed portentous—big with the destiny not simply of a county and a State, but of a race—

a nation—a world” (22). Through Sara, Alwyn and Zora are transformed into cultural icons, as

they are trained to appreciate the edifying ideals of black culture even as they appropriate both

liberal and industrial education.

Perhaps Edward Said’s assertion on culture best defines Sara as the embodiment of

culture in The Quest of the Silver Fleece: “Historically one supposes that culture has always

involved hierarchies; it has separated the elite from the popular, the best from less than the best.

It has also made certain styles and modes of thought prevail over others. But its tendency has

always been to move downward from the height of power and privilege in order to diffuse,

disseminate, and expand itself in the widest possible way” (228). Said’s delineation of culture is

a form of reverse osmosis in which Sara shapes the rough edges of the protagonists’ cultural

traits. Sara ensures that Alwyn and Zora acquire the cultural training that helps them become

important members of their race; she trains them to become enlightened and edified so that they

could live exemplary lives in the attainment of the Hebraic and Hellenistic goal of redemption

for blacks in the South. Their interest in industrial education inspires them to turn part of the

swamp, which in its virgin state symbolizes a place of wild, untamed passions so signifies all that

was superstitious, ignorant, sloth, and provincial about black culture into a cosmopolitan symbol,

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worthy of admiration by growing the silver fleece on it. When the need arises for money to pay

for Zora’s education, Zora and Alwyn use part of the swamp to plant the silver fleece to that

effect.

The sight of the newly cultivated cotton field is a source of burgeoning sanguinity and

pride for Zora. For “in the field of the Silver Fleece, all her possibilities were beginning to find

expression. These new-born green things hidden far down in the swamps, begotten in want and

mystery, were to her a living wonderful fairy tale come true” (125). Alwyn’s and Zora’s

appreciation of their culture manifests itself in their singing the song of their ancestors on seeing

the lovely blossoming of their silver fleece. When they see the bursting of the bolls, their joy

reaches a crescendo, and “they burst into singing; not the wild light song of dancing feet, but a

low, sweet melody of her fathers’ fathers’ whereunto Alwyn’s own deep voice fell fitly in minor

cadence” (128). Both protagonists prove that “the alternative of not dying like hogs is not dying

like snarling dogs. It is rather conquering the world by thought and brain and plan; by expression

and organized cultural ideals” (“The Field and Function of the Negro College” 100). In the above

quotation, Du Bois alludes to Claude McKay’s salient poem of the Harlem Renaissance “If We

Must Die” in which McKay encouraged blacks and minorities to be bold and courageous to

defend themselves if attacked by white mobs during the red summer scare of 1919. The defense

put up by the liberated community in the swamp echoes McKay’s poem. However, after

harvesting the cotton, Harry cheats Zora out of the profit.

Critically, the notion of embracing difference, irrespective of the transnational problems

associated with it, is rooted in Immanuel Kant’s idea of universal cosmopolitanism. In his essay

“The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1794), Kant advances nine

theses in which he specifically aligns a universal template enshrined in civic responsibility for

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the realization of a just and equitable social and political order. Kant states in his fifth

proposition: “The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature compels

him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally” (Kant:

Political Writings 45). As has already been mentioned, Cheah has argued that “What Kant calls

‘universal cosmopolitan existence’ refers to nothing less than the regulative idea of ‘perfect civil

union of mankind’” (23). Throughout his lifetime, “Nature” propelled Du Bois to advocate a

“universal civic society” for the oppressed in America and the colonized races of Africa, Asia,

and the Caribbean. Furthermore, in his 1784 pioneering essay, “An Answer to the Question:

What Is Enlightenment?” Kant theorizes that the quintessential objective of Enlightenment must

be liberty and rationality: “For Enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the

freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all--freedom to make public use of one’s

reason in all matters” (Kant: Political Writings 55). In the trans-figuratively useful arena of

American and global democratic politics, Du Bois did exercise the right of using his analytical

reasoning skills poignantly and publicly in dislocating and debunking some of the myths

associated with black and minority subjectivity. In a Kantian cosmopolitan discourse, Du Bois

linked African American subjectivity and dignity to the quest of freedom, even after

emancipation because long after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, black

and minority subjects were not totally free.

In “The Conservation of the Races” (1897), Du Bois calls for racial pride predicated on

culture, pointing out that the destiny of African Americans “was not a servile imitation of

Anglo-Saxon culture but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly further Negro ideals”

(The Oxford Reader 41). On the basis for the need of an ontological and teleological bulwark of

African American culture, DuBois positions culture as the center in the spatial realm of black

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and minority subjectivity. In Bruce Robbins’ insightful introduction to Cosmopolitics, he

unequivocally cites culture as central to cosmopolitanism because “like diaspora,

cosmopolitanism offers something other than a gallery of virtuous eligible identities” (12). By

calling for African American culture to intertwine with mainstream American culture, Du Bois

had hoped for an appreciation of black cultural forms such as music to pave the way for

dignifying black subjectivity and in the process, neutralize the oppressive politics of his day.

Thomas C. Holt has also argued fluidly on the importance of African American culture as a

means to survival in a ruthless society:

By the time Hector St. John Crevecoeur composed his famous Letters from an

American Farmer in 1782, celebrating ‘the new man, this American,’ there was

no group more representative of his portrayal of the melding of diverse ethnicities

into a new nation than Americans of African descent. Arising in response to the

everyday challenges of living, cultural syncretism proved a potent, even if

unconscious, strategy in a brutal and alien environment, while creatively

preserving at least some core ancestral values. Cultural syncretism was not a

moral choice for African Americans, but an imperative creative response to the

problem of survival and life. (81-2)

Furthermore, James Clifford has also suggested that there should be a “focus on hybrid

cosmopolitan experiences on how culture is produced through travel relations and local/global

historical encounters” (22). Du Bois advances a dual national culture in The Souls of Black Folk

in anticipation of its leading to new cultural identities carved in universal cosmopolitan

humanism. In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, as Caroline Wynn intimates, Sara transplants New

England conscience on to the tropical heart of Alwyn through an osmotic reversal that results in

culture diffusing from a high arena to a low one. Rampersad infers a universal cosmopolitan

frame of the novel: “In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, hatred or cynicism concerning whites as a

body is synonymous with a primitive ignorance or a corrupted soul. The unschooled Zora

exemplifies the first, and the sophisticated Caroline Wynn the latter. Du Bois criticizes white

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society, holding only Ms. Smith as a moral hero” (123-4). Du Bois’s criticism of white society is

in regards to ‘the problem’ of the color line that Mary Taylor tries to efface early in the novel but

which has persisted even beyond the twenty-first century. Bell has also argued that Du Bois was

seemingly influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder’s theory that stipulates folk art as the

capstone of a culture’s civilization. Herder postulates that “folk art is the foundation of high art

and the folk song represents spontaneous, indigenous expression of collective soul of a people”

(Bell 388). Thus, Alwyn and Zora sing the song of their fathers’ fathers during the harvest of the

cosmopolitan product, the silver fleece to suggest an indigenous expression of their collective

souls.

This chapter argues that Du Bois’s debut novel is metaphorically rich in doomsday

scenarios to render The Quest as a novel in which the dialectics play a crucial role to ensure the

triumph of cosmopolitan humanism. The Quest shares some similarities with Du Bois first

published work of fiction, “Of the Coming of John,” his first short story. The short story and the

novel all have white characters antagonistic toward the advancement of blacks with Colonel St.

John Cresswell and his son, Harry; Sheriff Colton, Reverend Boldish, Bocombe, and Mrs.

Vanderpool, initially, in The Quest playing the roles of traditionalists just as Judge Henderson,

the Postmaster, and the rest of the white folk in “Of the Coming of John” exhibit fierce

antagonism to any intention of the pursuit of high culture by blacks. The difference, however, is

that there is no white woman to challenge the hegemonic reification the whites envelope the

blacks in “Of the Coming of John,” but in The Quest, Sara “trusts blacks more than whites” and

calls the elder Cresswell “a fool, his son a rascal, and his daughter a ninny” (34). In the process,

Sara returns the same stereotypical assumptions that some whites harbor against black

subjectivity to the Cresswell’s. A classic case of illustration is Mrs. Vanderpool’s reference to

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black students as “funny little monkeys” who must be trained to become “cooks and maids” (23).

On the contrary, Sara regards black people as “God’s sort, not the sort that think of the world as

arranged for their exclusive benefit and comfort,” so in her cosmopolitan zeal, she educates black

children because she wants to “live in a world where every soul counts—white, black, and

yellow” (24). Although The Quest resonates with apocalyptic doomsday leanings, Alwyn has a

lover, Zora, with whom he eventually ties the knot. Both Alwyn and Zora are trained to become

culturally proficient in their traditions, with Sarah and later Mrs. Vanderpool, being the

embodiment of cultural transfusion in the novel.

Through Du Bois’s appropriation of dialectics, he created characters such as the

Cresswells and Colton to subvert the theme of universal cosmopolitan humanism in The Quest of

the Silver Fleece. Du Bois’s portrayal of the prevailing Western hegemonic conditions in the

novel renders St. John Cresswell as Justice of the Peace and his son, Harry, as the bailiff, and

with Colton as the sheriff, they try as much as possible from seeing black subjects and other

minorities as equals who deserve similar rights and privileges as whites enjoy. For example,

when Zora takes the Cresswells to court to authenticate the land she bought from the Cresswells,

she has no hope in the judicial system to adjudicate a case in favor of a black subject against a

powerful white man. Alwyn advises Zora that they should go to Montgomery for a first class

lawyer to help defend them against the Cresswells because as he puts it, “The land is legally ours

and he has no right to our cotton” (409). Zora responds: “Yes, but you must remember that no

white man like Colonel Cresswell regards a business bargain with a colored man as binding. No

white man under ordinary circumstances will help enforce such a bargain against a prevailing

public opinion” (409). Paul Gilroy discusses the subjugation of black subjectivity in The Black

Atlantic in which he suggests that the traumatic lived experiences of diaspora subjects transmute

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into an alchemic cultural history that perpetually has to be re-envisioned to ensure the dignity of

the oppressed. The creation of the cultural history, Gilroy argues, becomes antithetical to the

project of nationalism and acts as a counter-culture to modernity. As Gilroy points out in the

preface of The Black Atlantic, “Different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history

fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational formations…of the black Atlantic”

(ix).

In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois reconfigures the stifling conditions in

antebellum America as the Cresswells are cast in the mold of plantation owners. However,

through education and training by Sara, Alwyn and Zora transcend the veil, and through a fiery

independence, reminiscent of the new American, they establish their own progressive

community in the black belt to render The Quest a modernistic novel. Crevecoeur also came up

with the idea of America as a melting pot in his letter, an idea that infers cosmopolitanism: “Here

individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one

day cause great changes in the world” (186). Still, probably because Alwyn and Zora are

interested in liberal and industrial training, they attain redeeming qualities in life, informed by

the Hebraic values of good conduct and obedience and Hellenistic ideals of pragmatism in which

they see things as they really are, so they qualify to be included in an appropriation of the values

inherent in the representative American. The swamp gives substance to the old myth for Alwyn

and Zora. In this sense, the description of America by Guerin, Labor, Morgan, Reesman, and

Willingham aptly applies to Alwyn and Zora and their relationship with the swamp: “From the

time of its settlement by Europeans, America was seen as a land of boundless opportunity; a

place where human beings, after centuries of poverty, misery, and corruption, could have a

second chance to actually fulfill their mythic yearnings for a return to paradise” (186).

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Closely related to the Myth of Edenic Possibilities is the concept of the American Adam

as the Mythic New World man. In the American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis describes the type as:

a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual

emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by

the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant

and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his

own unique and inherent resources. (qtd. in Guerin, et al 187)

Alwyn’s radical defiance against the Republican Party in DC, Zora’s courageous contestation

against the Cresswells in court, and the cultivation of the swamp, echo the American Adam.

Gilroy has posited that “[t]he theory of modernity necessarily pursues the sustained and

uncompromising interrogation of the concept of progress from the standpoint of the slave” (113).

In The Quest, Du Bois exposes the untoward conditions akin to antebellum America that initially

inhibit the determination and commitment of Alwyn and Zora to help dismantle the antiquated

beliefs and stereotypes about black and minority subjectivity in the novel. The importance of

peeling off these layers of hegemony in African American texts could not have been emphasized

more by Toni Morrison, who encourages critics, scholars, students and readers to spare the novel

from “its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the

fundamental innocence of Americanness and instead to incorporate its contestatory, combative

critique of antebellum America” (A Handbook of Critical Approaches 285).

The Quest could also be read as Du Bois’s critique of the mistreatment of women and his

re-envisioning of the plantation politics that existed in antebellum America, which can be a

cosmopolitan agenda because as Appiah argues,

The cosmopolitan agenda focuses on conversations among places: but the case for

those conversations applies for conversations among cities, regions, classes,

genders, races, sexualities, across all the dimensions of difference. For we do

learn something about humanity in responding to the worlds people conjure with

words in the narrative framework of the novel: we learn about the extraordinary

diversity of human responses to our world and the myriad points of intersection of

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those various responses. If there is a critique of the Enlightenment to be made, it

is not that the philosophers believed in human nature, or the universality of

reason: it is rather that they were so dismally unimaginative about the range of

what we have in common. (225)

Seemingly, in Toomsville, black women and other women in the minority are not included in the

conversations across difference and to compound the problem of their marginalization, they must

conform to an institutionalized violence enmeshed in patriarchal hypocrisy that endorses their

sexual violation. In that scenario, Harry deflowers Zora and later on, abuses his wife, Mary even

as his father, St. John, fathers an illegitimate child with Bertie. Such marginalization is informed

by Michel Foucault’s notion of Panopticism in which he posits that the panopticon is a project of

exclusion in which minorities are denied from benefiting from society’s privileges. Thus, those

in the panopticon are gazed upon perpetually by those outside of it, the dominant, to render those

in it as ossified objects. In a metaphor of constriction, Foucault writes:

The gaze is alert everywhere. A considerable body of militia, commanded by

good officers and men of substance, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in

every quarter to ensure prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute

authority of the magistrates, as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion.

(195-6)

Du Bois, in deciding to symbolically highlight the plight of minorities in hegemonic societies in

novels “understood racial differences in behavior, custom, and outlook to be products of

different social environments and histories” (The Reader 132), and Alwyn and Zora embrace

these racial differences to render them in the realm of Kantian universal cosmopolitanism

because of their belief in the “regulated civil union of mankind.”

Furthermore, in the construction of universal cosmopolitan landscape in the German

Romantic tradition, music plays an important role since it has the traction to transcend race and

class boundaries to unite people because it is part of folk culture. Although Du Bois likes

classical music, his fascination was with African American music (the sorrow songs), its

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universality, and the profound impact it has had on mainstream American culture, so his

protagonists sing the sorrow songs in The Quest. As he confesses in his Autobiography (1968), in

Germany, Du Bois “was a little startled to realize how much what [he] had regarded as white

American, was white European and not American at all: America’s music is German, the

Germans said; the Americans have no art, said the Italians; and their literature, remarked the

English, is mainly English” (157). Du Bois dedicates the last chapter in The Souls of Black Folk,

“The Sorrow Songs” to African American music, its origins, and its influence. Du Bois opens the

last chapter in The Souls of Black Folk by stating, “They that walked in darkness sang songs in

the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart” (The Reader 231). The heaviness

of heart of the enslaved made them sing elegiac songs full of lamentation, detailing their plight in

the New World. The uniqueness and profundity of the sorrow songs motivated Du Bois to state:

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself

stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in

vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro

folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole

American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born

this side of the seas. (The Reader 231)

Du Bois gave the sorrow songs the tag of “sole American music” because the music America

called its own, back then, was classical music, which was a European import. The sorrow songs,

however, were created from the suffering and pain the enslaved endured on American soil, so

they became authentic American music; Du Bois avers the cosmopolitan universality of the

sorrow songs: “In these songs . . . the slave spoke to the world” (234). The enslaved spoke to the

world, including America in their songs, but Du Bois complained that the messages in the sorrow

songs were fleeting in the imaginations of people who should know better because those who

sang the songs when they were first heard by Northerners were ragged, rugged, and philistine.

Du Bois argues that the sorrow song of the Negro was in the 1830s relegated to the shadowy

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penumbra of American music and was given little reverence in American cultural disposition

because it was mischaracterized and misunderstood as such. He writes: “It has been neglected, it

has been, and is, half despised, and above all it was persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but

notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest

gift of the Negro people” (The Reader 231). “Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of

these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty” (231-2). If

Higginson and McKim introduced the sorrow songs to America and the world, the Fisk Jubilee

Singers popularized them to the world as they “sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s

heart that it can never wholly forget them again” (The Reader 232). For this reason, Du Bois was

of the firm conviction that the slave songs were the single most important addition from African

American culture to American culture because they were created here in America, a cultural

syncretism borne from experiences of jagged terrains whose lyricism rendered the music

simultaneously sorrowful, melodic, and cathartic. Thus, the sorrow songs become a strain of

universal cosmopolitanism in The Quest as both Zora and Alwyn sing the song of their fathers’

fathers when they see the gorgeous bloom of the Silver Fleece.

Furthermore, “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” chapter nine in The Souls of Black Folk is

equally situated in the realm of universal cosmopolitanism as well as in the spiritually cultural

landscape of Hellenism and Hebraism and together with “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”

serve as prequels to The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Du Bois devotes “Of the Wings” to the city

of Atlanta that had become the hub of the cotton industry in the world. In a sentimental

delineation, Du Bois captures the rise and decadence of the city and attributes Atlanta’s fall from

grace to the rapaciousness of her residents. The chapter is Du Bois’s call to black subjects for

caution against an obtuse obsession with wealth because it could lead to a life devoid of the

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Hellenistic ideals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, virtues Du Bois believed lead to the ultimate

end of redemption. Du Bois also heralds an apparent Atlanta that is a beacon of hope to many:

[T]hey of Atlanta resolutely strove toward the future, and that future held aloft

vistas of purple and gold—Atlanta, Queen of the Cotton Kingdom; Atlanta,

Gateway to the land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and

woof for the world” (140).

The cosmopolitan nomenclature of cotton due to its universal appeal became a promise of

hope to the rest of America, so the “Nation talked of its striving” (The Reader 140).

However, although Du Bois panegyrized the cosmopolitan opulence of Atlanta because of the

silver fleece, he was wary of the avarice that drove the ambitions of men in the chase of the

silver fleece just as the chase of the Golden Fleece led many people to their doom. In the spirit of

intertextuality, Du Bois narrates the Grecian myth of Atalanta to explain the probable cause of

the city’s decline:

Atalanta, the fair maiden who was hitherto indomitable and invincible was

finally outwitted by Hippomenes simply by capitalizing on Atlanta’s love of gold

to outpace her and in the process, Hippomenes deflowered her chastity and

stained the Sanctuary of Love. All Hippomenes had to do was to throw three

golden apples that served as red herring to have Atalanta digress from the race to

pick up the golden apples. After the third throw, Hippomenes caught up with

Atalanta, and “looking on each other, the blazing passion of their love profaned

the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. (The Reader 140)

Indeed, Du Bois’s substitution of silver fleece for the Golden Fleece is his play on the Greek

tradition to draw attention to the terrible consequences that could emanate if individuals

abandoned the pursuit of knowledge to pursue wealth. Du Bois was concerned that an excessive

obsession with wealth could corrupt the soul and circumvent folks from seemingly striving to

attain the ultimate redemption that is the aim of both Hebraism and Hellenism.

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If “Of the Wings of Atalanta” admonishes the consequences of avarice, Du Bois’s intent

in signifying on the myth of Jason and the Argonauts that he narrates in “Of the Quest of the

Golden Fleece,” is a call for the study of the conditions of minorities in the Black Belt:

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so

much easier to assume that we know it all. And yet how little we really know of

these millions—of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and

sorrows, of their real short-comings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we

can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale

arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in

training and culture. To-day, then, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of

Georgia and seek simply to know the black farm-laborers of one county there.

(The Reader 171)

Du Bois initially felt that by predicating his explanation of the Negro Problem on the Classic

Greek tradition, the problem would attract more global sympathy. However, after the publication

of his study on African history, published as a monograph in The Negro, Du Bois’s philosophy

on Hebraism and Hellenism shifted, and the focus became more on African and Oriental

traditions in his second novel, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928).

Du Bois changed his mind on many of his ideas, ideologies, and philosophies, but one

phenomenon that remained constant throughout his life was the importance of culture in the

affairs of humanity and in the attainment of equality because of its reverse osmotic quality. He

wrote in 1960 in “Whither Now and Then,” “What I have been fighting for and am still fighting

for is the possibility of black folk and their cultural patterns existing in America without

discrimination; and on terms of equality” (150). It could be argued that the thematic frame of

culture in Du Bois’s treatises and its axiological imperatives are a counter-hegemonic strategy

that attempts to dislocate feelings of supremacy inherent in ethno-centrists and bigots like the

Cresswells and Sheriff Colton. In other words, by grounding his treatises on the need for equality

and dignity through culture syncretism, Du Bois critiqued the hegemony, provincialism, and

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indignity that informed the mistreatment of black subjects and other minorities. Moreover, in

“The Meaning of Education,” an unpublished speech that, according to Aptheker, he gave in

either 1944 or 1945 and currently published in Against Racism, Du Bois signifies universal

humanistic ideals informed by European Neo-Classical Enlightenment ideals as such. In this

lecture, Du Bois states inter alia . . . “[K]nowledge, reason, feeling and taste make up something

which we designate as Character and this Character it is which makes the human being for which

the world of technique is to be arranged and by whom it is guided" (252).

In relation to Du Bois and cosmopolitanism, Posnock states in “The Dream of

Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,” “Cosmopolitanism regards culture as public

property and nurtures the capacity for appropriation as a tool for the excluded to attain access to

a social order of democratic equality” (802). In this sense, Du Bois was the arch architect who

directed his talent and genius to fighting for black and minority subjects to “gain access to a

social order of democratic equality.” Evidently, it is fair to argue that Du Bois’s chapter in The

Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Quest for the Golden Fleece” that examines the quest of the modern

Golden Fleece in Atlanta is another reminder of the impact Greek art and tradition had on Du

Bois’s writing. “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece” is a chapter that unfolds a perfect storm of

hopelessness, decadence, and uncertainty that gripped the black labor class in Atlanta after

Emancipation and the salience of the universal symbolism of cotton.

Finally, H.W. Donner observes that “the community of goods that reason recommends to

the Utopians must be excelled in the spiritual community. It is not our institutions that we must

destroy, but those evil passions which are at the root of the abuses. The Utopia does not attempt a

final solution of the problems of human society—for More was too wise to attempt the

impossible—but it contains an appeal to each one his share to mend our own selves and ease the

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burden of our fellow men to improve mankind” (Introduction: Turner 12). In the same vein, Du

Bois’s excoriations against racism, discrimination, imperialism, and colonialism were directed at

people with ethnocentric mindsets whose passions were fueled and matched by their rapacious

stimuli toward power and opulence. Indeed, just like More, Du Bois was too enlightened to

attempt the impossible, for he simply argued for the catholicity of the white, dark, brown, and

yellow races to live and enjoy life without fear or intimidation. In this regard, Rampersad

suggests that “politics was only one part of [Du Bois’s] philosophic pragmatism and only one

goal of his imagination. He lived politically but also spiritually in a dualism of mind and act

forced on him by the pressure of American reality” (201). Furthermore, as Fredric Jameson

points out in his conclusion to “Cognitive Mapping,”

Achieved cognitive mapping will be a matter of form, although its own possibility

may well be dependent on some prior political opening, which its task then will

be to enlarge culturally. Still, even if we cannot imagine the productions of such

an aesthetic, there may nonetheless, as with the very idea of Utopia itself, in the

attempt to keep alive the possibility of imagining such a thing. (356)

Du Bois foresaw such political openings, not only for black subjects in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece but also for the dark, brown, and yellow races in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean in Dark

Princess. Through what I term as cosmopolitan mental mapping, he was able to dream of

protracting the cultures of the colored races, hence, his extension of the Negro Problem to the

gamut dark, brown, and yellow races of the world. If Freud saw the pleasure principle as the

driving force of human life, Du Bois viewed human life as driven by economics. In that context,

Du Bois saw The Quest of the Silver Fleece as a novel of economic study in which he critiques

the avarice, callousness, and manipulative tendencies of capitalism, but obviously the thematic

framework of The Quest richly extends far beyond the peripheries of simply an economic study

towards a humanistic goal, one that affirms the universality of cosmopolitanism in the West.

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NOTES

1. See also chapter 9 in Dusk of Dawn, for his admission that he saw The Quest of the Silver

Fleece more as an “economic study of some merit,” 269.

2. Contrast with Anderson and Moss 56-7; Oliver 32-46; Rogers 121.

3. Many writers also have discussed the theme of socialism in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

See Wienen and Kraft 66-85.

4. Du Bois devotes an entire chapter, “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece” to the Greek myth

in The Souls of Black Folk in which he calls for the study of the Negro Problem in the South. See

chapter 8.

5. Zamir has posited the importance of Du Bois as central to a broad understanding of the

dialectical and comparative understanding of African American and European American

traditions.” See Zamir, “Introduction,” 4.

6. See Rampersad in The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois 6.

7. For a comprehensive analysis, see Bell in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition 20.

8. For a more liberal view on cosmopolitanism, see Appiah and “Cosmopolitan Reading” 197-

228.

9. See Hacken for a delightful treatment of the forest in his address.

10. For more on the possibility of creating Utopia, see Jameson and “Cognitive Mapping”

347-357.

11. Charles Sumner was instrumental in passing the first Civil Rights Act of 1873.See Charles

Sumner. “History.” Web.

12. See Hacken’s Address, “Imagined Forest,” and how he makes an important connection on

the salience of the forest to German identity. Web.

13. See Guerin, et al for a detailed analysis.

14. For more information on the metaphorical cataract, see chapter 1 of Soyinka’s Of Africa.

15. Zora has read Edmund Spencer, so it is possible the fire and ice reference could be his

thirtieth sonnet. See Spenser’s Amoretti (1595).

16. Du Bois ends chapter six, “Of the Training of Black Men” with a paragraph rich in

Hellenism and Hebraism as he summons Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas, Aristotle, and Aurelius.

See The Souls of Black Folk.

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17. For a possible Platonic influence on the source of Du Bois’s dialectics, see “Dialectic” in

Murfin and Ray.

18. For more information on “deus ex machina” see Murfin and Ray.

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CHAPTER II

DISCREPANT COSMOPOLITANISM

IN DARK PRINCESS: A ROMANCE

By the time W.E.B. Du Bois published Dark Princess: A Romance in 1928, a number of

occurrences, including World War I, the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, and the rise of

Communism had culminated in shifts in his worldview politically, both at home and abroad.

Those events reshaped the political and cultural landscape globally, so they necessitated a

reworking of Du Bois’s politics and ideologies. Dark Princess is a reflection of some of Du

Bois’s philosophical shifts, shifts involving his ideological metamorphosis from the Western

idealism and Kantian Enlightenment discourse that informed universal cosmopolitanism in The

Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) to a discrepant cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess: A Romance.

As Herbert Aphteker notes,

Du Bois had changed after the publishing of The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Du

Bois—with such experience as the First All-Races Congress of 1911, the war

years, the Pan-African movement, the NAACP, and travels abroad—thought

increasingly in global terms and had shed much of the benevolent, elitist,

philosophically idealist approach that had marked his earlier period.1 (7)

As Jennifer Terry also observes,

Du Bois’s fiction was undoubtedly increasingly informed by international themes and

global politics. Dark Princess appeared at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, a

period of great creativity associated with the clustering of blacks from all over the

diaspora in Manhattan, causing Harlem to be dubbed the ‘Race Capital of the World.2

(60)

Indeed, universal humanism as seen in The Quest is unable to establish itself as capable of

providing an ideal and normative space for cosmopolitan subjects to realize their objective of an

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egalitarian order, free of imperialism and injustice; consequently, Dark Princess follows a

critical path towards discrepant cosmopolitanism, one that shifts from a Kantian universalism

rooted in Western philosophical Idealism. In Routes, James Clifford’s definition of discrepant

cosmopolitanism is “the displacement and transplantation of diasporic cultures that have become

inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction”

(36). Clifford also defines discrepant cosmopolitanism as “a comparative approach to particular

specific histories, tactics, and everyday practices of dwelling and travelling” (36). From this

perspective, Clifford’s definitions of discrepant cosmopolitanism become useful tropes to

analyze Dark Princess. The conflation of Matthew Towns, Princess Kautilya, the Chinese

couple, the Japanese, the Egyptian couple, the Arab, and Indians in Berlin to discuss matters

pertinent to America, Asia, Africa, and Europe constitutes a comparative rendering of particular

histories, tactics, and everyday dwelling and traveling.

Furthermore, in a re-envisioning of Clifford’s postulation on discrepant cosmopolitanism,

Bruce Robbins situates his definition of discrepant cosmopolitanism in the spatial realm of

actually existing particularities that cognitively impact cosmopolitan subjects. Robbins states that

“[i]nstead of renouncing cosmopolitanism as a false universal, one can embrace it as an impulse

to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend a particularity that is itself partial,

but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples. The world’s

particulars can now be recoded, in part at least, as the world’s discrepant cosmopolitanisms”

(259). Racism, imperialism, and colonialism are some of the world’s “particulars” that compel

discrepant cosmopolitanism to be the focus in the analysis of some of the controversial issues.

The discursive strategies among members of the Great Committee involve decolonization from

imperialism and the need to topple Western aristocracy as rulers of the world. In such discursive

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matters, members of the Committee exhibit an impulsive shared knowledge of their individual

experiences or particularities to engage the partiality of racism and colonization.

Before Du Bois published The Quest in 1911, he had traveled to Europe on three

occasions, these being his studies in Germany from 1892 to 1894, his participation in the Paris

Exposition of 1900, and his attendance of the Congress of Races in London in 1911. However,

between the end of the Great War in 1918 and 1928 when he published Dark Princess, he made

four trips, trips he describes as “of extraordinary meaning—to Europe and Africa.”3 (269). Du

Bois reveals: “I could scarcely have encompassed a more vital part of the modern world picture

than in those stirring journeys. They gave me a depth of knowledge and a breadth of incalculable

value for realizing and judging modern conditions and above all the problems of race in

America”4 (269). Du Bois’s evaluation of modern conditions and the problems of race in

America are what he extends to inform the discrepant cosmopolitan framework of Dark

Princess. In fact, even Du Bois former professors at Harvard understood the salience of his

extension of the problems of race in America globally. Again, Apthteker notes that Du Bois’s

“whole purpose in life was to defeat the forces of racism and obscurantism, of repression and

oppression” (6). On his fiftieth birthday, a decade before the publication of Dark Princess, Du

Bois invited some of his former professors and mentors to dinner, including William James and

Albert Bushnell Hart, where Hart complimented him with these words: “Out of his fifty years of

life, I have followed him for a good thirty—and have counted him always among the ablest and

keenest of our teacher-scholars, an American who viewed his country broadly”5 (269). As Terry

points out, “The rupture of World War 1, in which many black soldiers served, in addition,

brought African Americans a heightened awareness of their place in a wider world. Dark

Princess, with its action spread across America, Asia, and Europe, its featuring of a racially

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composite Great Council of Darker Peoples . . . unquestionably broke new ground in American

letters” (60). Du Bois’s broad view of imperialism in Europe, racism in America, colonization in

Africa and Asia, undergirds the discrepant cosmopolitan framework of Dark Princess.

Critics like Ross Posnock, Paul Gilroy, and Charles Briggs who weave the tapestry of

their essays with the thread of some of the variants of cosmopolitanism in analyzing Du Bois’s

fiction and other texts, paint a veritable picture of Du Bois as an excellent fiction writer. From

the perspectives of some of Du Bois’s critics, Rampersad claims that Dark Princess is a “queer

combination of outright propaganda and Arabian tale, of social realism and quaint romance, a

challenge to the casual reader. Du Bois’ creative faculty, straining to accommodate the variety of

his interests, could find satisfaction only in an arrangement of fluted arguments and multiple

themes” (204). Still, Rampersad critiques Du Bois and Dark Princess: “In fashioning the work,

Du Bois resisted the vogues and trends of the decade—the cabaret school of Harlem, the new

amorality in American life and letters. If Dark Princess as a result seems old fashioned or

clumsily tailored, the novel’s failings are only partly owing to the limitations of Du Bois’s fictive

gift and his lack of creative practice” (218). On the contrary, it is possible that a close reading of

Dark Princess would reveal Du Bois’s creative genius, as he probably had in mind, the writing

of a novel that would satisfy the requirements of the literary genre of the new age—

modernism—so he includes a minister’s visit to a cabaret with Towns and the latter’s flint with a

cabaret dancer that all constitute part of the amorality of the new age.

Writing on the lack of recognition some scholars give to Du Bois’s art, Bill Mullen

substantiates the Asian and African connections in Dark Princess that displace the Western

tradition, which informs The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Mullen notes that “Du Bois’s best novel,

Dark Princess, was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, but in part because of its

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focus on events outside of the U.S.—Berlin, India, and Japan—has rarely been considered a key

text to the Harlem Renaissance”6 (x-xi). Sydney Bufkin, in a useful analytical appraisal of Dark

Princess, suggests that “Dark Princess’s engagement with the romantic tradition indicates a

deliberate and sustained effort to theorize romance as integral to the novel’s utopian future and to

enact that theory through the novel’s formal structures” (63). Furthermore, Bufkin argues, “That

engagement calls on us to read Dark Princess not as pastiche or poorly executed propaganda, but

as a novel that thoughtfully considers the relationship between fictional modes and social and

racial progress” (63). I also argue that the utopia in Dark Princess is deferred to the future

because of the nationalistic fervor and aristocratic underpinnings of the Great Committee except

Kautilya, whose conjugal consummation with Matthew Towns results in the birth of the black

messiah and messenger to substantiate the utopian futurism of the novel. Bufkin’s analysis is an

important work because it provides a disparately crucial textual analysis of Dark Princess,

although he does not treat his analysis of Dark Princess from the vantage position of discrepant

cosmopolitanism. Posnock suggests that “Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism was marginalized because

he defamiliarized the term by rejecting its typical connotations of an apolitical leisure class. But

by the time Du Bois had published Dark Princess and Color and Democracy, black

cosmopolitanism, Marxism, and other projects had already challenged this definition”7 (qtd. in

Briggs 91).

On the need for a reexamination of Dark Princess, of the many variants of

cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism is the most relevant because in the novel, the

world view of Du Bois shifts from universal humanism to a shared epistemology among

members of the Great Committee. Charles Briggs avers that “recent challenges to purification,

such as Homi Bhabha’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ Appiah’s ‘rooted cosmopolitanism,’ and

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scholarly attention to the status of many contemporary cosmopolitans as ‘victims of modernity’

whose rootlessness is forced and impoverished have also helped open up a space in which Du

Bois’s projects can emerge” (92). This space is where discrepant cosmopolitanism steps in as a

useful revolutionarily literary trope in the analysis of Dark Princess. Claudia Tate suggests that

if Du Bois’s “critics had judged the novel according to the values of eroticized revolutionary art

instead of the conventions of social realism, they probably would have celebrated Dark Princess

as a visionary work” (ix). Tate also points out that the poetic presence of Du Bois in Dark

Princess allows critics and scholars to reconstruct many of his “private feelings, beliefs, and

longings.” From that perspective, Mary White Ovington who also attended the 1911 Congress

suggests a source for Princess Kautilya in a review she wrote on Dark Princess:

I think I saw the Indian Princess in 1911 as she came down the steps of the

ballroom at the last meeting of the First Universal Races Congress in London. I

thought her the loveliest person there, except perhaps the darker daughter of the

Haitian President, Legitime. And by the Princess’ side was one of the most

distinguished men of the Conference, Burghardt Du Bois. They were talking

earnestly, of course, of the race problem. Did this Indian Princess remain in the

American Negro’s memory to become the Titania of his Midsummer Night’s

Dream? (qtd. in Aphteker 8)

Du Bois’s discussion of the race problem with the Indian Princess in London possibly gave him

the idea of creating a black male protagonist to conjugate symbolically with an Indian Princess in

Dark Princess so that the darker races would give to the world a black millennial messiah, even

if symbolically.

Equally possible is the idea that Du Bois believed in a shared commonality between

African and Asian cultures, so he fictionalizes his belief through the conjugal consummation

between the Maharani of India and an African American medical student. Throughout his life

time, Du Bois’s passionate conviction was to engender the elevation of the darker races in Asia,

America, Africa, and the isles of the sea above the Veil of racism and colonialism in order for the

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colored worlds to be part of the broad conversation in American and global politics. As Du Bois

notes,

We cannot reverse history; we are subject to the same natural laws as other races,

and if the Negro is yet to be a factor in the world’s history—if among the gaily-

colored banners that deck the broad ramparts of civilization is to hang one

uncompromisingly black, then it must be there by black hands, fashioned by black

heads and hallowed by the travail of two hundred million black hearts beating in

one glad song of jubilee. (The Reader 42)

The two hundred million black hearts beating in one glad song of jubilee are the darker

races of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the seas whose efforts at decolonization occupied

Du Bois’s political agenda throughout his life time.

Furthermore, the role of women in Dark Princess is a reflection of Du Bois’s support for

the rights of women, a passionate support that can situate Du Bois, on hindsight, as a proto-

feminist. In one of the essays in Darkwater, “The Damnation of Women,” Du Bois assigns the

role of the symbolic Great Mother to women just as he does in The Quest and in Dark Princess.

From Kautilya through the Chinese woman to Sara Andrews and Towns’s mother, Kali in Dark

Princess and Zora as well as Sarah Smith in The Quest, women illustrate their creative talents

and the singular ability and intuition to make the world a better place for all, be it through talent

and conjugation, superior intelligence, sheer compassion, or even through the crafty

manipulation of others, as Sara Andrews and her predecessor, Caroline Wynn exhibit in Dark

Princess and The Quest, respectively.

Politics in Chicago captures Du Bois’s imagination, and he also excoriates the greed of

capitalism by linking domestic economic expansion to colonialism and imperialism, an

avaricious expansion, he argues in Dusk of Dawn that led to World War I.8 Du Bois also singled

out the rapaciousness of capitalism as the cause of the Great Depression of 1929. Du Bois opines

that “[t]he chief and only obstacle to the kingdom of economic equality which is the only logical

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end of work, is the determination of the white world to keep the black world poor and make itself

rich. The disaster which this selfish and short-sighted policy has brought lies at the bottom of

[the] depression and too, its cure lies beside it” (“The Field” 99). Here Du Bois seems to be

echoing Marx’s castigation of the rapaciousness of the bourgeoisie and the counter cosmopolitan

desire to dislocate industry and in the process, take advantage of the masses on a global scale.

This chapter examines Dark Princess with the trope of discrepant cosmopolitanism and Du

Bois’s shift from the Western imperialism that brought about two world wars and instead focuses

on Asia and Africa as a critique of Enlightenment values. A close reading of Dark Princess is

effected with the literary lens of modernism. By extending African American culture into the

realm of cosmopolitanism, Du Bois’s proclamations about the dearth of quality in educational

opportunities to the oppressed and his lamentations on the poverty inflicting many blacks and

colored nations became discrepant cosmopolitan concerns. Through the close reading of Dark

Princess: A Romance, chapter two argues that universal cosmopolitanism grounded in Kantian

Enlightenment values in The Quest of the Silver Fleece is replaced by discrepant

cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess. However, Du Bois’s quest for a futuristic world and an

egalitarian social, political, cultural and economic world order for the dark peoples of the world

fail to materialize.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Discrepant Cosmopolitanism,

and Dark Princess: A Romance

When Du Bois opens chapter two of The Souls by envisaging a cosmopolitan theme and

extending the “Negro Problem” to the darker and lighter-skin peoples in Africa, Asia, and the

isles of the sea, he critiques a misconception of white supremacists in The Souls of Black Folk to

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the extent that “education that encourages aspiration that sets the loftiest ideals and seeks as an

end, culture and character rather than bread winning is the privilege of white men and the danger

and delusion of black folk”9 (149). Du Bois’s refashioning of the Negro Problem from local and

national to transnational renders it cosmopolitan, so his concerns about lack of opportunity to

diasporic subjects for cultural advancement became concerns rooted in discrepant

cosmopolitanism. As Mark A. Sanders argues, “The often-quoted line ‘the problem of the

Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line’ couches the new century in binary terms,

dividing white and black, citizen and non-citizen, have and have-not; thus raising the question of

the extension of the Enlightenment experiment” (142). Du Bois seemingly attempted an

imaginative representation of global events partly through allegory and partly through the

concept of Utopia in Dark Princess, but his protagonist, Matthew Towns’s inability to complete

his education (medical school), renders him incapable of becoming the black messiah, as a result

of which Du Bois seeming utopian project in the novel goes largely unfulfilled.

In this sense, the spiritual redemption of the dark races to bring about an egalitarian order

in culture, education, economics, and politics presumably falls on the shoulders of Towns’s son,

Madhu. As a result, Madhu is proclaimed as the future messenger and the messiah. Madhu as the

future messiah and messenger is an allegorical echo of Jesus Christ. Madhu’s birth is the

precondition for his Asian-black cultural alliance to engender the process of attaining egalitarian

status for the darker races. As Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson point out, “In 1928, Du Bois

published Dark Princess, an allegory of efforts of Black and Asian radicals to resist colonialism

and build national and international movements during and after the war” (xiii). Furthermore, it

can be argued that Du Bois’s global configuration of the Negro Problem in Dark Princess and

the conjugal affiliation between Towns and Princess Kautilya that results in the birth of the black

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messiah was created out of his imagination for the possibility of an equal social, economic,

cultural, and political order for the “colored peoples” of the world through an African and Asian

alliance. Again, Mullen and Watson observe that “[for] Du Bois, Afro-Asian unity was a racial,

cultural, and economic imperative necessitated by what he perceived as the central dynamic of

the twentieth century: white and western domination of colored people” (xiv). Tate has also

argued that “Dark Princess is central to an appreciation of the passionate convictions that

empowered [Du Boi’s] stunning accomplishments” (ix). Shamoon Zamir opines that “Dark

Princess is a peculiar blend of realism and romance, pursuing a narrative of an affair between an

African American hero and an Indian maharani within an international setting that moves

between the United States, Europe, and Asia in its explorations of race, class, and colonialism”

(3).

Written at the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois, as one of the spiritual

godfathers of the African American cultural movement, possibly wanted to contribute fictionally

to the Zeitgeist of the Renaissance--Modernism, hence, his description of Dark Princess as his

favorite novel. Aphteker has claimed that by 1924, “the impact of the Harlem Renaissance was

being felt and Du Bois—with Alain Locke—was the parent of that movement. Du Bois was both

mentor and inspiration of that Renaissance, with the example of his life and work and the

influence of his spoken word and written words” (Intro. to Dark Princess 3). Sanders, writing on

the connection between the Harlem Renaissance and modernism, notes that “the modernism to

which New Negroes contributed was a multivalent, often discursive era, capable of expressing

unbridled optimism and chronic despair in the same breadth.” Sanders continues,

It was a moment that saw World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as

both the end and the beginning of modern Western civilization, an era that

celebrated democratic renewal, cultural plurality, and the potential in

mechanization, urbanization, and migration. And yet it was a moment that

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lamented the death of Christianity, the indeterminacy of language, and the demise

of the cohesive self. (129)

Dark Princess, at once, is a novel in which cultural plurality is celebrated; democratic renewal is

adorned; urban problems are extant through corrupt politicians, and migration is adored. As

Jennifer Terry suggests, “Du Bois’s protagonists may sometimes have parochial origins, but the

modernity they confront is frequently a cosmopolitan one, the consciousness they develop

diasporic, and the politics they adopt outward looking” (59). Dark Princess is also a novel in

which Du Bois deliberately resorts to Asian spirituality and African ritual and a prohibitive lack

of cohesiveness is extant in the protagonist until he meets the dark princess, speak of the novel’s

modern nomenclature.

Divided into four parts, “The Exile,” “The Pullman Porter,” “The Chicago Politician,”

and “The Maharajah of Bwodpur,” Du Bois’s second fiction is deprived of the traditional

beginning, middle, and end plot lines of realist novels to render Dark Princess as an

experimental work in modernism. Instead of chapters, Dark Princess has “Parts,” with each part

of the novel detailing a peculiar problem associated with the Negro Problem in America, a style

that also renders the novel as a hypertext. “The Exile” section is about the problem of the

education of the Negro in traditional white institutions and the psychic fragmentation of the

protagonist. “The Pullman Porter” part illustrates economics, the lynching of blacks and other

minorities in America, and underground efforts to eviscerate the Ku Klux Klan while “The

Chicago Politician” section details problems associated with urban politics in Chicago that

witness the rise and fall and rise again of Towns, and the last part, “Maharajah of Bwodpur”

unfolds a reemergence of Princess Kautilya in the life of Towns and how clearly Towns displays

indeterminacy in language and in his objectives in his communication with Kautilya, but

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Kautilya’s role as a feminine agent of power helps redeem Towns, with the end culminating in

the birth of the black messiah and messenger, Madhu.

Revisiting Clifford’s and Robbins’s definitions of discrepant cosmopolitanisms

simultaneously as the interaction between transplanted diasporic cultures that become

inseparable from often specific and violent histories culturally, politically, and economically and

discrepant cosmopolitanisms as a shared cognitive appreciation of diverse cultures, which may

be partial, are emblematic of Dark Princess. Axel Schaefer also argues that Du Bois’s

conception and perception of culture are grounded in his experience of faith, exile, and self-

transcendence. In this sense, Dark Princess becomes a product of Du Bois’s exilic imaginary in

which his “romantic conception of culture [seeks] to uncover authentic cultural expressions and

gifts of refined racial groupings” (Schaefer 108). Du Bois’s attempt to dislocate the West and

undermine activities of white supremacist groups through a black and Asian coalition in Dark

Princess is a discrepant cosmopolitan venture. Moreover, the portrayal of the Negro Problem in

Dark Princess published during the Harlem Renaissance adheres to what Sanders calls “the

celebration of the radically contingent nature of reality, aesthetic experience as the link between

art and social progress, the promotion of inter-ethnic exchange and cultural pluralism and the

dismantling of binaries in the service of democratic ideals all complemented and supported New

Negro political agendas and artistic pursuits” (137). Sanders also claims that for Du Bois, “the

central question for the modern moment was whether it would extend or restrict the

Enlightenment vision of universal human development” (142). Clearly, the Enlightenment vision

of universal human development is restricted in Dark Princess, so the University of Manhattan’s

refusal to educate black students to become obstetricians became a blight on the Enlightenment

vision, and a problem for discrepant cosmopolitanisms.10 In Daniel Singal’s words, “Modernism

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represents an attempt to restore a sense of order to human experience under the often chaotic

conditions of twentieth century existence” (qtd. in Sanders 130).

In Dark Princess, modernism deepens the novel’s connection to discrepant

cosmopolitanism. Du Bois opens part one of the novel with Towns aboard the Orizaba to Europe

in a depiction of the protagonist as a fragmented soul. In an omniscient point-of-view style, Du

Bois reveals Towns’s internal monologue and tension, the result of his abdication of his

education, as he stands on the deck of the ship, replaying his confrontation with the Dean of the

University of Manhattan. The replay makes extant his obfuscated feelings about the Obstetrics

Department’s refusal to allow colored students to register for obstetrics, a required course. The

Dean remarks rhetorically with a question, a remark that quickly exposes the callousness of the

educational system to Towns: “Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger

doctor delivering their babies?” (Dark Princess 4). On hearing this statement, Towns knows the

die has been cast for him, so his “fury burst in bounds” and capitulates to the Western hegemonic

constrictions imposed on members of his race because of the inevitable and inimitable badge of

color they wear. Towns’s ambition to become an obstetrician that was grievously thwarted

because white women patients would not allow colored doctors delivering their babies was just a

microcosm of the dilemma that Negroes aspiring to higher education faced in traditional white

institutions of higher learning. The problem of education in Dark Princess falls under the

purview of discrepant cosmopolitanism because of the inseparability of diasporic cultural

experiences with the violent history of slavery.

For diasporic subjects to be allowed to get an education is a universal humanist virtue,

but the denial of it is a problematic that falls under the lenses of discrepant cosmopolitanism.

Towns reveals his frustration with the Western hegemonic system in a terse letter to his mother,

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a letter that echoes Du Bois’ soliloquy in Darkwater when he was returning to the ‘nigger-

hating’ United States after two years of studies in Germany. Towns writes: “I’m through. I

cannot stand it and will not stand America [any] longer. I’m off” (Dark Princess 5). Towns

would not stand America any longer because of the systemic racism in educational policies

toward Negro education at the time that motivated Du Bois to propagate his educational treatises

on the importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Du Bois captures

the salience of HBCUs in Dark Princess regarding Towns’s impression on two of his classmates,

Jones and Phillips, in a revelation to Kautilya in Berlin, a revelation that exposes Towns’s

internecine feelings about members of his own race: “In the medical school there were two other

colored men in my class just managing to crawl through. I covertly sneered at them, avoided

them. What business had they there with no ability or training?” (Dark Princess 12). However, in

Berlin, Towns realizes the predicament and dilemma of Southern blacks in their quest for higher

education, the result of the blatant and dogmatic Southern white educator’s refusal to educate

black subjects, making some of them to become autodidacts: “I see differently now. I see there

may have been a dozen reasons why Phillips of Mississippi could neither spell nor read correctly

and why Jones of Georgia could not count. They had no hardworking mother, no Hampton, no

happy accidents of fortune to help them on” (Dark Princess 12). Towns, unlike Phillips and

Jones, got his training at Hampton, a Historically Black College or University, so he was well

prepared to attend medical school, which is clearly an allusion to the importance of Historically

Black Colleges and Universities. In relation to Southern blacks and Southern white teachers, Du

Bois complains bitterly in “Of the Training of Black Men,” one of the essays in The Souls:

“Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had.

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If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given

them was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers” (150).

Just like Du Bois’s reflective pronouncement on America while in Berlin, Towns is also

compelled “to look at the white leviathan—at that mighty organization of white folk against

which he felt himself so bitterly in revolt. It was the same vast, remorseless machine in Berlin as

in New York” (Dark Princess 7). The white leviathan allusion echoes Thomas Hobbes

seventeenth century work, Leviathan that argues for the supremacy of royalty over republicanism

because of the chaotic conditions in their society at the time. Hobbes postulates in the Leviathan

(1651) that in the absence of a coercive power (the King or Queen), during periods of

uncertainty, man’s desire for power is insatiable, so life becomes “solitary, nasty, brutish, and

short.” Hobbes postulates in Chapter 13:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is

uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the

commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no

instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no

knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no

society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and

the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Towns’s leviathan allusion is present in both Berlin and New York; therefore, it becomes

a critique of the Western hegemonic and imperialistic conditions in American and

European democratic politics that preempted white supremacists to impose their will on

the system in America and in Europe with the seeming connivance of the Federal and

imperial governments. Towns becomes symbolic of the contradiction of double aims that

confront black scholars in The Souls of Black Folk. As Du Bois posits,

The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his

people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge

which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The

innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing

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and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the

beauty revealed to him was the soul beauty of a race which his larger audience

despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. (103)

In his moment of melancholy, Towns ponders over a past life that until then “he never dreamed

how much he loved that soft brown world which he had so carelessly, so regretfully cast away.

What would he not give to clasp a dark hand now, to hear a soft Southern roll of speech, to kiss a

brown cheek?” (Dark Princess 7). Before coming to Berlin, Towns had debunked his African

American culture just like the invisible man in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In Berlin,

however, Towns realizes the salience of a romantic vision of expressive cultural traits and gifts

and falls into a homely nostalgia. The concern is that if Towns would not be allowed to become a

gynecologist because white women patients would not appreciate black doctors delivering their

babies, could he not have argued or told the Dean that he would deliver only brown, black, and

yellow babies? Apparently, he did not because of his belief in a non-existent equality that made

him spuriously think that being an obstetrician taking care of only yellow, black, and brown

women was in itself unjust. Towns’s initial rejection of his culture is a discrepant cosmopolitan

problem because he refused to take into consideration the psychological impact of the violent

history in which his expulsion is grounded.

In the artistic imagination of Du Bois, protagonists that alienate themselves from the

values and beliefs of their own, pay a price for the rejection of their own cultures. Obviously,

Towns’s punishment was his prevention from taking a course that would have led to his

delivering white babies. It is that moment of Towns nadir, that low ebb in the flow of life’s tidal

wave that his eyes caught the radiant beauty, Princess Kautilya in the Viktoria bar. The sight of

Kautilya in Towns’s moment of melancholy is Du Bois way of linking black and Asian ideal as a

counter discourse in the dislocation of European imperialism. As Mullen and Watson argue,

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“Afro-Orientalism may be understood as a counter discourse to a modernity which

simultaneously threatened blacks and Asians with perpetual subjugation, exploitation, and

division and yet, dialectically, made both visible and urgent the need for Afro-Asian unity” (xiv-

xv). The Afro-Asian unity to confront colonization and racism occurs in an allegory of Towns’s

rescue of Princess Kautilya from a white American male. Towns rescues Kautilya from a

swashbuckling white American male who has hedged a bet that he could court her. When Towns

cast his eyes on Kautilya for the first time in the bar, he is unable to muster enough courage to

approach her although she is the only dark beauty in the Viktoria. In Towns’s vacillating moment

of indecision, a white American male approaches Kautilya, but she does not like his impudence,

so she leaves the café. The white man, however, arrogantly follows her outside with the intention

of succeeding in wooing her to win a bet he has hedged. Towns sees his opportunity, so he

follows them outside and intervenes with a blow that lands in between the man’s ear and his

mouth, when the white American attempts imposing himself on the Princess as she sat in a taxi

cab. Fortunately for Towns, a waiter thought the two were a couple, so he pushes Towns into the

cab to join Kautilya in the waiting taxi, and the two are whisked away. The white American

represents the West and its inherent superior sensibility, so Towns’ successful rescue of Kautilya

from the white American is symbolic of the displacement of Western ideals in Dark Princess

with Afro-Asian ideals. Through Kautilya, Towns eventually is able to reconstruct his identity to

redeem himself to pave the way for his admission into a cosmopolitan group, comprising two

Indians, two Chinese, an Egyptian and his wife, a Japanese, and an Arab, members of the Great

Committee of Dark Peoples. Members of the Great Committee, in the words of Schaefer,

represent defined racial groups whose romantic conception of culture seeks to encourage cultural

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expressions and gifts. The Committee is linked by a shared cognition, so Towns is only allowed

membership to the Committee after he has sung the Negro spiritual, “Go Down Moses.”

Clearly, as a result of sheer serendipity or destiny, Towns is able to meet the woman of

his dreams, a meeting that conjures in Towns’s memory an image of perfection of Kautilya’s

captivating beauty as it enthralls his imagination long after they had met. Du Bois notes that

Towns “could never quite recapture the first ecstasy of the picture, and yet always even the

memory thrilled and revived him. Never after that first glance was he or the world quite the same

again” (Dark Princess 8). Later, Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, tells Towns, “It had never

happened before that a stranger of my own color should offer me protection in Europe. I had a

curious sense of some great inner meaning to your act—some world movement” (Dark Princess

17). Kautilya’s admission that she is of the same color as Towns is an affirmation of Du Bois’s

impassioned conviction of a shared cultural heritage between Africa and Asia and the need for a

unified front to disorient imperialism and colonialism. Du Bois wrote in a 1935 essay, “India,”

The problem of the Negroes thus remains a part of the worldwide clash of color.

So, too, the problem of the Indians can never be simply a problem of autonomy in

the British commonwealth of nations. They must always stand as representative of

the colored races—of the yellow and black peoples as well as the brown—of the

majority of mankind, and together with Negroes they must face the insistent

problem of the assumption of the white peoples of Europe that they have a right to

dominate the world and especially so to organize it politically and industrially as

to make most men their slaves and servants. (Mullen and Watson xiii)

The partnership between Towns and Kautilya is emblematic of the Afro-Asian solidarity Du

Bois calls for in the essay to enable the colored races to challenge the assumption of the West

that it has the right to dominate the world. Thus, after Towns’s rescue mission, Kautilya invites

him to her house to meet the other members of the Great Committee of Dark Peoples “of those

who suffer under the tyranny and arrogance of the white world” (Dark Princess 16). At the

meeting, Kautilya tells Towns, “we represent here much of the Darker World. Indeed, when all

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our circle is present, we represent all of it, save your world of Black Folk” (Dark Princess19). At

the meeting, Towns is fascinated with the education and the cosmopolitan pedigree of the group

by virtue of their versatility in languages and cultural expressions of the members of the

Committee. Du Bois points out that Towns is “astounded at the ease and fluency with which

most of this company used languages so easily . . . They talked art in French, literature in Italian,

politics in German, and everything in clear English” (Dark Princess 19). When one of the

Committee members, M. Ben Ali, suggests that Towns is not black enough to represent black

folk, Towns’s response is a spiritual one that hints at the one-drop rule of yore that widened and

deepened what it meant to be black in America: “My grandfather was [black], and my soul is.

Black blood with us in America is a matter of spirit and not simply of flesh” (Dark Princess 19).

The spiritual elevation of black blood is suggestive of the ability of blacks to interact peacefully

with any racial group, so they embrace difference without any inhibitions.

After Kautilya confesses to her own mixed-race heritage for which reason “Pan Africa

belongs logically with Pan-Asia,” and that every member of the Committee is of “mixed race,” it

signifies on Du Bois’s extension of the Negro problem in America to the light and dark races in

Africa, Asia, America, and the isles of the sea (Dark Princess 19-20). Again, in 1935, Du Bois

alluded to the mixed race heritage of many African Americans, so Kautilya’s admission that she

and the Committee members are all of mixed-race heritage is a claim that links the yellow,

brown, and black races, and because of their diasporic subjectivity and their shared cognitive

experiences, they form a discrepant cosmopolitan grouping to transcend the particularities of

colonialism and racism. Du Bois writes, “American Negroes have in their own internal color

lines the plain shadow of a caste system. For American Negroes have a large infiltration of white

blood and the tendency to measure worth by the degree of this mulatto strain” (Mullen and

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Watson xii). Indeed, Terry accentuates that Du Bois’s second novel, Dark Princess, holds many

of the same elements and preoccupations of The Quest, but Dark Princess is “far more

international in terms of its understanding of political and economic systems” (50). The

Committee certainly understands political and economic systems as well as cultural systems that

become inseparable from diasporic origins. Furthermore, Terry observes that Dark Princess like

the essay “Criteria of Negro Art” can be seen as a “response to the Harlem Renaissance and

those contemporaries who disputed the politicization of art” (50). The “Criteria of Negro Art” is

an address Du Bois gave in 1926 extoling Harlem Renaissance writers to strive for Goodness,

Truth, and Beauty in their literature, for black artists must serve and limit their writing to all that

is excellent in black culture because “all art is propaganda despite the wailing of the purists.”

Du Bois states:

We want everything that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest

in us. We insist that our art and propaganda be one. We have a right, in our effort

to get just treatment, to insist that we produce something of the best in human

character and that it is unfair to judge us by our criminals and prostitutes. This is

justifiable propaganda. (310)

Du Bois’s complaint here is in relation to the specific violent history that perpetually denigrated

black subjectivity, so he called on Harlem Renaissance writers to portray only the positive side

of black culture in an attempt to displace the abject abasement of the past.

Equally impressive is the outpour of the deep knowledge of the members of the Great

Committee in art forms—Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism—art forms that graced

the age of modernism, but the Egyptian is more interested in classics because although “Picasso

alarms him and Matisse sets him aflame,” he hardly understands them (Dark Princess 20).

When the Egyptian wants to know what was being exhibited at the New Palace in Berlin,

Kautilya tells him, “The Congo is flooding the Acropolis,” a clear indication of the influence of

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black Africa on Europe so the need for parity among African and Asian cultures with European

cultures. (Dark Princess 20). The Committee members’ cosmopolitan affection also fascinates

Towns because they “knew art, books, and literature, politics of all nations, and not newspaper

politics merely, but inner currents and whisperings, unpublished facts” (Dark Princess 20).

Although Towns is at a loss on the subject of fine art, he displays his knowledge in medicine

when the Japanese man mentions Peyton Rous who was then experimenting in etiology. Francis

Peyton Rous was an American Nobel Prize winner in medicine after discovering the role viruses

play in the transmission of some form of cancers. Later on, the discussion shifts to the

dissatisfaction of the oppressed peoples of the world, and Du Bois’s projection of the color line

as the world’s problem of the twentieth century. The Japanese man surmises: “We ourselves

know no line of color. Some of us are white, some yellow, some black. Rather, is it not, . . . that

we have from time to time taken council with the oppressed peoples of the world, many of whom

by chance are colored?” The Japanese man in a tone reminiscent of colorism declares:

It would be unfair to our guest not to explain with some clarity and precision that

the whole question of the Negro race both in Africa and in America is for us not

simply a question of suffering and compassion. Need we say that for these

peoples we have every human sympathy? But for us here and for the larger

company we represent, there is a deeper question—that of the ability,

qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere.

(Dark Princess 21)

The Japanese man’s statement recalls Du Bois’s extension of the color line as a twentieth century

problematic in The Souls of Black Folk, and the questioning of the cognitive potentials of blacks

render the statement a discrepant cosmopolitan problem.

The questioning of the abilities, qualifications, and real possibilities of members of the

black race is a familiar tableau with which Towns is still grappling in lieu of his withdrawal from

medical school, not because he was not qualified and did not have the ability to study medicine,

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but he was disqualified merely on account of the Veil that separates him and the white world. On

hearing the Japanese man, Towns is taken aback: “Suddenly now there loomed plain and clear

the shadow of a color line within a color line, a prejudice within prejudice, and he and his again

the sacrifice” (Dark Princess 22). Here Towns recalls the deliberate separation of light skin

Negroes from dark skin Negroes in antebellum America to create division and dissension among

the Negroes. It is known as colorism. After the Japanese man’s statement, Towns accepts the

challenge to prove that he also has the ability and the cultural gift of expression just like any of

the Committee members by singing the Negro spiritual. But before he sings, Kautilya reports on

the state of Black America after visiting Moscow to attend a meeting. Kautilya proclaims to the

relief of Towns: “I cannot see that it makes great difference what ability Negroes have.

Oppression is oppression. It is our privilege to relieve it” (Dark Princess 22). After this

pronouncement, Kautilya reports on the state of Black America:

You see Moscow has reports—careful reports of the world’s masses. And the

report on the Negroes of America was astonishing. At the time, I doubted its truth;

their education, their work, their property, their organizations; and the odds, the

terrible crushing odds against which inch by inch and heartbreak by heartbreak,

they have forged their unfaltering way upward. If the report is true, they are a

nation today, a modern nation worthy to stand beside any nation here. (Dark

Princess 22)

Towns reacts to the report by resorting to what Clifford has called “a comparative approach to

particular specific histories, tactics, and everyday practice of dwelling and traveling;” that is

discrepant cosmopolitanism. As Towns points out, “We American blacks are very common

people. My grandfather was a whipped and driven slave; my father was never really free and

died in jail. My mother plows and washes for a living. We come out of the depths—the blood

and mud of battle. And from just such depths came most of the worth-while things in this old

world” (Dark Princess 23). On the inclusion of the report on the state of Black America that

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Kautilya brought from Moscow, Mullen notes that Du Bois probably got information from a

meeting the Soviet Communist International (Comintern) held in Moscow in 1922, which was

attended by black delegates from the United States, including Claude McKay and Brahman M.

N. Roy of India. Mullen argues that the Comintern meeting “would eventually become part of

the allegory of Dark Princess”11 (221).

The Japanese man questions the ability and qualification of blacks because of the

misconception about the inferiority of black subjects that was engendered by the violent history

of slavery, which still lingers on in the minds of many people, including the Japanese man.

Towns is overwhelmed with feelings of fragmentation but not alienation on hearing the Japanese

man’s misconception. In the midst of the aristocratic leanings of the group, Towns “felt his lack

of culture audible, and not simply of his own culture, but of all the culture in white America

which he had unconsciously and foolishly, as he now realized, made his norm. Yet withal

Matthew was not unhappy” (Dark Princess 24). Furthermore, the Committee exudes a powerful

sense of affiliation from Towns because “even if he sensed divided counsels and opposition, yet

he still felt almost fiercely that that was his world” (Dark Princess 24). As Du Bois points out in

“The Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater,

Most men belong to this world (the darker world. With Negro and Negroid, East

Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the

world. A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind

must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the

hands of the darker nations. (The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader 507)

Moreover, Towns feels the Committee is his world because in what amounts to reverse racism, it

“was humorous to Matthews to see all tables turned; the rabble now was the white workers of

Europe; the inferior races were the ruling whites of Europe and America. The superior races

were yellow and brown” (Dark Princess 25). This then is an evidence of Du Bois’s decentering

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of Europe as the nucleus of cosmopolitanism. The Japanese man, master of provocative

discourse, adds: “We are agreed that the present white hegemony of the world is nonsense; that

the darker peoples are the best—the natural aristocracy, the makers of art, religion, philosophy,

life, everything except brazen machines.” In his depiction of the darker peoples as the ones to

rule the world because they have power, gift, and wisdom, the Japanese man limits these

qualities to just colored aristocracy whose self-interest in “superior men of all colors—the best of

Asia together with the best of the British aristocracy, of the German Adel, of the French writers

and financiers—of the rulers, artists, and poets of all peoples” should make them eligible to rule

(Dark Princess 25). The Japanese man’s sentiments here allude to Japan’s empiric mission that

made her abandon her own ideals in favor of Western imperialism that brought about an

ambition to colonize Asia. Consequently, the Japanese man’s nationalism contradicts Du Bois’s

utopian desire for an egalitarian social, political, and economic order.

From these pronouncements, Towns quickly realizes the exclusionary strategy of the

Japanese man, so he asks him: “And suppose we found that ability and talent and art is not

mainly among the reigning aristocrats of Asia and Europe, but buried among millions of men

down in the great sodden masses of all men and even in Black Africa?” Towns follows his

question with another one, wanting to know if the revolution would still happen if ability and

talent and art are resigned to the masses of all men, including those in Africa, south of the Sahara

Desert. But it is Kautilya who chides in that “it would still come forth” (Dark Princess 25).

Having established the clear intentions of the Committee members and their aversion to Black

Africa except Kautilya, Du Bois critiques the arrogance of some members of the “yellow race”

who think of Black Africans as nothing but riff-raffs. The Egyptian squeals: “Pah!--Pardon,

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Royal Highness—but what art ever came from the canaille!” (Dark Princess 25). On hearing the

Egyptian utter this abominable statement,

[t]he blood rushed to Matthew’s face and closed his eyes, and with the movement

he heard again the Great Song. He saw his father in the old log church by the

river, leading the moaning singers in the Great Song of Emancipation. Clearly,

plainly he heard that mighty voice and saw the rhythmic swing and beat of the

brown arm. Matthew swung his arm and beat the table; the silver tinkled. Silence

dropped on all, and suddenly Matthew found himself singing, “Go Down Moses.”

(Dark Princess 25-6)

Towns’s rendition of his father’s song, the Great Song of Emancipation, is an invocation of the

importance of memory to the spiritual uplift of black people.

Memory plays an important functional role in “The Exile” section of the novel because at

the apogee of the slave trade, the slave masters persevered to erase the memories of Africans

brought to the New World by sentencing them to three years in solitary confinement where

attempts were made to acculturate the newly enslaved by teaching them English while they were

held incommucado from other members on the plantation. The process was known as

“Seasoning.” Towns’s mother remembers her West African ritual, Shango, which she performs

with Kautilya when she initially visits her in Virginia. Kautilya notes: “We prayed to God, hers

and mine, and out of her ancient lore she did the sacrifice of flame and blood which was the

ceremony of my own great fathers and which came down to her from Shango of Western Africa”

(Dark Princess 221). Here Du Bois reenacts the mutual particularities of Africa and Asia through

that common practice. Towns’s remembrance of the song of his father and his mother’s

remembrance of the Shango prayer of West Africa echo memory as an important marker in the

lives of black subjects to illustrate the retentive power of the brain, and that in spite of the

atrocious efforts of slave masters to make amnesia part of black ossification, black subjects still

have the ability to remember the past. As Briggs argues,

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Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism has sometimes been erased by assimilating him to a Boasian

genealogy of cultural relativism and race, sometimes by reducing his politics to an elitism

or racial relativism, and at other times by ignoring him altogether. Yet in seeking to

transform cosmopolitanism by linking it to global antiracist and anti-imperialist

vernacularisms, Du Bois challenged the ways in which both cosmopolitanism and

vernacularism have been constructed since the 17th century. (77)

Briggs seems to be suggesting Du Bois’s importance in cosmopolitan, colonial, and imperial

projects, because of his extension of the Negro problem and colonialism to cosmopolitanism in

an effort to displace the West from the center of cosmopolitanism. In so doing, Briggs seems to

be arguing that Du Bois challenges the very idea of excluding him from both cosmopolitan and

anti-racist and anti-imperial projects.

Through the education he received at Hampton, Towns learned to sing the Negro

spirituals, so in a single moment of dire need, he recalled the lyrics of the Great Song of

Emancipation to enable him graft his culture into the hearts and minds of members of the

Committee. The Egyptian’s reference to Black Africa as canaille, riff-raffs, who could not create

art, is an accusation that seemingly demoralizes Towns. However, the particularity of the Negro

Spirituals that somatically uplifts the Negro in moments of hopelessness is clearly depicted in

Towns’s rendition of “Go Down, Moses.” After Towns has finished singing, “there was silence

almost breathless. The voice of the Chinese woman broke it. ‘It was an American slave song. I

know it. How—how wonderful’” (Dark Princess 26). Towns has sung his way into the hearts of

the Committee members, and in the process, Towns, through his song, brought dignity to blacks

in the eyes of the Committee members, as the Egyptian becomes the first person to lead the

unanimous chorus of approval. Towns then notes, “That came out of the rabble of America,” and

“They all smiled as the tension broke” (Dark Princess 26). Towns then tells the Committee that

“America is teaching the world one thing and only one thing of real value, and that is, that ability

and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but the widespread possibility

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for the majority of mankind if they only have a decent chance in life” (Dark Princess 26). Here

Towns seems to be commenting on the white supremacists view of culture as their monopoly

that they jealously guide and refuse to allow minority subjects to be educated to attain high

culture in The Souls of Black Folk. Again, that denial is a uniquely discrepant cosmopolitan

problem.

Through his education at a Historically Black College or University, Towns later on is

able to appreciate the essence of culture in the world. The Chinese gentleman and lady acquiesce

to Towns’s declaratory statement about black culture as an exceptional American trait that the

rest of the world must learn to emulate. The Chinaman points out: “If Mr. Towns’s assumption is

true, and I believe it is, and recognized, at some time it must be, it will revolutionize the world.”

However, the Japanese man smiles sarcastically and says: “It will revolutionize the world but

not—today.” The Arab speaks for the first time and adds tersely: “Nor this siècle.” The Egyptian

laughs and notes: “Nor the next—and so in saecula saeculorum.” But the Chinese woman steps

in and proclaims: “Well, the unexpected happens” (Dark Princess 27). Seemingly, Du Bois plays

out the turn of global events in relation to colonialism and racism and the dark races and the

people most likely to support efforts of decolonization and egalitarianism. It is also possible that

the Arab and the Egyptian are against African culture because of the internalization of Western

values and race superiority, so they only think in negative terms in regards to black culture.

China would turn out to be Africa’s best friend in the fight against colonization as symbolized by

the two Chinese members of the Committee. Du Bois’s portrayal of Africa as symbolized by

Towns’s singing of the Negro spiritual recalls Du Bois’s essay in Darkwater, “The Hands of

Ethiopia” in which he quotes the great Roman proconsul who proclaims Africa’s creative ability:

“Semper novi quid ex Africa” (The Reader 511). As Du Bois explains, “Always Africa is giving

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us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one

of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily that it

still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men” (The Reader 511).

To help relieve the world of oppression politically, educationally, and economically,

Kautilya sends Towns back to the United States. Kautilya tasks Towns to return to America to

deliver a letter to Miguel Perigua, leader of an underground movement working to undermine

white supremacy in the U.S. and colonialism in the world. However, the other members of the

Group feel the letter Towns is carrying to the United States could jeopardize the lives of Kautilya

and other Committee members, so they decide to murder him, but Kautilya suddenly appears on

the scene to derail the intentions of the group. In The Pullman Porter section of the novel, Towns

boards the Gigantic for New York as a stowaway, and because he does not have money to pay

for his return passage, he works to pay his way back. In New York, he is paid fifty dollars for his

work as a scullion on the ship. On the ship, Towns dreams and muses over life. Towns “wanted

to understand. His revolt against medicine became suddenly more than resentment at an

unforgivable insult—it became ingrained distaste for the whole narrow career the slavery of

mind and body, the ethical chicanery” (Dark Princess 42). Towns then realizes that “his sudden

love for a woman far above his station was more than romance—it was a longing for action,

breadth, helpfulness, great constructive deeds” (42).

Towns’s love for Kautilya transcends the provincial confines of physical love; it is also

spiritual because it would bring an African American male together with an Indian Princess. The

consummate conjugation of the two symbolizes a cosmopolitan alliance of the yellow, brown,

and brown races to contest the imperial and colonization landscape of the West in anticipation of

dislocating Europe as the center of cosmopolitanism. Terry situates Dark Princess in the realm

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of a romance that challenges the patriarchal assumptions of the age but also views the woman as

a cosmopolitan agency of change:

Flouting standard expectations of a romance plot and of behavior in early

twentieth-century patriarchal society, she [Kautilya] is idealized as gentle, refined,

and beautiful, yet also is politically committed, intelligent, able to withstand

menial work, and shares a passionate sexual relationship with Matthew outside of

marriage. (57)

In other words, Du Bois’s message for readers of Dark Princess is that the novel should simply

not be read as mere romance, for it carries a more serious message to America and the world.

Towns meets with Miguel Perigua in Harlem; during their meeting, Perigua’s feelings of

sanguinity are elevated as he almost repeats the Pan-Asian and Pan African message of Kautilya:

“Now all is well. We are recognized—recognized by the great leaders of Asia and Africa. Pan-

Africa stands at last beside Pan-Asia, and Europe trembles” (45). In “The Color Line Belts the

World,” Du Bois observes,

The magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken, and the Color Line in

civilization has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past. The

awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and

black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt. (34)

The recognition Perigua is referencing could be in relation to the awakening of the brown and

yellow races to form an alliance with the yellow races to defeat imperialism and colonialism in a

discrepant cosmopolitan zeal to dislodge the West as the center of cosmopolitanism.

After the meeting, Perigua appoints Towns Inspector of his organization to disseminate

letters country-wide to various centers of the organization. Perigua tells Towns: “Travel around

as porter. Sound out the country—test out the organization. Make your report soon and get some

money. Something must happen, and happen soon” (46). Towns then appreciates the discrepant

cosmopolitanisms of Perigua, for he was “well read, spoke French and Spanish, read German,

and knew the politics of the civilized world and current events surprisingly well” (46). After

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Perigua has held the meeting and his proclamation of the recognition of his group, Jimmie Giles

is innocently lynched by the Ku Klux Klan on the same train Towns works on as a Pullman

porter. When Towns learns that the Ku Klux Klan would be on the same train on which Giles

was lynched to Chicago a week later, he plans with Perigua to dynamite the train, for as Perigua

promises, there has to be, “Dynamite, dynamite for every lynching mob” (46). In a dialectic

juxtaposition between the serenity and equanimity grounded in the Romantic beauty of nature in

contrast to the disturbingly atrocious emblem of the Jim Crow car, Du Bois symbolizes the Jim

Crow car as one of debauchery and anti-cosmopolitanism in Darkwater: Voices from within the

Veil. He writes,

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the Jim Crow

car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the

world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood

than the Jim Crow car of the Southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is

nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego

Bay in far Jamaica. And both things are true and both belong to this our world,

and neither can be denied. (135)

Terry has also suggested:

The status of Matthew and the Princess as cross-cultural mediators is

indicated by their mobility in the novel. Matthew traverses the nation,

linking the poles of North and South, in his employment as a Pullman

porter. Just as on his return to America he worked his passage in the galley

of the liner, Gigantic, through his labor the train is shown to be a space

hierarchized by race and class. Yet it is also a site of potential subversion

and connectivity, surpassed only by the protagonist’s thrilling airplane

flight to the South at the climax of the novel. (60-61)

As part of their agenda in Chicago, the Ku Klux Klan hopes to upend Black progress, not only in

America but in the entire world. Members of the Ku Klux Klan murder Giles on the train on their

way to Chicago in anticipation of stemming the tide of their recent dormant activities. Giles’s

murder, therefore, is suggestive of the Klan’s desire to renew the lynching activities of its

members. As Du Bois observes, “The Klan is planning a comeback. It has suffered severe

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reverses in the South and in the East; .they are going to soft-pedal Rome and Jewry and

concentrate on the new hatred and fear of the darker races in the North and in Europe. That’s

what this meeting means” (Dark Princess 65). Lynching was a complicated problematic to Du

Bois. Between 1882, when the Tuskegee Institute started keeping records and 1944, 3,417

blacks were lynched. Aptheker notes that the 1920s were a “period of frequent lynching and

pogroms, of a powerful Ku Klux Klan and the resurgence of racist practices and myths as

reflected in the immigration laws of the time and books to people like Madison Grant who wrote

The Passing of the Great Race” (6). In his 1968 Autobiography, Du Bois views lynching as a

global problem. Du Bois reveals in his posthumous Autobiography, “During my college days

from 1885 through 1894, 1,700 Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon

my soul and led me on to conceive the plight of other minority groups; for in my college days

Italians were lynched in New Orleans, forcing the Federal government to pay $25,000 in

indemnity, and anti-Chinese riots in the West culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892”

(122). From that perspective, lynching is a prominent feature in Du Bois’s novels.

In Towns’s attempt to assume an economic and political leadership in America, he

writes to Kautilya, informing her about the rising black middle class and their willingness to take

their destiny into their own hands and fight for political power, as they endeavor to help the rest

of the darker worlds gain their freedom. Towns states in the letter, “My people are increasing in

material prosperity. A few are even accumulating wealth; large numbers own their homes and

live in cleanliness and a fair degree of comfort. Extreme poverty and crime are decreasing, while

intelligence is increasing” (Dark Princess 57). He continues, “[T]he Negro has advanced so

rapidly and is still advancing at such a rate that he is more satisfied than complaining” (57). He

ends his epistolary inquest thus: “On the other hand, with intelligence and forethought,

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concentrated group action, we can so align ourselves with national and world forces as to gain

our own emancipation and help all of the colored races gain theirs. Frankly then, “What is the

Plan?” (Dark Princess 59). As he waits for Kautilya’s response, Towns meets a black preacher

who descends into the secularism of cabarets and theaters to experience firsthand, life as it is

lived by non-believers. Towns reveals to him how some blacks earn their living, a living Towns

equates with modern-day slavery. As Towns puts it,

I mean in a great city like New York men and women sell their bodies, souls, and

thoughts for luxury and beauty and the joy of life. They sell their silences and

dumb submissions. They are content to do things and let things be done; they

promise not to ask just what they are doing, or for whom, or what it costs, or pays.

That explains our slavery. (Dark Princess 63)

After the visit to the cabaret, the preacher is struck by reality and promises not to preach against

cabarets and dance halls again because “they preach against themselves. There is more real fun

in the church’s festival by Ladies’ Aid!” (67). Kautilya does not respond to Towns epistolary

report until he sees Kautilya on the same train he and Perigua have planned to dynamite that is

carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan to the conference in Chicago. At the eleventh hour,

because of Kautilya’s presence on the train, Towns stops the train by “stepping out of the

compartment and throwing his weight on the bell-rope . . . and quickly the train slowed down”

(92-3). The dynamite had exploded minutes earlier, and Perigua loses his life in the attempt.

Towns is arrested, tried, and convicted to serve ten years in the penitentiary for his refusal to

cooperate with investigators. These activities fall under the category of discrepant

cosmopolitanism because they are inseparable from transplanted diasporic cultures and the

interaction they engender with specific, often violent histories politically, culturally and

economically.

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Again, politics mingles with culture to undergird the discrepant cosmopolitan framework

of Dark Princess. Towns’s defiance reaches Sara Andrews, the woman, who just like Caroline

Wynn in The Quest, knows how to manipulate the system and people to get what she wants.

Working as Sammy Scott’s efficient secretary, Sara Andrews is able to convince Scott to pull his

political strings by convincing the Republican Party, and the Ku Klux Klan of Towns’s

innocence, so he is released after serving just three months of his ten-year sentence. Sara

Andrews convinces him to become a politician. He marries her for political convenience and

wins an election to serve in the local legislature of Chicago, but he soon realizes the dishonesty

in which politics in Chicago is entangled. Kautilya then appears suddenly to save him. Towns

proclaims after seeing Kautilya again: “The Princess that I worshipped is become the working

woman whom I love. Life has beaten out the gold to this fine stuff.” Kautilya responds:

“Matthew, Matthew! See, I came to save you! I came to save your soul from hell.” But Towns,

cast in the mold of Dr. Faust, murmurs: “Too late. I have sold it to the Devil.” Kautilya insists

passionately: “Then at any price, at any price, I will buy it back.” When Towns wants to know

what he needs to do to be saved by Kautilya, she says in a determined tone, “We must give up.

We must tell all men the truth; we must go out of this Place of Death and this city of the Face of

Fear, untrammeled and unbound, walking together hand in hand.” Towns responds with a gleeful

assurance, “Your body is Beauty, and Beauty is your Soul, and Soul and Body spell Freedom to

my tortured groping life” (Dark Princess 209-10). The courtly riposte ends with the two going to

Towns apartment to consummate their love and passion that results in the birth of the black

messiah to render Dark Princess as a futuristic novel that defers Du Bois’s desire for a utopian

world. The consummation of the love between Kautilya and Towns also validates them as

decolonized bodies who have united in the struggle against racism, imperialism, and colonialism.

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Before Kautilya finally catches up with Towns in Chicago, she goes to stay with Towns’s

mother. After their conjugal consummation that leads to the birth of Madhu, she reveals to

Towns in a conversation in which she tells her complete story. In her story, Kautilya tells him of

her impression and the impact of Towns’s mother on her. Towns’s diligent, pipe-smoking

mother is “Kali, the Black One; wife of Siva, Mother of the World!” (Dark Princess 220).

Kautilya then tells Matthew:

And then came what I shall always know to have been the greatest thing in my

life. I saw your mother. No faith or religion ever dies. I am of the clan that gave

Gotama, the Buddha, to the world. I know that out of the soul of Brahma come

little separations of his perfect and ineffable self and they appear again and again

in higher manifestations, as eternal life flows on. And when I saw that old mother

of yours standing in the blue shadows of twilight with flowers, cotton, and corn

about her, I knew that I was looking upon one of the ancient prophets of India and

that she was to lead me out of the depths in which I found myself and up to the

atonement for which I yearned. (Dark Princess 221)

Indeed, Kautilya’s story in which she links Towns’s mother’s ancient heritage to India, is a

frame in which Du Bois attempts to establish the inter-connectedness between Asia and Africa.

Kali then becomes symbolic of the ideal black woman, confident, courageous, and calm in the

face of adversity as she helps guide black men on the path of good deeds to greatness. From this

perspective, Kali is an alter-ego of Elspeth, mother of Zora and who Du Bois symbolizes as

Medea in The Quest. While Elspeth relies on witchcraft and conjure, Kali still remembers her old

African shango ritual that she performs with Kautilya; it is a ritual that draws from African

spirituality, which regards God as the ultimate source of power. While Kali represents the old

generation of female strength and formidable resilience, Kautilya is symbolic of the new

generation, unbridled and independent to guide the men in their lives. Writing on the bravado of

Kautilya, Terry states, “In Dark Princess, Du Bois again creates a brave and principled heroine.

Although the narrative follows and predominantly focused through Matthew Towns rather than

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Kautilya, she is central to his personal and political development and hence salvation” (57). In

Dark Princess, Du Bois presents two types of politicians—the good, honest, and decent one with

a profound sense of rectitude in contra-distinction from the crooked, deceitful, and manipulative

one, who would go to any length to attain political leverage. The former is cast in the mold of

Plato’s philosopher, good enough to lead honestly while the latter is the Machiavellian type,

unashamed to lead through deception and crafty machination. Rampersad suggests that the

“Platonic insistence on the identification of philosophy with government, and of philosophers

with governors, still contrasts with the practices of Machiavellian expediency to which

generations of politicians are drawn by the temptations of their profession. The tension in Dark

Princess, in its fluted style, is a reflection of this dichotomy” (Dark Princess 218). As a

politician, Towns proves to be of the Plato type.

The nationalistic fervor that informs the aristocratic ideals of the Indians, the Arab, the

Japanese man, and the Egyptians render the Great Committee of the Darker Peoples in Dark

Princess incapable of exuding the ideals of humanism that links universal cosmopolitan subjects.

The group nearly murders Towns, but Kaultiya arrives just on time to save Towns and to render

Kautilya as an emblem of female agency of authority and beauty in the novel. Du Bois in Dark

Princess yearns for that cosmopolitan ideal of human brotherhood in racial unification, but in the

end, it is enlightenment through discrepant cosmopolitanism that prevails in the novel,

culminating in the birth of the black messiah. On the whole, Dark Princess is a modernistic

novel in which Du Bois, like in the rest of his other four novels and other works of fiction, finds

his creative voice and uses it as an avenue to reveal historical truths through fiction and to

critique racism, imperialism, and colonialism and, as Mullen has argued, Orientalism. Mullen

and Watson note,

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Du Bois’s writing on Asia is marked by a form of Afro-Orientalism: a

combination of passionate intellectual desire to wed African American political

interest and African American support to Asian destiny, and at times incomplete,

romanticized, or willful analysis of events there. Afro-Orientalism may best be

understood as the complex effort to undo a form of white supremacy—

Orientalism—which Du Bois understood threatened black Americans as well as

Asians, while fostering a colored unity that, owing to geographical, cultural, and

physical distance, was difficult to achieve in practice. (xiv)

Additionally, Du Bois challenges the vernacularisms that undergird colonialism, colorism,

imperialism, and racism in his exposure of the thought-process of some members of the

Committee. Again, Briggs suggests that “cosmopolitanism could only emerge by actively

challenging the vernacularisms produced by racism and colonialism, just as progressive

consciousness required a cosmopolitan consciousness to confront racism and its effects” (91).

Here Towns’s rendition of the Negro spiritual and his sharp cognitive awareness debunk the

internalization of Western racism and imperial consciousness that compels the Egyptian and the

Arab to denigrate black culture. Furthermore, Du Bois captures the romance between Towns and

Princess Kautilya in courtly disquisitions, their riposte echoing the courtly romance between

Oronooko, the African Prince and his Princess, Imoinda in Aphra Behn’s Oronooko.12 Moreover,

the indubitable realm of corruption in which Du Bois situates politics in Chicago, spearheaded

by corrupt black politician and attorney, Sammy Scott and his aide, Sara Andrews, and the Ku

Klux Klan’s vicious murder of the Pullman porter, Giles, place the nomenclature of Dark

Princess as a depiction of Du Bois’s dalliance with discrepant cosmopolitanism. Furthermore,

the concatenation of the Asians, the Africans, and the Middle-Easterners to seek liberation from

colonialism and Towns’s addition, deepen the novel’s discrepant cosmopolitan framework. Dark

Princess is also fervent in Ethiopianism as the conjugal consummation of Kautilya and Towns

results in the birth of the black messiah, Madhu. Ethiopianism, as Jeremiah Wilson Moses has

noted, is “a tradition based on the cryptic prophecy of Psalm 68:31, ‘Princes shall come out of

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Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’” (16). The birth of Madhu, who is

proclaimed as the millennial messiah recalls the biblical prophecy.

In Dark Princess, Du Bois also captures the essence of racism, colorism, imperialism,

and colonialism in fiction, his imaginative universe, and in the process, he creates a proto-

utopian novel in which he projects a unification of the “darker peoples” of the world. However,

the nationalistic and aristocratic fervor of the group dislocates Du Bois’s utopian mission to

render discrepant cosmopolitanism as a more suitable variant in cosmopolitanism in the analysis

of the novel. Amor Kohli has argued that Du Bois configures a utopian dream of solidarity

among the darker peoples of the globe in Dark Princess. Kohli notes that the plot of Dark

Princess shifts between “literary realism and romantic millenarianism” and suggests that “[t]he

novel is by turns vague and excessive and can with some justice be seen as an ideological

disquisition cloaked in the trappings of a melodramatic romance plot. Nonetheless, although the

utopian vision is actually never realized within the novel, Du Bois’s work is charged with and

animated by the problem of utopia” (162). Probably, if Kohli had read Dark Princess with the

analytical lenses of discrepant cosmopolitanism, he would not have seen the novel as “vague and

excessive.” However, Kohli’s analysis of Dark Princess as utopian is on a similar trajectory with

this project. He asserts: “What is crucial in reading Dark Princess as a utopian work is to

recognize that the utopia is almost literally gestational. It is imagined throughout the novel in

elusive, ethereal language as a ‘global South’ in which the land of the southern United States,

Latin America, Africa, and Asia are consolidated by a merging of the fertile, long-suffering

black US South and a romanticized India” (165).

While in Virginia and pregnant with Madhu, Kautilya exchanges letters with Towns in

which she critiques democratic politics and links black Africa and black America as a coalition

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unit in the project of decentering the West from cosmopolitan ideals. Kautilya also tells Towns

about a great meeting she attended in London. Here Du Bois could be alluding to the Congress of

Races meeting he attended in 1911, where, as Ovington has suggested, he met a dark Indian

Princess with whom he struck a friendship. At the meeting, Kautilya discloses the need for more

dark, brown, and yellow talents to be unearthed through their anti-imperial and Pan-Asian, Pan-

African crusades. Kautilya states:

We met in London, the leaders of a thousand million of the darker peoples, with,

for the first time, black Africa and black America sitting beside the rest. I was

proud of the Negroes we had chosen after long search. There were to be forty of

us, and, Matthew, only you were absent. …We organized, we planned, and one

great new thing emerge—your word, Matthew, your prophecy: we recognized

democracy as a method of discovering real aristocracy. We looked forward to

raising not all the dead, sluggish, brutalized masses of men, but to discovering

among them genius, gift, and ability in far greater number than among the

privileged and ruling classes. (Dark Princess 225)

Although Kautilya critiques oligarchy, the Great Committee is unable to implement any

meaningful system to help in the discovery of “genius, gift, and ability in far greater number than

among the privileged and ruling classes” because members of the Committee are equally guilty

of the presumption of aristocratic status based on their geographical sites of origin. Besides,

because of Kautilya’s love for Towns, some members of the Committee harbor feelings of

antipathy toward Towns. However, armed with the Buddha mantra that “God is Love, Love is

God and Work His Prophet” (Dark Princess 295), Kautilya, after being assured by Kali that she

would marry Towns regardless of his contemporary circumstances, goes to work, a form of

education and sacrifice to learn more about the masses of men. First, she works as a servant to a

Richmond engineer, who attempts to rape her, but she defends herself with a dagger that the

“grandfathers of her father had handed to her” (222). Kautilya proves she is a princess schooled

in deeds of chivalry, so at the appropriate time, she defends herself gallantly.

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From Richmond, Kautilya goes to Petersburg to work as a factory hand in a tobacco

factory. After three months in Petersburg, where it seemed to her that “every delicate thought

and tender feeling and sense of beauty had been bent and crushed beyond recognition” (223), she

leaves for Philadelphia, where she works as a waitress in two restaurants, one on Walnut Street

and the other on South Street. Working in these two restaurants helps Kautilya to learn about the

plight of restaurant employees, who although work in restaurants, must steal food to eat. From

Philadelphia, Kautilya travels to New York so that her dream of “life and of the meaning of life

to the mass of men might be more complete” (Dark Princess 223). In New York, she works for a

paper box-making factory on the lower East Side, where she organizes them to become

unionized, an effort that leads to a brief jail time for picketing. As an organizer, agent, and

officer of the union, Kautilya “knew her fellow laborers, in home and on street, in factory and

restaurant.” Kautilya “studied the industry and the law, traveled, made speeches, and organized”

(224). Working with the masses of black people and other minorities was to Kautilya “life, life,

real life, even with the squalor and hard toil” (Dark Princess 224). This signifies Du Bois’s

statement in his Credo that he believes in

Service—humble, reverent service, from the blackening of boots to the whitening

of souls, for Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell and Wage is the Well done! of the

Master, who summoned all them that labor and are heavy laden, making no

distinction between the black, sweating cotton hands of Georgia and the first

families of Virginia, since all distinction not based on deed is devilish and not

divine.13 (485)

However, in spite of his regret in Berlin for maligning his own folk while a student at the

University of Manhattan, Towns yet again disqualifies himself as a leader when on hearing

Kautilya’s story, he unleashes another vituperative, stereotypical verbiage against the darker

races. Possibly, Towns is one of those people, who have internalized stereotypes about minority

inferiority, and as a result, they are unable to come to terms with a romantic conception of

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culture that encourages cultural expressiveness and harnessing of talents of racial groupings. He

complains to Kautilya: “Those people there, these here—they are all alike, all one. They are all

foolish, ignorant, and exploited. Their highest ambition is to escape from themselves—from

being black, from being poor, from being ugly—into some high heaven from which they gaze

down and despise themselves” (Dark Princess 224). Seemingly, Towns is not ingenious enough

to appreciate the history of his folk that whatever predicament they may be engulfed in is not

their fault entirely. For that reason, their only recourse to redemption is to escape from

themselves in order to be seemingly free. Curiously, it is the same negative synergy some

members of the Committee have about blacks as a result of which they resisted initial attempts to

admit Towns into their fold.

Towns has misgivings about his own people, and he is not even sure if that

misconception is the right sensibility. From the perspective of Towns’s still naïve attitude about

the black experience, he must read one hundred books written by great minds of men to help him

escape from his predicament of identity crisis. He notes,

I am going to master a hundred books. Nothing common or cheap or trashy, but a

hundred master-thoughts. I do not believe the world holds more. These are the

days of my purification that I may rise out of selfishness and hesitation and

unbelief and depths of mental debauchery to the high and spiritual purity of love.

(270)

However, Towns must first redeem himself through work and sacrifice. As a result, just as

Kautilya, he decides to work as a laborer. Towns applies for a job to dig the ground for tracks of

a new subway after absconding from Sara Andrews and turning his back on the opportunity to

become the first black Congressman from the North. When Towns is offered an opportunity to

work as a foreman or a time-keeper, a less tedious, less laborious, and less taxing job, he declines

because as Kautilya puts it, Matthew has to dig “to get down to reality” (256). Ironically,

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Kautilya feels it is digging the ground that would help Towns realize his role as a leader of men

in an attempt to remake the world. Finally Towns confidently tells Kautilya:

We must dig it out with my shovel and your quick wit. Here in America black

folk must help overthrow the rule of the rich by distributing wealth more evenly

first among themselves and then in alliance with white labor, to establish

democratic control of industry. During this process they must keep step and hold

hands with the other struggling darker peoples. (257)

Towns veers away from Western values and traditions that are informed by the greed of

capitalism, so he shifts to a socialistic discourse.

Although Towns’s speech is couched in socialism, he at least has come to the realization

that there is the need to dig out economic disparity with his shovel to engender economic parity

for black folks too. However, Kautilya believes fervently that the “very hope of breaking the

sinister and fatal power of Europe lies in Europe itself; in its own drear disaster; in negative

jealousies, hatreds, and memories; in the positive power of Revolutionary Russia, in German

Socialism, in French radicalism and English labor,” but Towns is of the view that the “mission of

the darker peoples, of black and brown and yellow, is to raise out of their pain, slavery, and

humiliation, a beacon to guide manhood to health and happiness and life and away from the

morass of hate, poverty, crime, sickness, monopoly, and the mass murder called war” (Dark

Princess 257). Kautilya’s prediction here startlingly comes to be fulfilled as Germany, led by

Hitler with the collusion of Italy, rose against Europe in World War II.

Du Bois argues that the global war was the result of Germany’s desire to also share in the

colonial spoils of imperial countries like Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal. At this juncture,

both Towns and Kautilya know that the nationalistic desire and aristocratic leanings of the

Committee members would render their fin de siècle utopian mission impossible, then. For, it

must tarry on until some future date. In this sense, Kautilya informs Towns: “We will wait on the

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high gods to see if maybe they will point the way for us to work together for the emancipation of

the world” (Dark Princess 261). After that intimate exchange, Kautilya leaves for Virginia to

stay with Kali until she delivers the Black Messiah and Messenger, Madhu. As a result of

Madhu’s birth in Virginia, Kautilya in a response to Matthew to one of his letters, tells him of

Virginia as the new cosmopolitan center:

But to be in the center of power is not enough. You must be free and able to act.

You are not free in Chicago nor New York. But here in Virginia you are at the

edge of a black belt of a black world. The black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and

the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up

into the heart of white America; you can work in Asia and Africa right here in

America if you work in the Black Belt. (286)

Kautilya also informs Towns that he has been accepted into the liberal wing of the Committee,

but the radical wing is still unsure of the viability in admitting people of black African descent.

Kautilya tells Towns that the darker peoples of the world would be free in 1952. The year 1952

proved to be an excellent prediction for colonized nations to begin disentangling themselves

from the yokes of colonialism as India had gained her independence from Britain in 1947, and

Ghana became the first nation south of the Sahara to gain her independence from Britain a

decade after India. The Bandung Conference that brought non-Aligned nations together was held

in 1955 in Indonesia. After the Bandung Conferences in 1955 and 1957, and Ghana’s

independence in 1957, the floodgates opened for other African nations to decolonize themselves

from imperialism and colonialism.

Religion in Dark Princess focuses on African and Asian cultures, moving away from the

Hebraism that informs The Quest of the Silver Fleece. In terms of spirituality, Du Bois mixes

African spirituality, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism in Dark Princess, even as he

shifts from the religious dogma that modernism dislocates. Thus, “GOD IS LOVE, LOVE IS

GOD AND WORK HIS PROPHET” becomes the mantra of Buddha (295), and Kautilya is the

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mother of God and Madhu (308) to dedicate the young one as the Messenger and Messiah to all

the Darker Worlds (Dark Princess 311). Du Bois’s introduction of the train, telegraph,

telephone, airplane, and the building of a new subway in Dark Princess also renders the novel in

the epistemological realm of modernism because they are modern inventions that testify to

America’s advancement. Terry links modernism to utopia and notes that “the capacity of modern

transportation technology, and the new self-consciousness they engender, contribute in building

to the text’s utopian resolution” (61). Dark Princess is also a critique of cosmopolitan modernity

because in the words of Sanders, modernism experienced “unprecedented levels of

mechanization, and industrialization, the hegemony of industrial capitalism, and expanding

middle class, the emergence of suburbs, and migration—both international and domestic--all

created an economic, political, and physical world nearly unrecognizable to previous

generations” (130). Additionally, Dark Princess unravels the social and psychic fragmentation of

the human condition, even as Du Bois aligns the novel with eschatological themes of the

apocalypse with the birth of a black messiah. Towns’s psychic fragmentation occurs when he

willfully and haughtily cast aside his interest in his own people. To become eligible for

admission into the cosmopolitan group, however, Towns must overcome a test of character by

proving his knowledge in the values and beliefs of his people because a miasma of prejudice can

only be dislocated by character. As Du Bois points out, “Prejudice was a miasma that character

burned away, and character and brains were too much for prejudice” (Dark Princess 12, 13).

Education is one of the means, if not the central means, for the development and building of

character and in the acquisition of knowledge, so a higher education for blacks was not

encouraged in antebellum America and even beyond. The denial goes against cosmopolitanism

because cognition is in itself a discrepant cosmopolitan particularity.

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Through Du Bois’s critique of aristocratic education in Europe, subjugated education of

black subjects in the United States, and the aristocratic wrangling of colonial system of education

in Africa, he was able to provide a cognitive evaluation of what happens to groups of people who

are blatantly and malevolently denied the benefit of quality education. Through such criticisms,

Du Bois debunked and displaced the myth of “canaille” that grounds the refusal to provide

quality education to minorities. In this chapter, I have argued that by extending African

American culture to become cosmopolitan, Du Bois’s proclamations about dearth of quality in

educational opportunities to the oppressed in Europe, America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa

became concerns rooted in discrepant cosmopolitanisms. In “The Field and Function of the

Negro College” (1933), Du Bois seems to have laid a blueprint for education pertaining to the

training of the Negro and his relationship with the rest of the colored world. Beginning with the

importance of African cultures that train the child for life, Du Bois theorizes on the history of

education in Africa and links it with Africa’s influence on the civilization of the world. He

affirms in “The Field and Function of the Negro College” that “[n]othing more perfect has been

invented than the process of training youth among primitive African tribes. And one sees it in the

beautiful courtesy of their children; in the modesty and frankness of their womanhood; and in the

dignity and courage of their manhood; and too, in African music and art with its world-wide

influence” (84). Although Du Bois does not necessarily decenter Europe as the pivot of the

world’s history, he raises awareness about African consciousness and the part she has played in

world civilization. The actually “specific, often violent histories of politics, culture, and

economics” that inform discrepant cosmopolitanism and its position against Western hegemony

are witnessed in Du Bois’s critique of the education of the aristocracy because British aristocracy

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and elite society prompted the exclusion of the masses of men from getting a university or

college education of quality. As Du Bois points out,

Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, were for the education of gentlemen—

those people who inherited wealth and trained for the particular sort of life which

they were to live—a life which presupposes a large income, travel, cultivated

society, and activities in politics, art, and imperial industry. (85)

He then argues that a university that focuses solely on training aristocrats is ephemeral because

“it becomes so completely disassociated from the main currents of real life that men forget it and

the world passes on as though it has not and had not been” (86). Furthermore, through what can

be described as a cosmopolitan verbal jousting in “The Field and Function of the Negro

College,” Du Bois argues for an egalitarian education for Negro students in Negro colleges for “a

Negro university must be founded on a knowledge of the history of their people in Africa and in

the United States and in their present condition” (93). Du Bois argues for the training of blacks

from a groundswell of an inductive learning process where they would be first taught Negro

history, and then universal culture can be added to it; therefore, his cosmopolitanism becomes a

counter-current against Western hegemony.

In Dark Princess, nationalism is a problematic that counters the ideals of discrepant

cosmopolitanism and Du Bois’s utopian desire for an egalitarian order for the dark, brown, and

yellow “peoples” of the world. On the need to re-read Du Bois’s texts with the lenses of

cosmopolitanism in its various forms, again, Briggs has pointed out that “cosmopolitanism

could only emerge by challenging the vernacularisms provided by racism and colonialism, just as

progressive vernacularisms required a cosmopolitan consciousness to confront racism and its

effects” (91). In a clear instance of the nationalistic fervor that grounds the behavior of some

members of the Committee, the Indian tells Towns: “With every dilution of our great original

idea, the mighty mission of Bwodpur fades. The Princess is mad—mad; and you are the center of

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her madness. Withdraw—for God’s sake and your own—go. Leave us to our destiny” (Dark

Princess 300). Clearly, as a result of Kautilya’s love for Towns, she is declared insane with

Towns being the centrifugal source of her presumed insanity. It is also possible that the

geopolitical sites that constitute the setting in Dark Princess can be envisioned as cosmopolitan

to ensure a world in which racial difference and nationalism do not override the humanistic

visions of the subjects so that they can enjoy an egalitarian educational, economic, political, and

social order. However, the aristocratic self-indulgence of the Japanese man, the Arab, the

Egyptian, and the two Indians relegate Dark Princess to the realm of discrepant cosmopolitanism

and devolve the possibility of the attainment of the utopia until Madhu comes of age, presumably

in 1952 to lead the darker races to redemption. As Tate argues, “Du Bois repeatedly relied on the

conventions of romance in all of his writings to consolidate his racial analysis of history and his

faith in the inevitability of black liberation, a consolidation that he repeatedly sexualized in

conjugal symbolism” (xix). In spite of Kautilya’s laudable attempts through service, devotion,

and sacrifice for the liberation of the darker peoples from colonization and the snare of racism, it

is her love that triumphs over any ideology or revolution, so she rightly deferred the liberation of

the darker peoples to 1952, but the discrepant cosmopolitan thematic framework of Dark

Princess is unquestionably powerful.

Du Bois ends Dark Princess in pageantry-like fashion, where he juggles Christianity with

Islam and Buddhism as Kautilya gives birth to Madhu and followed by an affirmation of their

marriage in the Black Belt. The ending provides a utopian resolution to Dark Princess as Madhu

the messiah and messenger becomes an emblem of a future redemption of the black, brown, and

yellow races from racism, imperialism, and colonialism. Du Bois heralds Madhu, after he has

been christened in a ceremony that is simultaneously Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity:

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‘King of the Snows of Gaurisankar!’’Protector of Ganga the Holy!’ Incarnate Son

of the Buddha!’ ‘Grand Mughai of Utter India!’’Messenger and Messiah to all the

Darker Worlds!’ (311)

In an incantation, “a third voice rose shrill and clear: Oh, Allah, the compassionate, the merciful

who sends his blessing on the Prophet, Our Lord, and on his family and companions and on all to

whom he grants salvation” (311). The end is a realization of Afro-Asian solidarity, but Du Bois’s

dream of a utopian world in which there is an egalitarian landscape for a just social, political, and

economic order falls on the shoulders of the newly born millennial Messenger and Messiah.

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NOTES

1. See Aptheker, “New Introduction,” in Dark Princess: A Romance, 1974. See also Mullen

and Watson x-xi; Terry 60; Gates xi-xxx.

2. The Harlem Renaissance had a great impact on Du Bois, so the trope of modernity is

equally effective in the analysis of Dark Princess. See Gilroy, especially chapter 4, in The Black

Atlantic.

3. For the profound feelings of elation Du Bois had after his global tour, see chapter 15 in The

Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois published posthumously in 1968.

4. Du Bois’s trip to Africa helped in his reformulation of racism that economics is central to

racist ideology. See chapter 5 in Dusk of Dawn, precisely “The Concept of Race.”

5. Hart saw Du Bois as one of America’s brilliant scholars and cosmopolitans at Du Bois’s

50th birthday celebration. See Autobiography 269.

6. Du Bois spiritually inspired Asia to resist colonialism and imperialism. See Mullen and

Watson vii-xxvii

7. For information on Du Bois’s defamiliarization of cosmopolitanism as an apolitical activity

reserved only for aristocrats and the elite, see Briggs 75-100.

8. Du Bois makes similar claims elsewhere in “The Negro and Imperialism” and “The

American Negro and the Darker World.” See Mullen and Watson 37-56.

9. Attempts by white supremacists to bar minorities from the attainment of high culture

troubled Du Bois. See chapter 5 in The Souls of Black Folk.

10. For the contrast in discrepant cosmopolitanisms, see Robbins 246-264.

11. For an in-depth analysis of the Communist International, see Padmore 298.

12. Contrast with Southerne’s Renaissance drama of the same title, Oronooko.

13. Contrast with Du Bois’s “Credo” in Darkwater.

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CHAPTER III

BEYOND THE COLOR LINE: BLACK

COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE BLACK FLAME

W.E.B. Du Bois’s last effort at fiction writing when he was almost a nonagenarian was

the publication of his trilogy, The Black Flame. In The Black Flame, a historical fiction, Du Bois

traces the history of African America through the Mansart family, especially Tom and Manuel,

from the Revolution of 1876, which also marked the end of Reconstruction, to 1954, the year of

Brown versus Topeka Board of Education when public schools were desegregated in the country.

The Black Flame is in three volumes: The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and

Worlds of Color published in 1957, 1959, and 1961 respectively. According to Brent Hayes

Edwards, Du Bois “began writing the first book in the trilogy. . . in May 1949 at the sprightly

age of eighty-one during a vacation in the French resort town of Hye`res with his colleague,

lover, and future second-wife, Shirley Graham after they had attended the World Congress of

Partisans of Peace conference in Paris” (Intro. xxv). However, because of activities that

allegedly tied him to communism, Du Bois was branded an enemy of the nation, and his passport

was confiscated. As a result, no publisher was willing to publish any of his works until historian,

Herbert Aphteker stepped in as his editor. Against all odds and armed with the leverage as Du

Bois’s editor, Apthteker was able to publish The Black Flame in his journal, Masses and

Mainstream. Edwards notes that by the time Du Bois wrote The Black Flame, he “was

commonly dismissed as a crepuscular oddity, a radical black intellectual out of step with the civil

rights agenda of his day, and he was unable to find a commercial publisher willing to take a risk

on what must have seemed a sprawling, quixotic nostalgia by a very old man” (Intro. xxv). To

Aphteker, “In many ways this trilogy tells more of Du Bois—of what Du Bois thought about

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himself and the world in which he lived—than his more formal autobiographies which were

published earlier, one of which was to be published after his death” (Annotated Bibliography

560-61).

Essentially, Du Bois’s intentions in writing the trilogy are clearly defined in the

“Postscript” in The Ordeal of Mansart in which he states that the raison d’etre is white

America’s strategic dilution and coloration of facts pertaining to America’s antebellum blight:

“In the great tragedy of Negro slavery in the United States and its aftermath, much of

documented history is lacking because of the deep feeling involved and the fierce desire of men

to defend their fathers and themselves” (229). Toward that end, Du Bois tried by the “method of

historical fiction to complete the cycle of history which has for half a century engaged [his]

thought, research, and action” (230). In such a historical fiction, Du Bois implies that because

history is impure, as a result of its documentation from the memories of men, he would utilize

the fiction of hermeneutics “to make a reasonable story” with the hope that the volumes would

have “more history than fiction, more fact than assumption, much truth, and no falsehood” (230).

Martin Luther King, Jr. poignantly notes that one idea Du Bois passionately taught was that

“black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that

depicted them as inferior, born deficient and deservedly doomed to servitude….So assiduously

has this poison been injected into the mind of America that its disease has infected not only

whites but many Negroes”1 (vii). Indeed, if Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece

is an economic study of the South, The Black Flame is the opus of that study, and in it, Du Bois

critiques capitalism in the United States, Africa, Asia, and the isles of the seas as the mother of

all woes. Arnold Rampersad suggests: “Though The Black Flame is vague in its heroes, it is clear

in its villains. Capitalism, hydra-headed, is the ultimate evil. Injustices flow from the fangs of

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ravenous business; even racial prejudice is subordinate to its economics” (270). “In this respect,

what Henry Steele Commager has written of John Dos Passos’ trilogy is even more true of The

Black Flame: ‘It is a kind of Doomsday Book, a calendar of Sin, an Index Expurgatorius of

economic malpractices” (270). To Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Du Bois used The Black Flame

novels to underscore the economic foundation of anti-black racism”2 (xix).

Much of the anti-black racism in The Black Flame is informed by violent activities

engineered by the chain gang headed by Colquit and the Ku Klux Klan, thus, running counter to

the mission of black cosmopolitanism. From this perspective, how does black cosmopolitanism

differ from discrepant cosmopolitanism? Why is black cosmopolitanism more appropriate in

analyzing The Black Flame than discrepant cosmopolitanism? Nwankwo’s definition of black

cosmopolitanism decenters the West as being central to cosmopolitanism; instead, the valiance

of the marginalized for freedom becomes the constitutive marker in her definition. Such valiance

nourishes the hatred of racism and the memory of racial slavery. As a matter of fact, what Gilroy

describes as ”the literary and philosophical modernisms of the black Atlantic have their origins

in a well-developed sense of the complicity of racialised reason and white supremacist terror” is

the same residual frame Nwankwo draws her black cosmopolitanism from. (Preface x).

Clifford’s and Robbins’ discrepant cosmopolitanisms proximate an episteme of diasporic

cultures’ interaction with often specific and violent histories culturally, economically, and

politically.

The lynching of Tom Mansart, the near lynching of Sebastian Doyle, Booker T.

Washington’s “Cotton Exposition Address” of 1895, and the Atlanta Riot of 1906 as well as

Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes’s compromise of 1876 that led to the withdrawal of Federal

Marshalls from the South, I argue, provide a framework to deconstruct cosmopolitanism as anti-

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black and anti-modernity. Through the literary tropes of Black Cosmopolitanism and New

Historicism, I examine, in the chapter, Du Bois’s interpretation of history through fiction and his

residual role in the Pan-African Movement as well as Japan’s empiric desire, resulting in her

attempts to colonize the Manchuria province. Indeed, in writing The Black Flame, Du Bois drew

from what Schaefer has argued “a pragmatist-historicist conception which saw culture as a

dynamic component in the contingent historic constructions of moral norms, socio-economic

structures and political order” (108). From the perspective of The Black Flame being a historical

novel containing “more history than fiction,” black cosmopolitanism becomes a more

appropriate cosmopolitan trope to analyze the trilogy. In the close analysis of the chapter, Hew

Historicism informs another thematic framework of the trilogy.

Du Bois evolved radically after the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference of the United

Nations, as a result of which he focused more on decolonization and disarmament. Du Bois’s

mission after World War II was synonymous with the mission of the Non-Aligned movement

that held its first meeting at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 and the second in

Harlem, New York in 1957. Jennifer Terry notes the New Historicism undergirding Du Bois’s

historical trinity and suggests that in The Black Flame, among other things, “preoccupation with

race relations, education, economics, and social change survive, but this fiction declines a central

romance plot and much of the earlier sense of optimism and potentiality” (50). Since Du Bois, in

the trilogy, wrote fiction through the interpretation of history, he possibly refused, unlike Frank

Yerby, to romanticize and idealize black American history, especially with the pain and

bitterness of the ferocious lynching activities of the Ku Klux Klan still lingering in his mind. Du

Boisian consciousness on race was effectively absent in Yerby, and he became the first African

American best-selling author in 1946 with the publication of The Foxes of Harrow, a novel that

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was adapted by a Hollywood Studio into a movie. Yerby was particularly notorious for

romanticizing African American history during the protest era of the late 1930s and 1940s and

sold more novels than the aggregate of the era’s writers.

Critically, events after what Du Bois has termed the Revolution of 1876, led to a

Southern white reconditioning of the self to deal with newly emancipated black subjects in The

Black Flame. In this sense, how could Du Bois have romanticized black history? As King has

written, “History cannot ignore W.E.B. Du Bois because history has to reflect truth, and Dr. Du

Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in

his quest for truth about his own people” (ix). Rampersad has also argued that “[t]he trilogy is

concerned with the nature of power in this world, and power rests with the whites” (268). The

nature of power in The Black Flame rests in the hands of white aristocrats and aided by poor

whites who form the labor class in the trilogy. The power wielded by whites against blacks in the

South comes in the form of violence and intimidation couched in racial subjugation in an attempt

to psychologically return black subjects into slavery, not physically but ontologically. The

attempt to recondition black subjectivity in antebellum sensibilities is an obvious black

cosmopolitan domain and not discrepant cosmopolitanism since it evokes and provokes the

memory of slavery. In The Black Flame, Du Bois reveals through the fictionalization of history

the itinerant ideology of the peeved South in the aftermath of the Civil War and the efforts of

white supremacists in keeping black subjects perpetually subjugated by resorting to violence and

threats thereof. Through the dialectic of Black Cosmopolitanism and New Historicism, this

chapter analyzes The Black Flame as crucial in Du Bois’s transformation of his ideological

beliefs to suit the political whirlwind of the times; thus, the three volumes become the focus of

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black cosmopolitanism and Pan Africanism in contrast to the universal cosmopolitanism in The

Quest and discrepant cosmopolitanism in Dark Princess.

Beyond the Color Line: Black Cosmopolitanism

and Pan-Africanism in The Black Flame

Black cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame is extant only to the extent to which black

characters like Tom Mansart, Robert Elliot, Sebastian Doyle, Manuel Mansart, and Menelik II

stand up against racism, violence, and colonialism in defense of the enfranchisement, justice, and

liberty for black subjects. Nwankwo defines her black cosmopolitanism as being “borne out of

the liminal spaces between two mutually constitutive cosmopolitanisms—hegemonic

cosmopolitanism, exemplified by the material and psychological violence of imperialism and

slavery (including dehumanization) and cosmopolitanism rooted in a common knowledge and

memory of that violence” (13). Nwankwo also suggests that “cosmopolitan is reserved for those

at the top, and everyone else is viewed as comfortably provincial. Black Cosmopolitanism traces

the dialectics of a cosmopolitanism from below.” “It is one that came of age at the same time

that the forces of hegemonic cosmopolitanism in the Atlantic world were forced to reconfigure

themselves to deal with the new threats posed by the uprising in Haiti” (14). Black

cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame is quite distinct from discrepant cosmopolitanism, which

Clifford has also called “a comparative approach to specific histories, tactics, and everyday

practices of dwelling and traveling” (36).

With the focus mostly on Manuel Mansart as the protagonist (although he is sometimes

relegated to a peripheral status) in the novels, more attention needs to be paid to the roles other

characters like Tom and Elliot play in the novel in Du Bois’s fictionalization of the

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hermeneutical account of history and how that history has shaped the lives of black subjects in

the intervening years. On New Historicism, William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman’s note that,

the New Historicism resembled old historicism in treating literature in a certain

way—not as a self-standing transcendent entity capable of analysis on its own

terms but rather as a part of history and, furthermore, as an expression or

representation of forces on history. Older historicism tended to push literature

back into linguistic history. . . The New Historicism tends to be social, economic,

and political, and it views literary works as instruments for displaying and

enforcing doctrines about conduct, etiquette, and law. In a dynamic circle, the

literature tells us something about the surrounding ideology (for example,

primogeniture, rights of women, slavery, or royal succession), and the study of

ideology tells something about the embedded literary works.3 (346)

In The Ordeal of Mansart, I view Tom as a salient black cosmopolitan, who the Ku Klux

Klan lynches on the very night his son, Manuel, is born. Before relocating to Charleston in South

Carolina, the state then regarded as the gateway to Southern civilization, Tom fought in the Great

War of Emancipation. In Charleston, like Frederick Douglass, Tom works as a stevedore, where

he meets the sagacious Aunt Betsy, a midwife who unlike Matthew Towns in Dark Princess,

white pregnant women allow to deliver their babies, and she is also a conjure woman. Tom

strikes a friendship with Betsy before eventually marrying her daughter, Mirandy. Tom rises to

the pinnacle of labor as president of a strong 10,000 black labor force. As the leader of the Black

Labor Union in Charleston, Tom represents their voice in their demands for decent pay, right to

vote, and justice; besides, Tom also wins an election to become a member of the South Carolina

legislature in spite of his minimal education. It is in devout pursuit of the fundamental rights of

blacks that he loses his life through a gracious act of generosity. In a struggle for a firm spatial

realm to fortify their bases, both the Black Labor Union under Tom’s leadership and the poor

White Labor Union led by ethnocentric Sam Scroggs, decide on forming an alliance, but there is

a conundrum because the poor whites, in the words of the white aristocrat, Colonel John

Breckinridge, “hate Negroes more than starvation” while the blacks mistrust the poor white

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farmers because of their affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. Both Scroggs and Tom, ironically

decide to contact Col. Breckinridge for the support of the aristocratic landowners for leverage.

Edwards notes that “Du Bois is virtuosic throughout The Black Flame not only in his

management of intertwined family trees and intricate historical references, but also in his

animation of economic history and especially labor history” (Introduction xxviii). And,

Rampersad suggests that “[r]acial bigotry and all its results—poverty, crime, lynching,

ignorance—stem from the power of property, which is a force above race” (271). Although

capitalism is a force above race, probably without the black race, the fierce power derived from

property would not have been possible without the presence of black subjects in the West and in

the New World. Black cosmopolitanism is also seen to have emerged from the history and

harrowing relationship between cosmopolitanism and equality. Ross Posnock notes, “Black

cosmopolitanism is often overlooked in spite of its emergence from the historical affinity

between cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism” (804). Here black cosmopolitanism is different

from discrepant cosmopolitanism because the latter involved the interaction of transplanted

diasporic cultures that becomes inseparable from specific histories informed by culture, politics,

and economics.

Southern whites hanged on perilously to the notion of the “Great Chain of Being”

developed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century that Renaissance writers of the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries used profusely in sustaining the status quo in their literary

works. To Scroggs and his members, the “aristocrats needed total white vote and the power of

white muscles now if they were going to control Carolina against the arms of the Northern

Yankees; against the white upstate farmers and city merchants; and above all against the

impudence of Negroes who thought themselves free” (The Ordeal 11). Scroggs states that

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“Negroes thought themselves free,” but in reality, they were not actually free. On the Chain, God

is first, followed by angels, then human beings, animals, and trees. The Chain is a hierarchy on

which the ones above have dominion over the ones beneath them. Thus, animals have dominion

over trees, humans reign supreme over animals while angels are spiritually more powerful than

humans with God being the ultimate source of power as the Omnipotent, Omniscient, and

Ubiquitous. Any attempt to move up the Chain consequently is deemed a violation, since it

disturbs and disrupts the natural order of things. However, there is a subdivision among the

various categories with Kings and Queens occupying the top of the human chain, followed by the

nobility while the Gypsy occupies the bottom of the human chain. Presumably, in order to keep

black subjects at the bottom of the human chain, they were branded as properties with no rights

during the era of slavery. After emancipation, they were miscast as Gypsies. For this reason,

chain gangs were formed all over the South to intimidate blacks with lynching after

Reconstruction in attempts to keep black subjects in perpetual servitude. Toward that end, to

Southern aristocrats like Colonel Breckinridge, who “had sold much of his former acreage and

there was no market for what was left, where the proud home of his youth was beginning to

moulder and fall, either the past must be restored with faithful black labor and complacent whites

or the landed aristocracy was doomed” (V.I 29). Edwards also sees The Black Flame as

apocalyptic novels enriched by humans’ talent to sin without any remorse: “If The Black Flame

takes up history through the ‘fiction of interpretation…, then the trilogy continually reminds us

of the ‘mess,’ the morass of human evil and suffering that cannot be explained or healed by the

instrumental use of reason” (Intro. xxvii).

In fact, Scroggs situates his poverty-stricken social status squarely on the shoulders of

Negroes, whom he thought during the days of slavery, were a dime a dozen, so he did not get a

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decent job. After emancipation, therefore, Scroggs “hated Negroes with a deep, blind hatred.

They typified to him all of his unavailing struggles to be a man” (V.I 11). Du Bois surmises that

probably, without the Ku Klux Klan, the struggle of the planter class to restore its dominance

would have been between rich against poor whites with blacks on either side; however, “the Ku

Klux Klan turned it into a race war with the killing, raping, and robbing of Negroes” (The Ordeal

11). The notion that economics is the mother of mankind’s woes is touted in “Concepts of Race,”

in which Du Bois confesses that on visiting Africa, his philosophy on race consciousness

underwent another transformation: “I think it was in Africa that I came more clearly to see the

close connection between race and wealth….And then this thought was metamorphosed into a

realization that the income-bearing value of race prejudice was the cause of and not the result of

theories of race inferiority; that particularly in the United States the income of the Cotton

Kingdom based on black slavery caused the passionate belief in Negro inferiority and the

determination to enforce it even by arms” (The Oxford Reader 94). In the spirit of black

cosmopolitanism, Tom tells Col. Breckinridge, “We never asked to come to this land and it was

little use for us to ask for freedom after we got here. We’se helped make this nation rich and

powerful….Colonel, we’se in trouble and know it. We’se having a last rally tomorrow night in

Emmanuel Church. It will be a closed meeting but it will represent 50,000 votes in city and state.

. . . We ain’t promising to do everything you say. But we’se promising to listen and trust the

word of a Breckinridge” (25). Tom’s speech is couched in black cosmopolitanism and not

discrepant cosmopolitanism because it is not an appeal to knowledge that he is sharing with

Breckenridge; he is reminding him of the history of the slave trade and the role blacks have

played in the progress of America. As Bruce Robbins has suggested in his essay, “Comparative

Cosmopolitanisms,” “[D]iscrepant cosmopolitanism is an impulse to knowledge that is shared

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with others, a striving to transcend a particularity that is no more partial than the cognitive

strivings of many diverse peoples” (259). And Rampersad has noted,

The Black Flame epitomizes the power of capitalism, which becomes a

transcendental force, more relentless than racism. Three representation groups

hanker for influence in the trilogy. The planter class is represented by Colonel

Breckinridge who becomes the bridge between poor white laborers and

disfranchised black laborers. The Scroggs clan members represent the poor white

laborers while Tom Mansart is the representative for the black laborers. (270)

Although both Tom and Scroggs are able to convince Col. Breckinridge to attend their

respective events, it is Mrs. Clarice Breckinridge who ends up at Betsy’s house at the time of the

meeting. When two members of the Ku Klux Klan cast their eyes on Mrs. Breckinridge entering

the house, they attempt to stop her, but Tom intervenes. The two Ku Klux Klan men with rifles,

tell Mrs. Breckinridge: “Colonel Breckinridge sent us to bring you home, Madam; he was

afeared the streets might be rough” (43). An argument then ensues between Betsy and the two

Ku Klux Klan men because she felt they were prevaricating. “The men swore and both started to

raise their guns. Tom Mansart struck one full in the face, and black arms from behind throttled

the other.” Mrs. Breckinridge found herself lifted, almost carried, rapidly in the darkness out

through the back door, until they came to a shadowy barnlike building. . . ” (V.I 43). “Mansart’s

voice whispered in her ear: ‘Madam. . . You must trust me. I must get you away from here and

safe back to your husband. That may prove our faith in him’” (44). Unfortunately for Tom, the

Ku Klux Klan resorts to an evil machination of infuriating Col. Breckinridge by mendaciously

telling him that the Negroes had kidnapped his wife. On the way to ascertain the truth, Col.

Breckinridge sees his wife in Tom’s buggy, but she faints on seeing her husband. Using that as a

pretext, the Ku Klux Klan chases Tom, catches up with him and “dragged Tom Mansart from his

buggy and threw him against his own door. He fell against it with out-stretched arms and blood-

shot eyes. A hundred guns thundered and lightened as a wind of lead shattered the house where

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his body leaned, and left it a jelly of mangled flesh, blood and bone” (46). That same night

Mirandy goes into labor, and Betsy delivers her grandson. Still with blood oozing from Tom’s

slain body, Betsy carries the child to Emmanuel church and

silently anointed its forehead with its father’s blood….Slowly she swayed and

danced through the church. The Bishop (Cain) standing still behind the altar, saw

a thousand years of the African Dance of Death gliding out of the past. Snake-

wise, the throng followed the dancer, moaning to her cries: ‘Curse God! Ride,

Devils of Hell, with the blood-bought baby! Burn! Kill! Burn! Crawl with the

Snake! Creep and Crawl! Behold the Black Flame!’ (46)

With these evocative verbs, Betsy invokes the spirit of Tom through his and her African

ancestry to guide the child to avenge his murder after naming the child, Manuel. However,

having been named Manuel, an abbreviation of Jesus’s other name, Emmanuel, Manuel Mansart

grows up to become more or less a pacifist, who ironically strikes a great blow through the heart

of the Ku Klux Klan by helping empower black subjects as an educator in the South. Similar to

Jesus, Manuel is violent only once in his life. Jesus whipped some hypocrites who were using the

sanctified walls of a synagogue for commercial activities within the synagogue, while Manuel

deliberately drops a brick on the head of another Scroggs, who had bullied him. Scroggs’s injury

required an ambulance to cart him to the hospital, but to Manuel’s relief, he did not die. The last

name, Scroggs turns out as an anathema to the Mansart’s throughout the trilogy until Mansart

decides in Mansart Builds a School to approach Joe Scroggs, a member of the Ku Klux Klan to

talk civilly with him. Mansart succeeds in using his flaming words to diffuse the Scroggs scion

of his race hatred.

Poetic justice seems to be at play in the trilogy in fulfillment of the apocalyptic

dimensions of the trinity as evil does not go unpunished, just as it does in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece. If Manuel burst the head of Scroggs of Atlanta for bullying him, Sam Scroggs of South

Carolina is killed, apparently for the role he played in the murder of Tom Mansart. Clarice Du

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Bignon Breckinridge is haunted by the myth of the tragic mulatto for her vicarious role in the

lynching of Tom. It would be weeks before Mrs. Breckinridge recuperates from her fainting fit

after which she wanted to narrate what happened on that fateful night in 1876 to Col.

Breckinridge. However, she realizes from newspaper reports and from her daughter, Betty Lou

that the Ku Klux Klan had lynched Tom after which “she kept whispering to herself--; There is

blood upon my hands. I am guilty of murder of a good man who gave his life for me.’—She

could not bear it. She did not for a moment blame her husband. He did what he had to do for me”

(61).

It is an open secret in New Orleans, where the Du Bignons are originally from and where

the matriarch Hortense Me`re Du Bignon still resides, that the Du Bignons have a black ancestor,

so some of them fall into the domain of the one-drop rule. However, because of the wisdom of

Me`re Du Bignon, who announces to anybody who wants to know, that part of the family’s

heritage is black, the information cannot be used to betray the love life of any Du Bignon family

member as the tragic mulatto myth goes. Because of Me`re Du Bignon’s and later, Jean Du

Bignon’s revelations, Du Bois seems to subvert the tragic mulatto myth in the trinity, so instead

of the woman going away, it is Col. Breckinridge who departs to Washington, DC and then to

the Caribbean to attend a secret conference of the Masons when Clarice commits suicide. The

sea, somehow, symbolizes suicide in The Ordeal of Mansart and Mansart Builds a School just as

it does in Du Bois’s debut short story in The Souls of Black Folk “Of the Coming of John.” Du

Bois writes to describe how the end unfolds for Clarice: “She repeated: ‘And the slave that saved

St. Michael…’ Slowly she turned and faced the eternal sea, the old and ever-lasting sea….The

great black earth, like a waiting mother lifted its loving arms. And Clarice Du Bignon leaned far

out and dropped into the areaway sixty feet below” (The Ordeal 61). Clearly, the fact that Du

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Bois does not state Clarice’s marital name but instead uses her maiden name, a name that has ties

with the tragic mulatto myth, is suggestive of the possibility that he had the myth in mind in

constructing the character of Clarice Du Bignon Breckinridge. And because Col. Breckinridge

“did what he had to do” for his wife, he leaves $2,500 in his will toward the education of

Manuel.

For Sam Scroggs, Du Bois reveals later on in the novel that he has been killed, without

elaborating on whom or what killed him. Still, in the realm of the apocalyptic doomsday scenario

of the trilogy, Atlanta burns for its lynching activities, and John Pierce II commits suicide by

jumping into the sea, following the crash of the stock market in 1929 for his support of the Ku

Klux Klan and white supremacy. Du Bois’s love for interpreting history in fiction allowed him to

play the Omnipotent role of God by not allowing evil deeds to go unpunished, thus, making

poetic justice a fundamental theme in his fiction. Even Booker T. Washington could not

recuperate from a shock he had in 1915 when in the company of a white woman in New York, a

white man saw him and yelled: “Kill that nigger; he’s after white women” (V. II 20).

Washington went into shock after hearing that vituperative indictment and died not too long after

the debasement, apparently, for his support of de facto and de jure segregation. Again, a

character argues that the Atlanta riot of 1906 was the consequent of the San Francisco

earthquake that occurred five months after the riot. As Rampersad correctly observes, “The Black

Flame is a kind of Doomsday Book, a Calendar of Sin, an Index Expurgatorius of economic

malpractices” (270).

In addition to Tom, Elliot and Doyle also provide moments of black cosmopolitanism in

The Ordeal of Mansart to deconstruct the de facto Jim Crow political and economic activities

that run counter to black cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame. Tom first met Elliot in Columbia,

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at the state capitol in 1869, where for the first time in his life, Tom Mansart “saw an educated

Negro leader, a man who looked like a field hand, with black skin and a mat of close-curled hair,

but who on the other hand not only was well-dressed but spoke white people’s English and had

that certain air of confidence which he had always associated with white people” (17). Elliot later

rose to become Speaker of the House in Congress. Tom also ran for the same election that

elected Republican governor Chamberlain and won a seat in the legislature in South Carolina.

After the election, Bishop Cain who had relocated to South Carolina from a Brooklyn church to

help the Negroes there, narrates an incident that occurred in Congress when he was also a

member of the House. It was a debate between Alexander Stephens, “once Vice President of the

Confederacy who must sit down and listen to a black congressman. Elliot speaks and

embarrasses Stephens:

Sir, it is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by

announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its

cornerstone. The progress of events has swept away that pseudo-government

which rested on greed, pride and tyranny, and the race whom he then ruthlessly

spurned and trampled on are here to meet him in debate, and to demand that the

rights which are enjoyed by their former oppressors—who vainly sought to

overthrow a government which they could not prostitute to the base uses of

slavery—shall be accorded to those who even in the darkness of slavery kept their

allegiance true to freedom and the Union. . . . (VI 19)

Elliot’s speech in the debate against Stephens in Congress has its foundation in black

cosmopolitanism as it details the Southern hegemony that made the South to fight fruitlessly to

sustain slavery; Elliot recaptures the memory of that violence in reminding Stephens that the race

he despises is also human beings, who deserve to be treated with reverence, equal justice, and

dignity.4 On being told of Elliot’s speech in Congress, Tom “began to believe in his black leaders

and feel that they could unite in a successful group. In his sublimation of the nourishment of the

hatred of racism and the memory of racial slavery,

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Tom came to recognize Berverly Nash, once a slave: blunt, ungrammatical,

honest; Wright of Pennsylvania he saw, now black justice of the State Supreme

Court; Cardozo, handsome, free-born and educated at the University of Glasgow;

Ransier, dignified and alert, President of the Senate; Smalls, self-taught, crude

and popular; Richard Cain, preacher and editor. (The Ordeal 19)

Sadly, the activities and insight of these black cosmopolitan heroes and heroin began tumbling at

the end of Reconstruction with the compromise between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes as

the cause; it is what Du Bois has termed the Revolution of 1876.

Yale-educated Doyle is a vibrant and vitriolic black preacher, who is a source of

dignified subjectivity to blacks in South Carolina as he forms a formidable alliance with the

leader of the Populist Movement, Tom Watson. Doyle plays out the historical affinity between

cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism; hence, he becomes Watson’s advisor and staunch supporter.

Watson is blatantly robbed of a couple of elections to Congress for his support of black labor

workers. As a result, Watson is compelled to save Doyle’s life when a Ku Klux Klan-organized

mob of about a thousand people attempt to lynch the preacher in his home, following a campaign

in support of Watson. Fortunately for Doyle, Watson and his men were around to drive the mob

away by returning their gun fire. Doyle then relocates to Texas where in August of 1906, at a

time when he was dying of tuberculosis, he joined other black groups to protest against a

decision by President Teddy Roosevelt to dishonor and dismiss an entire battalion of black

soldiers for rioting in a Texan township. The white citizenry had disrespected and debased the

black soldiers in spite of their achievement in the Spanish-American War. “In 1898,” as Du Bois

points out, “Negro regiments at El Caney had saved [Roosevelt’s] Rough Riders from certain

defeat. Later, that 25th United States Regiment which he crucified, had held San Juan Hill for

[Roosevelt’s] undisciplined troops” (157). Edwards views Doyle as an epitome of Du Bois’s

poetic presence: “Doyle not only studied the Negro Problem, he embodied the Negro Problem. It

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was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. It made his world and filled his thought,” echoing

Du Bois own proclamation in the “Forethought” of The Souls of Black Folk (xxvii).

Another instantiation of anti-black cosmopolitanism regarding the affinity of history and

its lineage with cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism is Washington’s support for internal

colonization of African America. At fifteen, Ms. Freiburg, Manuel Mansart’s high school teacher

at Atlanta University, helped him build his character and conscience as a maverick, an

independent thinker, who was unafraid to ask questions and oppose others, if he did not agree

with their line of thinking, including his teacher. On the basis of this development, Ms. Freiburg

sends Manuel to go and listen to Booker T. Washington’s controversial “Atlanta Exposition

Address” of September 1895 in which Washington quintessentially advised blacks to give up

their political rights for servitude and economic uplift. The “Atlanta Exposition Address” then

became one of the most powerful tools that encouraged white supremacists to deprive black

subjects of their suffragist rights as a result of which the address becomes symbolic of anti-black

cosmopolitanism, which was encouraged and even promoted by one of its own. Rampersad notes

that “Washington’s 1895 speech had practically assented to disfranchisement as a voluntary

concession to the reality of power. In place of the vote, the black man depended on the goodwill

of the electorate. The results were disastrous” (272). Although young Manuel entertained similar

thoughts as Washington, he felt it was wrong for Washington to render those thoughts in the

public domain. Even Manuel knows that when certain thoughts are expressed publically, bad

people take advantage and use them as an excuse to perpetrate evil deeds against innocent

people. Unsurprisingly, it is possible that Washington’s address could have encouraged the

Supreme Court to uphold Plessy versus Ferguson and render segregation the official de jure

practice, exactly twenty years after Reconstruction. After Plessy, in the South, “Whenever

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Negroes were hired in a mill or at any work not recognized as their usual work, the white unions

struck and usually secured the dismissal of the person” (The Ordeal 171).

Just like black cosmopolitanism, New Historicism deals with the way in which historical

forces have shaped and situated existential approbation with the representation of forces such as

politics, economics, and social norms in literature. From the perspective of the superfluity of

black labor in the South, employers adopted a clever ploy of dismissing white laborers who

struck for ameliorated working conditions and replaced them with black workers. “This

increased race hate until at last in 1901, the Federation of Labor came out flatly in favor of

disfranchising Negroes, thus deliberately cutting the labor vote in two” (171). According to Du

Bois, “the caste legislation covering travel, amusement and civil rights made the American

Negro a subordinate citizen in the South and partially so in the North. Negro representation in

Congress disappeared. From six congressman and one senator from 1873 to 1877, there was but

one black congressman from 1891-1899 and none since 1906” (V.I 191). When approached on

the black voting issue, John Pierce II, one of Atlanta’s millionaires, uses as an example, the

experience of England in his support of disfranchising blacks:

Look at England and the Empire on which ‘the sun never sets.’ It was the greatest

government in the world and the most benevolent. Did anybody hear of East or

West Indians voting?....Yet here we were with what would yet be the greatest

colonial dominion on earth right in our hands, and we were bellyaching because a

lot of lazy Negroes wanted to vote instead of work. (V.I 171-2).

In spite of his wealth, John Pierce II later on commits suicide after the fall of the stock market in

1929 when he was on his way back to America from Europe. He jumps overboard the ship when

he is informed of the Great Depression.

A clear case of material dialecticism plays out in the trilogy in Du Bois’s delineation of

the benefits apostles of Washington’s philosophy derive from going into insurance business, but

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as a result of the political ineptitude of blacks, their success became ephemeral. Du Bois

panegyrizes the efforts of black businessmen in the insurance industry such as Alonzo Herndon,

Herman Perry, and Ben Davis, who heed Washington’s philosophy for blacks to seek economic

kingdom of business over political rights. Du Bois points out, “The teaching of Booker T.

Washington to black labor was Work and Save. Save and Invest. Invest and become Rich. The

insurance business flourished; individual contractors made money; Negro stores and other

enterprises multiplied. But the whole development brought fear and jealousy to the poor white

labor class” (The Ordeal 210). Negroes tilted toward economics to see if it could help solve their

political problem as Washington had preached. That was particularly at the beginning of the

twentieth century as “before the War one man owned his own business or ran it by partnership;

but beginning with the 20th Century, the Corporation, in which the investor was liable only for

the amount he invested, was the director of large scale enterprises” (V.I 189). The insurance

business provided some hope to blacks as Herndon became a millionaire before he died in 1927

while Davis and Perry also proved to be adept entrepreneurs in the insurance business. However,

on the whole, with “Negroes disfranchised, the white voters refused repeatedly adequate money

for Negro schools; they refused the Negroes parks and playgrounds, and did not admit them to

the city parks” (210). The lack of political capital for blacks led to another blight on the ideals of

black cosmopolitanism—the Atlanta Riot of 1906.While Georgia politician Hoke Smith

predicated his campaign entirely on how he would ensure to keep blacks in perpetual

subordination, others classified the Negro as antithetical to the progress of the nation. In regards

to the riot, Du Bois states that the “real cause of the disaster was not, however, just the Smith

campaign. It lay ten years back in the tirades by [Ben] Tillman of South Carolina, [James]

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Vardaman of Mississippi, and Tom Dixon of North Carolina. They painted the Negro as an

enemy of the nation and threat to civilization” 5 (V.I 175).

After the riot, Washington made a tardy attempt to modify his 1895 address by noting

that he did not mean for voting rights to be determined by color caste but by ability, regardless of

one’s race. “Thus as political power faded there emerged a new escapism for educated and

ambitious Negroes. In the South particularly, the better class not only turned from politics, but

from industry to exploitation” (The Ordeal 204-5). For these reasons, Manuel Mansart, after

graduation from Atlanta University, faces “now for the first time and inexorably the life problem

with which he was destined to struggle three-score years and ten and yet never answer to his own

satisfaction or that of anyone else:

How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of

Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall

Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall

Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There were so many answers and so

contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions

similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and

daily. (The Ordeal 199)

In spite of the constraints, Mansart proves to be a sensitive, conscientious, and solitary individual

disturbed by man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and by his own occasional callousness,

especially to his wife, Susan. Indeed, Mansart is just a microcosmic representation of the people

who battle with questions every hour and daily on the problem, but he also becomes determined

to do something about it since he is the black flame. The black flame must burn slowly, cleanly,

and brightly to illuminate the dark alleys of racism that is festered by ignorance, economic greed,

and sheer hatred, so Mansart decides to become an educator. He begins his teaching career in a

Georgia province, Jerusalem, where poor whites continue the tradition of colonizing the

education of black subjects. Here is a teacher bearing the middle name of Jesus who has gone to

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teach in a town called Jerusalem, the city that is christened after the city in Israel where Christ

was first hailed and then, crucified. In Jerusalem, the superintendent of schools quickly warns

Manuel neither to request nor to demand anything for his black students. In spite of the

constraints under which he works, Manuel fulfills his pedagogical responsibility of teaching his

students all that they need to know, including black history and the accomplishments of some

great black people. When the subject of the American-Spanish War comes up, Manuel teaches

his students about the valiant role black soldiers played in helping America defeat Cuba,

especially the role black soldiers in Teddy Roosevelt’s battalion played in saving his life and

those of the white soldiers who fought in the War.

Incidentally, Abe Scroggs is told of Manuel’s American-Spanish War enlightenment to

his students and just like Judge Henderson does in “Of the Coming of John,” Abe decides to go

to Mansart’s school to accost him. Having participated in the war himself, Scroggs feels it an

opprobrium for black soldiers to be mentioned as excelling in the War, so he goes to the

classroom to chastise Manuel in front of his students. Abe Scroggs deliberately accosts Mansart

to solicit a reaction from him that could possibly serve as an excuse for Mansart to be lynched,

thus, suffering the same unpalatable and dastard fate of his father, Tom. However, Manuel

proves to be an exemplification of the bifurcated good boy, bad boy image Americans have

always cherished in one way or another. Though he is exposed to much evil in the nature of

human beings, he does not suffer the same painful fate of his father, Tom; he survives by his

sheer sense of Goodness and fundamentally, his sense of humanity. In this sense, Manuel

remains as cool as a clam and refuses to be drawn into any argument or react to Abe Scroggs’s

impudence and calculatedly violent behavior. Abe is still in Manuel’s classroom, when the

superintendent of schools at Jerusalem, like a deus ex machina, appears in Mansart’s class to

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divulge to him that he has been given a position in Atlanta to serve as principal of colored

schools. Having been dismissed to go home on the arrival of the superintendent, the school

children follow Abe Scroggs and stone him. Manuel’s experience at Jerusalem becomes an

allegory in its inversion of Christ’s experience in Jerusalem. Unlike the people of Jerusalem, who

turned their backs on Jesus by calling him names and compelling Pontius Pilate to release him to

them for crucifixion, the school children support Manuel. When the superintendent enters the

classroom, Scroggs is paralyzed into dumbness; instead of Manuel being stoned for lying, it is

Scroggs who gets at the mercy of the stones for his untoward prevarication against Manuel.

Manuel goes to Atlanta where he assumes the tutelage of public schools for the colored in the

city until 1920 when he is appointed the president of Georgia State Agricultural and Mechanical

College, thus, becoming the first black university president in the South, and he appoints Jean Du

Bignon as his secretary and later on, marries her after the demise of his wife, Susan.

Excellent revelations of the poetic presence of Du Bois in some of his characters in the

trilogy are when Tom Mansart refuses to situate the black labor class in Charleston in the realm

of just economic advancement. He wants blacks to be able to work, vote, and be treated with

equal justice under the law simultaneously..6 Manuel battles the Negro Problem throughout his

entire life and takes a trip to Europe and Asia in 1936. When Mansart went and listened to

Washington’s 1895 anti-black cosmopolitan address, “he felt some uneasiness because he feared

that Washington’s philosophy of seizing opportunities at hand, avoiding politics and making

friends with white folks was yielding too much. . . . He still never wanted to forget, or let any

children of his forget that they were men and had rights and that those rights were trampled on”

(V.I 89). Miss Freiburg, Manuel’s great influence at Atlanta University was educated in

Germany . . . and had actually been to Africa and the West Indies. She brought to her students a

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sort of world view of race, which she applied to Georgia” (V.I 86). Du Bois taught at Atlanta

University and studied in Germany and visited the West Indies and Africa and also rendered the

race problem in America into a hemispheric index to bring a cosmopolitan vision to the problem.

Under the auspices of Miss Freiburg, Manuel began understanding the cosmopolitan link of the

race problem in America, for “it began to dawn on Manuel that more often what he called

problems of his race were in essence problems of all men in similar positions” (V.I 87).

Furthermore, just like Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk after his gift is rejected by his white

classmate, some of Miss Freiburg’s students like Mansart “expected to come into their own by

excelling white people in all lines of endeavor. They were convinced that given freedom of

opportunity, they will prove to have as much brains, energy and determination as the whites”

(V.I 86). Professor James Burghardt teaches at Atlanta University and is one of the founders of

the Niagara Movement in 1905 to counter Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine that did

not believe in voting rights for black subjects.

Du Bois reveals in The Autobiography (1968), published posthumously that he founded

the Niagara Movement quintessentially to help support Monroe Trotter after he had accosted

Washington at a public forum in Boston. “As co-publisher of the Negro newspaper the

Guardian, Trotter’s newspaper became the first newspaper to castigate Washington overtly.

Washington’s friends reacted by sending Trotter to jail when he dared to heckle Washington in a

public Boston meeting on his political views.” “I was not present nor privy to this occurrence,

but the unfairness of the jail sentence led me eventually to form the Niagara Movement, which

later became a founding part of the NAACP (138). The Niagara Movement became the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and in 1915, under the

aegis of the NAACP in the fight against color caste in this United States, the Supreme Court for

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the first time declared the 15th Amendment as constitutional, and Professor Burghardt in the

trilogy played a great role in that. Professor Burghardt also becomes the editor of the Crisis, the

mouthpiece of the NAACP: “Negroes led by Professor Burghardt of Atlanta formed a radical

‘Niagara Movement’ in the North in 1905 and Negroes and whites held a conference in New

York in 1909 to found a new radical organization” (The Ordeal 211). The NAACP

brought Professor Burghardt from Atlanta as its chief spokesman and adopted a

line of concerted action in the courts, which might mean trouble. What would be

the refuge of the Supreme Court once it really faced the legality of Caste? The

answer was seen in 1915 when for the first time the 15th Amendment was

pronounced constitutional. Did the nation realize the epoch-making victory of

these new Abolitionists? (V.I 211).

In the spirit of black cosmopolitanism, the ‘new Abolitionists’ continued to defend the legal

rights of black subjects, even under the segregation law of 1896 until 1954 when the Supreme

Court finally overruled its own decision in Plessy versus Ferguson. Edwards asserts that in The

Black Flame “there are echoes of Du Bois’s experience in a wide range of characters throughout

the books. In The Ordeal of Mansart, one might point to Dr. Sophocles Thrasymachus Baldwin,

the white teacher and philosopher . . . who is parochial, but he is committed to the education of

African Americans in a manner that recalls Du Bois: in chapter three, readers are informed that

‘he [Baldwin] believed in the training of the mind as the only worthwhile salvation’” (Intro.

xxvii). It was Du Bois’s passionate conviction that training the mind prepared individuals for

life.

A salient black cosmopolitan occurrence in regards to Africa at the fin de siècle of the

nineteenth century that Du Bois captures in The Ordeal happened on March 1, 1896 on the

continent. A dozen years or so earlier, Africa had been partitioned at the Berlin Conference of

1884/85. However, Italy’s attempt to occupy her Ethiopian territory was given a rude awakening

when Emperor Menelik II led his Ethiopian troops to defeat Italy in the Battle of Adowa, killing

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25,000 Italian soldiers. Du Bois saw Menelik’s feat as a proud and sublime moment in black

history because it dislocated many of the condemnations Booker T. Washington leveled against

black subjectivity. “The speech had taken place on the 18th September 1895, just as Atlanta

University opened its Fall term. The class discussed Washington’s speech all the year; the

colored people discussed it; the nation discussed it. Perhaps no American speech before or since

has been so widely considered” (V.I 90). Not long thereafter, Africa responded swiftly to

Washington’s philosophy: “It was six months later, on the first of March, 1896, that an answer to

the Washington philosophy came, so terrible and portentous that men dared mention it” (V.I 90).

Thus, if Nwankwo has argued that black cosmopolitanism in the diaspora began with the Haitian

Revolution of 1791, I suggest that black cosmopolitanism on the continent of Africa began on

March first 1896 when Menelik of Ethiopia soundly defeated Italy in the Battle of Adowa. Later

on in this chapter, I go beyond Nwankwo’s exclusion of Pan-Africanism in her crucial Black

Cosmopolitan project and develop my argument on Pan Africanism from the point of view of

both traditional and continental, based on but distinct from Nwankwo’s important diasporic

concept of black cosmopolitanism. Du Bois ends The Ordeal with Manuel Mansart courageously

stating, “I am the Black Flame in which my grandmother believed and on whose blood-stained

body she swore. I am the Black Flame, but I burn for cleaning, not destroying. Therefore, I burn

slow” (V.I 228).

In Mansart Builds a School, education is treated as part of black cosmopolitanism

because the history of blacks in America is replete with the denial of education to black subjects

in antebellum America. Manuel Mansart goes to Atlanta as principal of colored schools in the

city. Mansart, unlike James Jones, the ineffectual figurehead superintendent of colored schools

when Mansart arrives in Atlanta, is not prepared to be a mere figurehead, who sits innocuously in

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an ivory tower as principal. Mansart would burn slowly in his attempt to improve the untoward

conditions battling the education of blacks in Atlanta. Du Bois captures the dilapidated

conditions of colored schools under Jones:

[H]ere were 40,000 children crowded into five schools; all the buildings old, the

newest built twenty years [earlier] and then handed over to the Negro when a shift

had taken place in the residential areas of the Negroes and new and better sections

were opened for the whites. All of these Negro schools had double sessions, that

is, the children did not go to school all day. One part went half a day and then in

the afternoon an entirely different set crowded in. (V.II 9)

Mansart complains about the poor conditions. Impressed by the sheer will and determination of

the teachers, children, and the principal to get the best out of their existing conditions, newly

appointed superintendent of schools (both white and black), Arnold Coypel commits to helping

Mansart improve the colored school system. Mansart’s initial protest about the horrifying

conditions of the school system to the new superintendent is rewarded. Soon, in appreciation of

the good work the black flame has hitherto done, he and his teachers are rewarded with salary

increases. Mayor of Atlanta, John Baldwin, son of Dr. Sophocles Baldwin, the philosopher who

supports the idea of knowledge being imparted to everybody regardless of color affiliations,

confides in Coypel: Manuel Mansart has “done a pretty good work…He’s got brains and

ideas…but we can’t have a firebrand on our hands” (9). The mayor then tells Coypel that the

least suspicion of any form of radicalism on Mansart’s part should culminate in his dismissal.

Again, for that reason, the black flame must burn slowly.

Baldwin’s admonition to Coypel not to encourage Mansart to be a ‘firebrand’ has

historical implications, which are firmly rooted in the memory of slavery and the disapproval of

educating black subjects. Well after Emancipation, therefore, there is still some disquiet about

the thought of giving colored people good, quality education. In that sense, education became a

central part of the Negro Problem, and it is also a black cosmopolitan problematic. Manuel

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Mansart’s decision to become an educator instead of a politician could consequently be viewed

as the raison d’etre for his black flame burning slowly in order to clean; therefore, he must not

be a ‘firebrand,’ less the white voting public would revolt. Probably, Du Bois titled the second

volume in the trilogy figuratively as Mansart Builds a School to illustrate the salient realm

school occupies in the development and progress of cultures. When James Jones dies, Mansart

gets the opportunity to fill the position as superintendent of colored schools in Atlanta; however,

that opportunity comes simultaneously with another opportunity to assume the role of the same

position in Gary, Indiana. In a conscious effort to make a decision that his family, especially

Susan would support, he asks them to help him arrive at that final moment. Susan is elated that

finally the opportunity has come for them to move away from the “Nigger hating” South up

North, where their essence as human beings would be appreciated and not violated with

impunity. However, Mansart has other ideas; he wants to remain in the South to help educate

black subjects, regardless of the odds stacked against him. Mansart stays as superintendent until

1920 when he is appointed the first black titular head of a college in the South as president of

newly founded Georgia State Colored Agricultural and Mechanical College at Macon. He

remains as the president until 1946.

At Macon, Mansart learns what is happening in other parts of the country and the world

through the Crisis. The Crisis, therefore, becomes an important medium of black

cosmopolitanism in helping disseminate information not only on injustice, colonialism, and

imperialism but also on lynching. Writing on the importance and the power the press possesses

in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), Ferdinand Toennies notes that the press is a real

instrument of public opinion that possesses:

a universal power that is comparable and in some respects, superior to the

material power that the states possess through their armies, their treasuries, and

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their bureaucratic civil service. Unlike those, the press is not confined within

natural borders, but, in its tendencies and potentialities, it is definitely

international, thus comparable to the power of a temporary or permanent alliance

of states. It can be, therefore, conceived as its ultimate aim to abolish the

multiplicity of states and substitute for it a single world republic, co-existence

with the world market, and which would be ruled by thinkers, scholars, and

writers who could dispense with means of coercion other than those of a

psychological nature.7 (qtd. in Robbins 6-7)

The Crisis, under the auspices of Du Bois, who was a thinker, scholar, and writer helped produce

feelings and opinions along local, national, and international lines to authenticate the importance

and critical nature of the press to causes of national, international, and cosmopolitan concerns.

Mansart Builds a School is also a novel in which Du Bois details the history of the NAACP and

its relationship with the Crisis. Consequently, if the Pan African Movement fought for the

decolonization of African nations, the NAACP stood at the pinnacle of the efforts to rid the

nation of lynching and other forms of political and social injustice with the Crisis as its mouth-

piece: “This new organization included the radical Burghardt as the only Negro radical, who for

that reason wielded disproportionate influence. Without him no inter-racial effort could succeed.

With him his radical ideas must be pushed” (V.II 44). With Burghardt’s suggestion, “the Crisis

appeared as a magazine of 18 pages in November 1910. The magazine spread like a wildfire not

simply because it was readable but because it was timely for a people emotionally starved in a

crisis of their development” (V.II 44). The Crisis became so popular that by 1919, its circulation

had reached 100,000, and it sold over 10 million copies within a decade of its establishment.

Spanning a period of over two decades, Burghardt devoted the pages of the Crisis to the nation’s

shortcomings in its dealings with minority subjects, especially in the South:

For twenty years, the Crisis made a fight on a program aimed at civil and political

rights and social equality. Led by this propaganda and organized into local

branches, the N.A.A.C.P. gradually succeeded in making the nation ashamed of

lynching, and willing to discuss political and civil rights; but its propaganda also

succeeded in bringing some considerable critical opposition; but especially in

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scaring Big Business into action. Lynching decreased from one a week to seven or

eight a year. Also through court cases and the assistance of well trained lawyers,

white and black, the Supreme Court began to recognize the Negro as a free

citizen. (V.II 44)

Although the Supreme Court began to recognize Negroes as free citizens, the recognition

obviously did not translate into reality across the length and breadth of the nation. This soon

becomes apparent to Mansart: “Mansart realized that the progress as far as American Negroes

are concerned, progress was not what it should be. In the days after the First World War until the

Depression, contradictory happenings highlighted their plight” (V.II 48). So the Crisis continued

with the struggle. In addition to its profound disapprobation of racism, the Crisis also fanned and

promoted the newly emerging cultural movement that encouraged and gave black artists the

medium to express themselves, the Harlem Renaissance: “But the greatest occurrence of this era

was the Harlem Renaissance; the sudden flowering above the music and dancing of the Sons of

Laughter of a distinct Negro American literature and art centering in Harlem” (V.II 48).

The centering of Negro literature and art in Harlem was critical because it became a

source of cultural awareness and preservation to many who heard about it. Although African

American literature had before the Harlem Renaissance produced excellent writers like Phyllis

Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,

Charles Chesnutt, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Du Bois, Sutton Griggs, and James Weldon Johnson,

among others, they wrote at different epochs in African American literary history, so their efforts

were not coordinated under an umbrella of a movement like the Harlem Renaissance. To guide

the artistic development and progression of the Renaissance writers, therefore, Du Bois wrote

what many have termed a manifesto for the writers, “Criteria of Negro Art.” Arguing from the

knowledge of the zero and negative images into which some white artists have miscast black

subjects, Du Bois calls on black artists to use their creative abilities in propagating only positive

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images about black life, claiming that Negro artists must strive for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

in their works:

Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the

creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and

we must use all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the

tools of the artists in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth—not for

the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth

eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as one great

vehicle of universal understanding. Again, artists have used Goodness—goodness

in all its aspects of justice, honor, and right—not for the sake of an ethical

sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.8

(The Reader 327)

In spite of Du Bois clarion call for black artists to utilize their artistic imagination in a just

pursuit of black cultural redemption, writers like Claude McKay and Carl van Vechten went for

the obvious reason of writing—money, so they produced art that validated the cultural morass of

black civilization. Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and McKay’s Home to Harlem drew the ire of

Du Bois, and he minced no words in his review of the two writers in particular and other writers

who might follow their examples. To one work, Du Bois felt like “taking a shower” after

reading it and to the other, he felt like “throwing up:”

Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem for the most part nauseates me, and after the

dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. . .McKay has set out to

cater for that prurient demand on the part of white folks for a portrayal in Negroes

of their utter licentiousness, which a certain decadent section of the white world ..

wants to see written out in in black and white and saddled on black Harlem. He

has used every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, ‘lascivious sexual

promiscuity’ and utter absence of restraint in as bold and bright colors as he can.

As a picture of Harlem life or of Negro life anywhere, it is of course, nonsense.

Untrue, not so much as on account of its facts, but on account of its emphasis and

glaring colors. (Crisis 35:202)

Obviously McKay was furious when he heard of Du Bois’s vitriolic criticism of his novel. Then

in France, McKay responded to Du Bois’s critique in an equally caustic letter dated June 18,

1928:

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I particularly resent the publication of my poem in the same number of the Crisis

in which in criticizing my novel, the editor steps outside the limits of criticism to

become personal. I should think that a publication so holy-clean and righteous

pure as the Crisis should hesitate about printing anything from the pen of a writer

who wallows so much in ‘dirt,’ ‘filth,’ ‘drunkenness,’ ‘fighting,’ and ‘lascivious

sexual promiscuity. . .Certainly I sympathize with and even pity you for not

understanding my motive, because you have been forced from a normal career to

enter a special field of racial propaganda and, honorable though that field may be,

it has precluded you from contact with real life, for propaganda is fundamentally

but a one-sided idea of life. Therefore, I should not be surprised when you

mistake the art of life for nonsense and try to pass propaganda as life in art. (The

Correspondence 375)

Indeed, McKay and Vechten were not the only overawed artists who bore the brunt of

Du Bois’s unfavorable criticism for writing for art’s sake; Du Bois critiqued a group of other

Negro writers for denigrating black culture for fiduciary reasons and categorized the Harlem

Renaissance as failing to live up to expectation. In a generic version of his critique of McKay

and Vechten, Du Bois states in Mansart Builds a School:

This Harlem Renaissance was an abnormal development with abnormal results. It

was not a nation bursting into self-expression and applauding those who told its

story and feelings best, but rather a group oppressed and despised within a larger

group, whose chance for expression depended in large part on what the dominant

group wanted to hear and willing to support. This then, was but a part of the true,

uninhibited message, and there were consequently prizes offered to those willing

to distort truth and play court fool to American culture. (54)

Du Bois then acknowledges the efforts of some of the artists as extraordinary but limited by

American racial politics, with book sellers and publishers interested only in stereotypical

portrayal of black life while the Depression effectively stunted the Renaissance. Among other

writers of the Renaissance were Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Rudolf Fisher,

Arna Bontemps, Jean Toomer, and Frank Horne. In effect, in spite of Du Bois’s contempt for

some of the fiction produced during that epoch, he was nonetheless impressed with the overall

poetry produced during the Renaissance, and the Crisis published the poems and short stories of

the writers. McKay’s “If We Must Die,” Toomer’s “Song of the Son,” Hughes “The Negro

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Speaks of Rivers,” and Bontemps’s “Nocturn,” are some of the favorite poems recited by poets

in the Little Theater that was opened in 1927 by the Crisis near the Schonberg Library of Negro

Americana in New York (V.II 52-54). The Crisis was instrumental in unearthing many black

artistic geniuses as it became “a vehicle of the human expression of a race. It printed pictures of

prominent black folk. . . Clearly a new nation was expressing itself; first and most clearly in

poetry, as poets always precede a literature….Then came drama, descended directly from the

older musical comedies” (V.II 49). However, “it was in music that Negro genius was first

recognized in America and in the world. All Africa sings and dances and the roll of her drums

comes down centuries from Egypt to the Gold Coast” (V.II 49).

The history of black cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame would not be complete without

mentioning the extraordinary contributions of the self-made millionaire, Sarah Breedlove

McWilliams, popularly known as Madam C.J. Walker, who died on May 25, 1919. According to

Jean Du Bignon, as she narrates the story to Manuel’s oldest son, Douglass Mansart, “Madam

C.J. Walker helped Negro organizations in various ways, the YMCA and the YWCA, and types

of social work. She had spread business over three continents; her factories turned out 34

products, and in the United States alone, there were 25,000 of her agents. She had worked hard

and long. She died on May 25, 1919 in her lovely house on the Hudson, amid thunderstorm”9

(V.II 127). Madam C.J. Walker’s rags-to-wealth narrative is indicative of the proverbial fierce

individualism associated with success in America. She rose to wealth and fame through her

ingenuity and diligence by making a stretch comb to soften her hair and later mass produced it

and other hair products to become Black America’s first female self-made millionaire.

In drama, Du Bois restaged his colorful dramatic pageantry, The Star of Ethiopia in 1919

to harness a renewed interest in Africa and its decolonization and in support of the new cultural

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awakening in African America. The pageant with its 1,200 strong choreographers was first

staged in New York in 1913 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Emancipation. In 1915, it was

the turn of the District of Columbia to observe the sheer magnificence of the play, and the

following year in 1916, it was staged in Philadelphia to mark the centennial of the African

Episcopal Church. Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, CA was the last hosting venue of the play

in 1924 when the Harlem Renaissance had taken off. According to Du Bois, the drama was a

celebration of 10,000 years of African history that had hitherto been strategically submerged by

the West to pave the way for its civilization to blossom: “The story of the pageant covered

10,000 years of the history of the Negro race and its work and suffering and triumphs in the

world. This was the message of its 1,000 actors” (V.II 55). Staged in three terse Acts, the

message of the pageant was simple and carved in the realm of black cosmopolitanism, enjoining

the rest of the world to revere Africa because it is the oldest civilization, with gifted and strong

people, even if sometimes gullible and naïve:

Hear ye, Hear ye! Men of all the Americas, and listen to the tale of the eldest and

strongest of the races of mankind, whose faces be black. Hear ye, hear ye, of the

gifts of black men to this world, the Iron gift, and Gift of Faith, the Pain of

Humility and the Sorrow Song of Pain, the Gift of Freedom and of Laughter, and

the undying Gift of Hope. Men of the world, keep silence and hear ye this! (V.II

56)

It is possible that after hearing about the blight and denigration of Africa for so long, Du Bois

chose the title of the play to glorify Africa, with Menelik’s defeat of Italy in 1896 in mind, to

serve as a relief, especially to those interested in uplifting the continent. A white government

observer confesses her comic relief after watching the drama unfold: “I can hardly think of any

way in which more of beauty and inspiration and information could have been brought to us. It

was one of the most beautiful things of the kind I had ever seen and the most beautiful I had ever

seen in Washington” (V.II 56). Du Bois reveals his elation about the play in his 1968

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Autobiography: “I made two efforts to which I look back with infinite satisfaction. . . most

especially my single handed production of the pageant’ The Star of Ethiopia.’ The pageant was

an attempt to put into dramatic form for the benefit of large masses of people, a history of the

Negro race” (270).In addition, Menelik’s triumph over Italy in 1896 also provided a moment in

history that continental Africans could look back on with dignified nostalgia, hence, its

significance as the starting point of black cosmopolitanism for Africans on the continent.

Many Africans (280,000) were recruited to fight in World War I, so after the War, “the

editor of the Crisis believed as did numbers of American Negroes led by a group of Philadelphia

Negroes, that the Congress of Versailles should try to settle the problems of Africa” (V.II 56).

After the Congress of Versailles, through Du Bois’s unflinching interest in Africa, he decided to

organize his first traditional Pan-African Congress in Paris that was attended by fifty-eight

delegates, representing sixteen different Negro groups, and it “passed resolutions which the press

of the world largely approved:

Wherever persons of African descent are civilized and able to meet the tests of

surrounding culture, they shall be accorded the same rights as their fellow

citizens; they shall not be denied on account of race or color a voice in their own

government, justice before the courts and economic and social equality according

to ability and desert.10 (V.II 57)

Clearly, in the above paragraph, there is emphasis on the Negro Problem in America and the

subjugation of colonial subjects by imperial powers in colonized countries to draw awareness to

the fact that blacks everywhere were in crisis. It is important to note that the indefatigable efforts

of the Crisis during the Harlem Renaissance led to the founding of other black magazines like

the Opportunity under the auspices of the National Urban League with Charles S. Johnson as its

editor, A. Phillip Randolph’s left-wing magazine, Messenger, and an anarchist magazine,

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Challenge. With these additional publications, “The voice of the Negro became louder and more

strident with novels and books of essays” (V.II 49).

Following the success of the 1919 traditional Pan-African Congress, Du Bois held

another Congress a couple of years later on a scale larger than the one in 1919, with 110

delegates from 26 countries while a thousand more visited. The Congress was held in three

European cities—London, Brussels, and Lisbon. Jessie Fauset, then the literary editor of the

Crisis, recorded that the “dream of a Pan-African Congress had already come true in 1919. Yet it

was with hearts half-wondering, half fearful that we ventured to realize it afresh in 1921. So

tenuous, so delicate had been its beginnings” (V.II 57). Fauset then wondered if the Black

World, once stimulated and energized by the Great War, had lost its effervescence. Fauset did

not wonder long as Egypt-Sudan, then, under the yoke of British colonization, responded to the

call by making a fiduciary contribution to the 1921 traditional Pan-African Congress.

Specifically, the two countries sought the assistance of the Congress with a spiritual appeal to

Du Bois: “Sir, we cannot come but we are sending you this small sum to help toward the

expenses of the Pan-African Congress. Oh, Sir, we are looking to you for we need help sorely”

(V.II 57). The Congress viewed Du Bois extension of the Negro Problem to the rest of the

imperial and colonial worlds with more sanguinity:

The experiment of making the Negro slave a free citizen in the United states is not

a failure; the attempts at autonomous government in Haiti and Liberia are not

proofs of the impossibility of self-government among black men; the experience

of Spanish America does not prove that mulatto democracy will not eventually

succeed there; the aspirations of Egypt and India are not successfully to be met by

sneers at the capacity of darker men. (V.II 57-8)

In a profound spirit of cosmopolitanism, the resolution continues:

This is a world of men, of men whose likenesses far outweigh their differences;

who mutually need each other in labor and thought and dream, but who can

successfully have each other only on terms of equality, justice and mutual respect.

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They are the real and only peacemakers who work sincerely and peacefully to the

end. (58)

Encouraged by the success of the 1919 and 1921 Congresses, Du Bois held a similar traditional

Pan-African Congresses in 1923 and 1927, but the last traditional Pan-African Congress came

off in Manchester in 1945 under the guidance of George Padmore.

In spite of Du Bois and the Congresses’ interest in the progress of people of African

descent everywhere, Manuel Mansart developed an indifferent attitude toward the Pan-African

Congresses. In that scenario, Manuel becomes symbolic of the few provincial black Americans

Du Bois complained about after attending the 1911 Race Congress in London.11 Apparently, as

the black flame, Manuel was interested only in burning to illuminate the dark alley of ignorance

in education in the southern United States. In a conversation with Joe Scroggs who Mansart

eventually succeeds in convincing about the importance of blacks being educated in America, he

notes: “My mother washed dirty clothes to give me an education, and I became a teacher. My

people need teachers to cure the ignorance so longed forced on us” (V.II 129). From that

perspective, “The Pan-African Congress in 1919 and after, scarcely interested Mansart. There

were, however, several persons, ministers and teachers, who took the trip to England, France,

and Belgium to attend the second in 1921, largely because of the novelty of traveling abroad, but

also because of interest in Africa and the feel of a tie between the American Negroes and their

African cousins” (V.II 75).

The second volume in the trilogy ends with some blacks expressing their hopes in

Communism merely because it would guarantee them justice and equality, with some of the

great American writers of the Age also declaring their support for socialism. Frank Waldo,

Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Sidney Hook, Frederick Schuman, Lincoln

Steffens, Matthew Josephson, and Ella Winter all “aligned themselves with the frankly

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revolutionary, the party of the workers” (V.II 262). The Crisis, however, took a non-partisan

stance:

The world is ill. It has desperate economic problems intertwined with its problems of

racial prejudice. It does not make any difference what Communism says or does, these

problems are there. It does not make any difference what Capitalism does or has done in

the past. It has left this sinister heritage of poverty, maladjustment, and race prejudice.

These problems must be solved and only thought, study, and experiment can bring

intelligent action on the part of Negroes as well as whites. (V.II 262-3)

Through thought, study, and experiment, President Franklin Roosevelt installed new economic

and social measures in the 1930s to undo and remedy some of the past ills of poverty and

maladjustment that were profoundly deepened by the Great depression. The New Deal as it is

famously known had some of its measures declared unconstitutional in 1935. The Supreme Court

in declaring some of the measures in Roosevelt’s social program for economic recovery after the

depression as unconstitutional claimed that they violated the constitutional rights of the states.

The National Recovery Institute (NRI) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were some of the

measures deemed as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert

Hoover and some of his allies, including Andrew Mellon and a German businessman had hoped

that American republicanism rather than federalism should be depended on to stem the tide of

the Depression, and Big Corporations should provide the fiduciary stimulus to put the economy

on the road to recovery. On the basis of the Supreme Court decision, the German businessman

accentuates the unbridled power Big Business possesses:

This is the day of the Corporation. This culminating invention of the capitalist

age—immortal, omniscient, omnipotent, impersonal, and amoral—is bringing all

industry under its control and Industry is becoming Government” (264). In a

corollary, Hoover expresses his faith in imperialism and colonialism to help

sustain the monopoly of Corporations and white supremacy: “. . . We whites, and

we alone can direct the world’s work and make the goods it needs. For this we

need capital in huge amounts for labor and materials. This can come from

colonies in Asia and Africa and our Governments can secure and hold colonies

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and colonial regions. We need Russia and the Balkans, China and India, and the

South Seas for land and labor and they need us for brains. (VII. 264)

However, the Great Depression proved too powerful and too swift in its crippling of Big

Corporations. That economic meltdown compelled Roosevelt to rely on socialist programs to

return normalcy into the economy.

The closing paragraphs of Mansart Builds a School see Roosevelt and his Secretary,

Harry Hopkins in pensive moods, each making a prediction that came to pass. Roosevelt points

out, “We nations of the world have set the Russian revolution so thoroughly, completely back

that whatever it might have done, it now probably will not even attempt.” And Hopkins

prophesies:

I prophesy, I stand and swear that Britain and Europe and our America will yet be

saved from Nazis and Fascists by Communists under Stalin. Russia and Russia

alone, representing the white race, will yet prevent an awful World War between

the white and the colored worlds. The possession of modern industry by Russia,

and Russia’s stand against colonialism will make the exploitation and decimation

of Asia and Africa by Britain, France, and the United states impossible. (266)

In all of these, Mansart reads Marx’s Communist Manifesto but doubts its authenticity and

wonders how he can explain it to his students, who might want to know more, for his

unquenchable drive and enthusiasm as an educator is to unleash his heart and world totally “into

one whole Power and Peace, of Freedom and Law, of Force and Love” (V.II 266). Mansart’s

sentiments about the manifesto echo Du Bois’s revelation on Marx when he was at Harvard:

“Karl Marx was mentioned only to point out how thoroughly his theses had been disproven; of

his theory itself almost nothing was said” (The Autobiography 142). With his mind in a

quagmire, Mansart visits Europe and Asia in book three, Worlds of Color, to illuminate the

ignorance of Europeans about black America and to serve as a beacon in a search for the best

industrial education for Negroes.

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Manuel Mansart, at the age of sixty in 1936, set out for a visit to Europe and Asia

simultaneously to enlighten him and to enable him to get what Jean Du Bignon terms a well-

deserved rest. For before his trip, Mansart had been so traumatized by the race problem in the

United States, which he saw to be at best provincial and at worst hopeless. To Mansart’s able and

highly efficient secretary, Jean, Mansart “needed not simply rest but total spiritual change. He

needed to see a world divorced from the essentially trivial and temporary question of skin color

which had always been the center of his thought and action, and to realize that color of skin was

no more important than color of hair or length of foot” in many places in the world (V.III 8). In

Europe, Mansart first visits England, where he is hosted by the Rileys, one of England’s

aristocratic families living off the wealth derived from the benefits of colonization from mining

in Nigeria.

Through reading, Mansart realizes the role of imperialism and colonialism in unsettling

the world with economic wars. From Mansart’s reading, he realizes that the main cause of World

War I was from Germany’s dissatisfaction in her role as one of Europe’s imperial powers and

incompatibility with the wealth accruing from colonization and Italy’s frustration with its own

dearth of ability to impose its will on its share of colonies. As Europe enjoyed relative peace

from 1814 to 1915, there were intermittent wars for a piece of colonial domains “linking Europe

and eventually North America for world domination of the darker peoples of the earth” (V.III

11). Du Bois indicates: “As this European consortium became increasingly tightened and

perfected, three nations, Germany, Italy, and Japan, frozen out of their larger profits, began more

and more peremptorily to demand a share of the colonial areas. The result was the First World

War” (V.III 11). The Riley’s, Sir John, his wife, Lady Rivers; and their daughter, Sylvia prove

to be excellent hosts, allowing Mansart to critique their aristocratic life style in contrast to

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America’s profound work ethic, a habit the British regard as “perhaps an American rush and

hurry,” which seems to the British as “unnecessary and even useless” (V.III 14). Mansart seizes

the moment to strike at the heart of British aristocracy: “Milady, you never picked cotton. You

see, I was a child of workers. I was raised to work for what I wanted. You, if I may say so

without offense—do not work” (V.III 15). Sir John Riley then educates Mansart on the

colonization that was borne out of capitalism and which simultaneously enriched the imperial

nations as well as individuals:

I realize your implied criticism, Mr. Mansart. You see the situation is complicated

and historical. To many it is hard to grasp. For instance, my grandfather pioneered

in the Niger delta, traded in gold and pepper and at last in tin. He got title to

valuable mines. He raised capital in England to develop the mines, hired natives

to work them, brought in British technicians to direct this work; from the results

of this, I and my family live. (V.III 15)

When Sylvia wants to know Mansart’s impression on Africa, he responds: “We really know little

of Africa, but of course theoretically what we want is that Africa should be free and

independent” because freedom is the “heritage of mankind, of all men” (V.III 19).

From England, Mansart visits France, Germany, China, and Japan before returning to the

United States. While on these visits, Mansart learns of Europe’s dependence on Asia and Africa

for 500 years, learns more about the French Revolution of 1789 that gave the French “Liberty,

Equality, and Brotherhood,” the Haitian Revolution which “tried to force equality on France,”

and “the interpretation of the Russian Revolution” (V.III 23). In Germany, Mansart learns about

commerce and industry, and he visits a music theater in Beyreuth, where Richard Wagner’s

exhibits were on display and “was astonished at the picture of the German soul which this music

theater painted. He thought how among American Negroes, legend and fantasy might thus be

wed to histrionic ability and imagination, to build a great dramatic tradition”12 (V.III 30). While

in Japan, Mansart learns why Japan decided to become Hitler and Mussolini’s ally. In a letter to

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Jean, Mansart explains: “At one time during and after the Russo-Japanese war, recognizing the

power and ability of the Japanese, England made alliance with her as an equal. Then, with no

reason except the unstated one of color prejudice. Britain broke the alliance in 1921, unwilling to

link her fortunes with yellow people” (V.III 43). On Mansart’s return, Jean “realized that

Mansart’s wonderful trip around the world had broadened his outlook and broken down some of

the barriers that had hemmed him in to a narrow racial world. Life had become beauty, logic and

comfort” (V.III 45). As the Black Flame, the trip around the world helped define Mansart’s black

cosmopolitan position; the trip enlightened Mansart more on historical knowledge in regards to

England, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan, even as he excoriated colonialism.

The Black Flame is not only a historical account in fiction of African America from the

end of Reconstruction in 1876 to desegregation of schools in 1954, but it also recounts the

history of Pan-Africanism to give the trilogy its black cosmopolitan and Pan-African themes. In

The World and Africa, Du Bois reiterates the importance of Africa to the world as part of his

agenda to dignify Africa to help in the anti-colonist and anti-imperialistic struggle to relieve

Africa and Asia from the yokes of imperialism, hence, the need for the Pan-African and Pan

Asian movements. However, the Pan-African movement, in spite of the good intentions Du Bois

had, antagonisms from other blacks in the black Atlantic, to borrow Gilroy’s term, countered the

diligence and good will of Du Bois. St. Clair Drake argues that Du Bois and other traditional

Pan-Africanists saw “their struggles as not only involving black people everywhere but also as

being organically related to Third World struggles generally and to the world-wide struggle of

proletariat and peasantry, regardless of race” (454). In America, some black Americans felt the

Movement was too remote from the prevailing needs of blacks in America, so there was no need

for them to offer any help. This sensibility is exemplified by Mansart in England when he tells

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Sylvia Riley that African Americans “know comparatively little about Africa” (V.III 19). Du

Bois notes in “Whither Now and Why,” “The Pan-African meeting in 1919 could get little

support and cooperation among American Negroes. Most of them resented it as being a back to

Africa movement. Others simply said we had enough problems in America without taking on the

insoluble problems of Africa” (150). In Belgium, The Brussels Neptune wrote on June 14, 1921,

“Announcement has been made of a Pan African Congress organized at the instigation of the

National Association of Colored People of New York. It is interesting to note that this

association is directed by personages who it is said in the United States have received

remuneration from Moscow (Bolsheviks)” (The World and Africa 237). M.W. Kodi has argued

that the hostility of the Belgian Press toward Du Bois and the 1921 Pan African Congress was

largely a reaction toward Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association

(UNIA) that was fiercely agitating for decolonization in the Congo. The Belgians wrongly

thought Du Bois was in partnership with Garvey, especially after Du Bois was introduced at the

Brussels session by the Congolese intellectual, Paul Panda Farnana, known to the Belgian press

as the agitator for Garvey in the Congo (264). Kodi observes:

The Brussels session of the 1921 Pan African Congress took place under the long

and threatening shadow of Marcus Garvey and the overbearing pressures of the

Belgian Ministry of Colonies, business concerns, and newspapers. The vicious

campaign launched by the Belgian press against the congress made Garvey the

main issue of the session and allowed the specter to haunt participants. (263)

However, Du Bois was insistent and persistent, so the allegations did not stop him, as he held

two more congresses in 1923 and 1927 before the Great Depression obviated any more attempts

to organize meetings. Du Bois notes in an epigram to chapter two in Color and Democracy:

Colonies and Peace, “Colonies and the colonial system make the colonial peoples in a sense the

slums of the world, disfranchised and held in poverty and disease” (253). As part of his

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decolonization agenda, Du Bois indicts colonial imperialism. He notes: “Colonies are centers of

helplessness, of discouragement of initiative, of forced labor, and of legal suppression of all

activities or thoughts which the master country fears or dislikes” (253).

Toward the anti-colonial imperialistic goal for Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, in 1945,

under the aegis of George Padmore, the last traditional Pan-African meeting was held in

Manchester, England before Du Bois finally broke his second spell from the NAACP. In 1955,

under the auspices of Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a non-aligned

movement meeting was held in Bandung, Indonesia, where colored nations of the world met and

resolved not to get embroiled in the Cold War politics that rattled the world after 1945 when the

Soviet Union disengaged from the imperial three nations, the United States and Great Britain

being the other two. Du Bois was not able to attend the Bandung meeting in 1955 because his

passport had been confiscated for allegedly refusing to register as “an agent of a foreign

country.” Du Bois laments in “Whither Now and Why:” “From 1950 until 1958 I was not

allowed to travel abroad. The reason was that I had cooperated with millions of men who wanted

war to cease. For this I was accused of being the agent of foreign peace makers and ordered to

admit this or go to jail” (155). Of course, Du Bois refused to admit it, for which his passport was

confiscated, tried, and acquitted. Informed by German nationalistic ideals, Du Bois, it can be

argued, charted a cosmopolitan trajectory that initially was universal in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece and discrepant in Dark Princess: A Romance, but after Dark Princess and Japan’s

collusion with Hitler and Mussolini, his desire for a colored universe in which egalitarian social

order applied to all through cosmopolitanism became black, with the focus riveted on Pan-

Africanism and decolonization, so his mission in The Black Flame is the capturing of Black

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America’s history in fiction from the end of Reconstruction to 1954 and his efforts to help

disengage Africa from its colonial tethering.

Black cosmopolitanism and Pan-Africanism emerged from similar ideological trajectories

in reference to the links they share with slavery, violence, imperialism, and the memory

informing hegemonic conditions. As Drake has written, “In 1791, Haiti became the kind of key

symbol in the diaspora that Ethiopia was in Africa and one where ‘real history’ was available for

inspiration instead of mythic history” (452). Drake argues that ”Pan-African political activity

developed as a series of local, highly specific struggles against discrimination based on race and

color, sometimes covert, sometimes overt, and against material and psychological legacies of the

slave trade” (453). Drake also concerns himself with the task of tracing the political Pan-African

activity from 1900 to 1958 and gives it the moniker traditional Pan-Africanism, 1958 marking

the year in which Nkrumah, aided by George Padmore, organized the first Pan-African Congress

in Ghana. As a result of the protracted dispersion of black people on the globe through the slave

trade, the need arose for the creation of a movement to unite the oppressed in the struggle against

oppression. From this perspective, “Traditional Pan Africanism consciously and deliberately

attempts to create bonds of solidarity based on a commonality of fate imposed by the trans-

atlantic slave trade and its aftermath” (Drake 462).

After Menelik’s defeat of Italy in 1896, efforts to translate that victory from its symbolic

significance into reality occurred in 1900, when Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester-Williams

organized the debut traditional Pan-African Congress in London, and he invited Du Bois,

appointing him as secretary of the Congress. The experience Du Bois garnered from the first

Congress, culminating with the Congress of Races meeting he attended in 1911 weighed heavily

on him in his attempts to externalize the Negro Problem. As one of his biographers, David

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Levering Lewis has observed “In Du Bois, the African idea found an intellectual temperament

and organizational audacity enabling it to advance beyond the evangelical and literary to become

an embryonic movement whose cultural, political, and economic potential would assume, in the

long term, world-wide significance” (38). Du Bois would go on to advance the apolitical African

idea of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries championed by Martin Delaney and Edward

Wilmot Blythe into a political one by organizing his first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919

under the auspices of the NAACP. He organized successive Congresses in London, Brussels,

Paris, and Lisbon in 1921, 1923, and 1927, with the last one in New York. Drake affirms that the

“conferences were political in intent; they produced manifestos and protest delegations asking

for the elimination of racial discrimination on the basis of race and color discrimination

everywhere and for the gradual movement toward self-government in the Caribbean and Africa”

(463).

On the other hand, India’s independence in 1947 and the Non-Aligned nations’

conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 and in Harlem in 1957 fulfilled Princess

Kautilya’s prediction in Dark Princess and brought a new wave of sanguinity to African nations

in their struggles for decolonization. The African-centered struggles compelled a shift in Pan-

Africanism from the traditional to what Drake has labeled continental. Thus, continental Pan-

Africanism relates to “efforts to unite Africans in Africa” based on Padmore’s groundbreaking

book, Pan-Africanism or Communism, which was published in 1956. In the book, Padmore

assigns a broad definition to what constitutes an African to constitute the basis of continental

Pan-Africanism in the struggles for decolonization. Based on Padmore’s definition, anyone who

believes “in one man, one vote, and economic, political, and social equality” is an African

(Drake 469). Under Nkrumah’s effort and aided by Padmore, the first continental Pan-African

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Congress under the name First Conference of Independent African States was held in Accra,

Ghana in 1958, a year after Ghana’s independence. Later, it became the Organization of African

Unity, but today it is known commonly as the African Union.

The broad definitions of Pan-Africanism and what constitutes an African provide an

ambiguous ground for the classification of Asia in Du Bois’s Black Cosmopolitan and Pan-

African projects. Du Bois praised victorious Japan in 1906, hailing its triumph over Russia in the

Russo-Japan War of 1904 as victory of the colored people of the world over Western hegemony.

Du Bois has written in Crossing the World Color Line:

The Russo-Japanese war has marked an epoch. The magic of the word ‘white’ is

already broken. The magic of the word ‘white’ is already broken, and the Color

Line in civilization has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past.

The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown

and black races would follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can

doubt” (Introduction vii).

Japan’s defeat of Russia compelled Du Bois to develop a fraternal relationship with Asia. Mullen

and Watson have argued that “Du Bois consistently saw Asia as the fraternal twin to African—

and African American—struggle for political freedom and cultural self-preservation. In 1914, on

the eve of World War I, he revised his color line trope as a hemispheric index to the world’s

future” (viii). Certainly, the color line trope as a global index to the world’s future was critical in

Du Bois’s decolonization and anti-imperialistic agenda, as Japan’s partnership with Hitler and

Mussolini prompted the vision of both universal and discrepant cosmopolitanisms in The Quest

and Dark Princess, respectively, to shift to black cosmopolitanism in The Black Flame. Japan’s

alliance with fascism countered the ideals of cosmopolitanism and modernity. However, before

Japan’s developed her costly relationship with Hitler, Britain had broken her alliance with Japan

in 1921, because apparently, Britain was “unwilling to link her fortunes with yellow people”

(V.III 43). Japan’s attitude, then, experienced a detour, and she began to develop an insatiable

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desire to profit from colonization, the same motivation that drove Germany to the zenith of

avarice and which precipitated World War I. Toward that end, since Japan’s alliance initially

with Great Britain proved unsuccessful, she shifted the alliance to Italy and Germany to wage

another deadly World War. While Hitler was mesmerizing and annihilating Jews in Germany,

Japan was pursuing its own colonization mission in Asia by declaring war on China in 1937 for

the rights to dominate and rule over the Manchuria province.

While in Japan, Manuel Mansart wrote a letter to Jean, narrating reasons behind Japan’s

decision to collude with Hitler and Mussolini in spite of the fact that the former was tormenting

Jews in Germany and the latter was still a thorn in the flesh of Ethiopians with a new form of

aggression: “It was the fear of England that was pushing Japan. England dominated China and

India, Australia and New Zealand. . . [T]he tragedy of this epoch was that Japan learned Western

ways too soon and too well, and turned from Asia to Europe.” Japan’s “headstrong leaders chose

to apply Western imperialism to her domination of the East, and Western profit-making replaced

Eastern idealism” (V.III 43). Professor Burghardt points out that during the Pan-African

congresses, he “wanted Negroes to emerge into an understanding of a greater black world and its

problems. His plan even attracted Asia, India, and Vietnam. China listened. But neither he nor

they dared hope to get any chance to be co-workers in the white world. That world then seemed

too self-centered” (V.III 66).

In November of 1944, Du Bois made a radio broadcast in New York, “The Negro and

Imperialism,” in which he critiqued the Dumbarton Oaks Conference as unfair in its treatment of

the black, brown, and yellow peoples of the world, especially the exclusion of China from the

formulation of the UN Security Council. Du Bois blamed the League of Nations for its refusal to

acquiesce to Japan’s proposal to the League to declare racial equality among all nations, as the

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residual cause of World War II. As Du Bois points out, “The proposal for a racial equality

declaration among all nations, once made by Japan before the League of Nations and lately as

persistent rumor has it, repeated at Dumbarton Oaks by China does not appear in the published

proposals.”13 After World War II, understandably, Du Bois’s black cosmopolitanism was

focused more on decolonizing Africa and on peace missions, although he personally did not

convene any more Pan-African congresses. As Gates notes in “The Black Letters on the Sign:

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Canon,” “The conundrum in Du Bois’s career is that in his old age, Du

Bois became, more deeply immersed in the struggle for Pan-Africanism and decolonization

against European colonial powers, and an emergent postcolonial ‘African’ or ‘Pan-Negro’ social

and political identity” (xv). Furthermore, Gates adds:

And the blacker that his stand against colonialism became, the less ‘black’, in a

very real sense, his analysis of what he famously called ‘The Negro Problem,’

simultaneously became. The more African Du Bois became, in other words, the

more cosmopolitan his analysis of the root causes of anti-black- and-brown-and –

yellow racism and colonialism became, seeking the status of the American Negro

as part and parcel of a larger problem of international economic domination. (xv)

Gates’s analysis of Du Bois’s important career aptly explains his evolution and metamorphosis

of cosmopolitanism that began as universal and discrepant but eventually became black, with the

concentration of Du Bois being on Africa and its decolonization. The markers “black” and

“African” are the adjectives that define the cosmopolitanism I utilize in the analysis of the trilogy

to indicate, as Gates has claimed, the shifts in Du Bois’s ideologies—from a Western-centered

cosmopolitanism in The Quest to Asia in Dark Princess and finally to black and Africa in The

Black Flame.

In “Ghana and Pan Africanism,” Du Bois reveals a vision of a “continental” Pan

Africanism with the focus being distinctly on Africa. Du Bois observes in this message: “The

new series of Pan-African Congresses would seek common aims of progress for Black Africa,

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including types of political control, economic cooperation, cultural development, universal

education and freedom from religious dogma and dictation” 14 (296). The shifts in Du Bois’s

ideology are partly observed in The Black Flame where the focus initially is on African America

in The Ordeal of Mansart and Mansart Builds a School, but in the last volume, Worlds of Color,

Manuel Mansart, the protagonist, goes international with visits to Europe and Asia while Jean

visits the West Indies. During his visit, Mansart is able to debunk some of the empiric notions of

superiority by his hosts. In a tone that has a sarcastic element to it, Mansart points out to Lady

Rivers, “I assure your ladyship that Sir John richly deserves what the world gives him. I only ask

in humility, if Africa is today in a position to pay the debt, and if her bankruptcy is her fault,

since surely it is not the fault of Sir John?” (V.III 17). Here Mansart is referring to the

exploitation of Africa’s resources by the imperial powers during the colonization of the continent

and the possibility of Africa’s debt being overwritten by the imperial nations. Martin Luther

King, Jr. once wrote: “And yet, with all his pride and spirit, [Du Bois] did not make a mystique

out of blackness. He was proud of his people, not because their color endowed them with some

vague greatness but because their concrete achievements in struggle had advanced humanity, and

he saw and loved progressive humanity in all its hues, black, white, yellow, and brown” (Dusk

of Dawn xiv). Certainly, by fictionalizing history in The Black Flame, Du Bois did not create any

mystique out of blackness.

Thus, Mansart, the first black college president to come out of the South dies a satisfied

president, especially so because his death coincided with the year in which the Supreme Court

desegregated schools, transportation, and other public places in the country. Indeed, Mansart dies

peacefully, so the Bishop recites Psalm 23, for he feared no evil in his life time, as he walked

through the Shadow of the Valley of Death in the presence of his enemies, and Goodness and

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Mercy followed him throughout his days on earth. He was the black flame that dealt a terrible

blow to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan’s hate-spewing ideology against the education of blacks

to perpetuate the myth of the inferiority of the Negro. In this sense, when Mansart died, “over his

body lay a pall of crimson roses, such as few kings have slept beneath” (V.III 240). Manuel

Mansart died like a monarch because under his tenure, the education of black subjects was not

encased in the realm of a solitary, nasty, and brutish treatment. Clearly through black

cosmopolitanism and stirring Pan-African activities, Du Bois fictionalized history to help

dismantle notions of Western hegemony and empire building by imperial Europe to pave the way

for Asian and African nations to gain their independence with India leading the way in 1947 and

followed by Ghana a decade later in 1957.

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NOTES

1. See King’s tribute to Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn for the full text (vii-xvii).

2. For more on Du Bois’s African consciousness, see the chapter, “Andromeda,” in The World

and Africa.

3. See Murfin and Ray for another definition of New Historicism.

4. Elliot’s rendition recalls Du Bois commencement speech at Harvard in which he chose as

his topic Jefferson Davies, president of the Confederate States of America. See Du Bois, The

Autobiography, 146; Dusk of Dawn, 42.

5. Tom Dixon published The Clansman, a book that D.W. Griffiths adapted into a gross

selling movie, Birth of a Nation, and which became a darling of white supremacists in the early

decades of the twentieth century. Contrast with its sequel, The Fall of a Nation.

6. Du Bois points out, “Work, culture, liberty,--all these we need not singly but together.” See

chapter 1 of The Souls of Black Folk, 106.

7. See Robbins, “Introduction: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” for a comprehensive

analysis of cosmopolitanism, 1-26.

8. Du Bois borrowed the Hellenistic ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness and made them his

mantra for a long time. See chapter 5 in The Souls of Black Folk.

9. The demise of Madam C.J. Walker during the thunderstorm signifies her greatness. See

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen, but the heavens

themselves blaze for the death of princes” (Act II scene 2).

10. Drake echoes Du Bois on the need for social equality according to ability for the darker

races. See Drake 451-518.

11. The Races of Congress meeting Du Bois attended in London in 1911 inspired him to

coalesce the darker races even if spiritually. See Du Bois, “Whither Now and Why,” 150.

12. Through fiction, Du Bois is able to express his political sensibilities unequivocally and

without any inhibitions. See The Autobiography 156, 168.

13. Du Bois castigated the Dumbarton Oaks Conference as meaningless without China’s

membership to the U.N. Security Council. See Du Bois, “The Negro and Imperialism,” 37.

14. Du Bois anoints Nkrumah to lead the Pan-African movement in “The Future for Pan-

Africa: Freedom, Peace, Socialism,” 292-310.

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CHAPTER IV

DU BOIS AND HIS INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES

IN AFRICA, ASIA, AND THE CARIBBEAN

While many critics, authors, and scholars, including Herbert Aphteker, Henry Lewis

Gates, Jr., Arnold Rampersad, Harold Bloom, and David Levering Lewis, have written and

commented on Du Bois’s American and European influences,1 his African, Asian, and Caribbean

influences deserve more scholarly investigation to ensure that these influences over time are not

relegated into critical obscurity.2 As a result, much more needs to be written on his so-called

“Third World” influences to shed more light on the interactions that contributed to his shifting

ideologies and world views in the formulations of his anti-imperial and anti-colonial thought.

From this perspective, chapter four examines Du Bois’s intellectual influences outside of

America and Europe and focuses on his intellectual and political influences in Asia, Africa, and

the Caribbean and how they helped shape his utopian desire for an inimitable colored world. In

such an imagined world, Du Bois desired that equality and justice could prevail to all through an

elaboration on black cosmopolitanism. In his formulation of anti-colonial and anti-imperial

programs for Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, Du Bois envisioned a world-imagined community

that was devoid of impassioned nationalisms in order to bring into fruition an egalitarian social

order. Obviously, such a world is utopian in its dimensions and limitations, but merely by

imagining this world, the idea itself helps to engender, as Fredric Jameson has argued, its very

own possibility.

Jameson has written eloquently on Utopia and its applicability to science fiction and

other phenomena. In “Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Jameson sees

Utopia as “Hope” that is coterminous with the hope Du Bois had in anticipation of helping

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Africans and Asians win their independence from the hegemony of Western imperialism and

colonialism. In “Varieties of the Utopian,” Jameson envisions a contemporaneity of Thomas

More’s 1571 foundational text, noting that just like More felt when his utopian project became

complete after the building of the canal, in a similar vein, “the conquest of the New World,

Ariosto and modern literature, Luther and modern consciousness,” as well as Machiavellian’s

political perspicuity can all be considered utopian productions. More importantly, Jameson

addresses the idea of “utopia” not as wishful thinking but as a necessary pre-condition for any

political project—it is part of what he calls “cognitive mapping” by which he means that one

must envision the future if it is to come into being. So “utopia” is not “building castles in the

sky”; it is a form of “cognitive mapping” that is necessary for political engagement in the world

to bring into being what is “possible.” Jameson concludes his address on “Cognitive Mapping”

thus: “Still, if we cannot imagine the productions of such an aesthetic cognitive mapping), there

may, nonetheless, as with the very idea of Utopia itself, be something positive in the attempt to

keep alive the possibility of imagining such a thing” (6). In the same strand, I argue that in Du

Bois’s configuration of traditional Pan-Africanism and concerns about Pan-Asian ideals, he

moved away markedly from the German romantic ideals and the Western Enlightenment

tradition.3 Indeed, from his stirring activities in traditional Pan-Africanism, Du Bois imagines the

possibility of continental Pan-Africanism in a short manifesto to the Non-Aligned Movement at

their 1955 meeting in Bandung: “Black Africa welcomes the world as equals, as masters never;

we will fight this forever and curse the blaspheming Boers and the heathen liars from Hell”

(“The Giant Stirs” 291). The semantics here mark a clear shift from the Fabianism of the

traditional Pan-African congresses from 1919 to 1927 to a more radical and defiant tone, echoing

a resolution of the 1945 Pan-African Congress that George Padmore organized.4

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Writing on the path emerging African nations vying for independence need to chart as

such, Padmore does not lose sight of the nationalism that could derail Du Bois’s vision of an

egalitarian social and political order for the colored worlds. As Padmore adheres,

In their struggles to attain self-government and self-determination, the younger

leaders of Pan-Africanism have the task of building upon the ideological

foundations laid by Dr. Du Bois, the father of Pan-Africanism. The problems

facing these men are very much more varied and complex than those which beset

the founders of the Sierra Leone and Liberia settlements. They are under the

necessity to evolve new political means and organizational techniques adapted to

African traditions and circumstances. (Author’s Note xvii)

In Kenya, a classic example of a multi-racial society in Africa, tension among the various racial

groups in the struggle for independence resulted in a Jomo Kenyatta-led Mau Mau, a militant

group infused with profound nationalistic fervor, to resort to violence in the form of guerrilla

warfare to wrestle Kenya’s independence from Britain. Nationalism, therefore, becomes

antithetical to the ideals of cosmopolitanism, be it universal, discrepant, or black. As David Hell

has argued, “The contemporary drivers of political nationalism—self-determination, secure

borders, geo-political and geo-economic advantage—place an emphasis on the pursuit of the

national interest above concerns with what it is that humans have in common”5 (28).

Perhaps, Jean-Paul Sartre’s mordantly Manichean appraisal of Africa in which he deconstructs

the continent symbolizes the Pan-African Movement. In “Black Orpheus,” Sartre paints a

mysterious picture of Africa:

the last circle, navel of the world, pole of all black poetry; Africa, dazzling,

incendiary, oily as the serpent’s skin; Africa of the fire and the rain, torrid and

tufted; Africa--phantom, flickering like a flame, between being and nothingness,

more real than the ‘eternal boulevards and their legions of cops,’ but yet absent,

beyond attainment, disintegrating Europe with its black but invisible rays; Africa

beyond reach, imaginary continent. (299)

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During the struggle for independence when Pan-African activities were, for the most part,

traditional, the inchoate African leaders could only dream of the day when they would be able to

decolonize the continent from colonial imperialism. In that sense, Africa seemed beyond reach to

the nascent leaders, so they only imagined the potentiality of the attainment of independence. Du

Bois himself saw the Movement as a forum for ideological iteration.

It is equally important to note that Du Bois first arrived in Africa in December of 1923;

he stayed for six weeks. On January 27, 1924, he met with members of the National Congress of

British West Africa (NCBWA) under the leadership of J.E. Caseley-Hayford.6 At that meeting in

Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Du Bois pointed out to his audience the importance of

Pan-Africanism, grounding his speech in the inherent values and benefits of Pan-Africanism to

the darker world. As David Levering Lewis asserts, “Pan-African Movement was to inform, to

plan, and ultimately to mobilize the darker world”7 (127). The interaction Du Bois had with

intellectuals, politicians, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean kept his dream of

mobilizing the darker world alive, and when India gained her independence from Britain in 1947,

it kept his flame for an egalitarian social order in the colored world still burning, although

nationalism would soon derail his hopes with the assassination of Gandhi not long after India

declared her independence. Pan-Africanism is not just an African movement catering to the

liberation of Africa; it is also interested in Asia and how countries such as India, Indonesia, Sri

Lanka, Myanmar, and Malaysia could extricate themselves from the grip of colonialism. As

Padmore has suggested,

Recognizing the oneness of the struggles of the Colored World for freedom from

alien domination, Pan-Africanism endorses the conception of an Asian-African

front against that racial arrogance which has reached its apogee in the Herrenvolk

philosophy of apartheid. Pan-Africanism, moreover, draws considerable

inspiration from the struggles of the national freedom movements of the Asian

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countries, and subscribes to the Gandhian doctrine of non-violence as a means of

attaining self-determination and racial equality. (xvi)

The inspiration drawn from the national freedom struggles of the Asian countries that adheres to

the Gandhian principle of non-violence in attaining self-determination and racial equality is a

further elaboration on Du Bois’s black cosmopolitan thought and contributes to Du Bois’s

evolving ideas on in his decentering of the West’s empiric ambitions.

W.E.B. Du Bois and His Intellectual and Political

Influences in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean

The chapter argues that Du Bois’s configuration of traditional Pan-Africanism and

concerns about Pan-Asian ideals were borne out of his imagination for the possibility of an equal

social and political order for the ‘colored peoples” of the world. Broadly speaking, Du Bois saw

traditional Pan-Africanism as an intellectual understanding and co-operation among all colored

groups for spiritual and industrial emancipation that he believed would lead to the progress of the

colored races. Du Bois’s two year sojourn in Germany remarkably assisted in his having a more

truthful conception of Africa: “In the last decade of the 19th century, I studied two years in

Europe, and often heard Africa mention with respect. Then, as a teacher in America, I had a few

African students. Later, at Atlanta University, a visiting professor, Franz Boaz, addressed the

students and told them of the history of the Black Sudan. I was utterly amazed and began to

study Africa for myself” (The World and Africa 305-6). Du Bois’s study of Africa at Atlanta

University culminated in his acceptance to attend the first ever Pan-African Congress held in

London under the auspices of Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester–Williams, in 1900.8 At that

meeting, Du Bois was appointed the Secretary. Following the 1900 meeting, Sylvester-Williams

relocated from London to Port-au-Prince to signify the abeyance of the Movement. When

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Sylvester-Williams died in 1911, Du Bois attended a World Congress of the Races in London in

the same year and returned with an indomitable desire to revive the traditional Pan-African

movement. The intervening years rendered Du Bois incapable of doing anything about the Pan-

African idea because of World War I (1914-18). Du Bois’s dream, however, came into fruition in

1919 when he organized the first Du Bois-led Pan-African Congress in Europe in Paris.9

Traditional Pan-Africanism, with Du Bois determined to topple the West from its

colonizing mission, became a counter-culture of hegemony that hastened the pace for India and

African nations, south of the Sahara, to gain independence from the imperial powers. At the 1919

Congress, Du Bois met the Senegalese intellectual Blaise Diagne, South African educator and

founder of African National Congress, John Langalibalele; and Guadeloupian intellectuals

Graftien Candace and Isaac Beton.10 Du Bois would meet other African intellectuals like

Ghanaian lawyer and author of Ethiopia Unbound, J.E. Caseley-Hayford, whom he first

communicated with in 1920 after Caseley-Hayford had led a group of West African intellectuals

to the Colonial Office in London to demand participation in government by Africans. Later, Du

Bois met Caseley-Hayford in Sierra Leone in 1924 on his African visit. Du Bois also met

Nigerian intellectual and first president after independence, Howard University, Lincoln

University, and University of Pennsylvania-educated Nnamdi Azikiwe. Du Bois also met a

Ghanaian, another Lincoln University and University of Pennsylvania-educated intellectual,

Kwame Nkrumah in Manchester in 1945, who also became Ghana’s first president after

independence in 1957. Of all the Pan-African intellectuals he met, however, Du Bois became

fond of Nkrumah and anointed him his successor.11

Du Bois’s initial mission to France in 1919 was to attend the Versailles Peace Treaty also

known as the Peace Conference of Versailles that was organized after the War. As soon as

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“armistice was declared, Dr. Du Bois set forth for Paris in the hope of petitioning the victorious

Allied Powers to adopt a Charter of Human Rights for Africans as a reward for the services

rendered by black men on the battlefield of Europe and elsewhere” (Padmore 97).

Simultaneously, as the Peace Treaty meeting was going on, Du Bois decided to call for his debut

Pan African Congress, but the fashion in which to garner and harness delegates and logistics to

ensure a successful Congress became a little problematic for Du Bois as the United States

embassy in Paris was unwilling to help. At that juncture, J.A. Rogers, an African American

historian who was then stationed in Paris, mentioned Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese deputy who

was the only African member of the French Parliament, to Du Bois.12 Diagne was an interesting

yet complex character. Based on George Padmore’s account, “in 1917, France was confronting

military disaster, so Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau hurriedly appointed Diagne

Commissaire-General of West Africa, charging him “with the responsibility of recruiting African

troops for the Western front to help stem the German offensive at the Battle of Marne in July

1918” (98).

Similar to the Battle of Adowa in 1896, the African troops in 1918 excelled and pushed

the Germans into defeat and submission. Clemenceau was impressed with the profound

execution of duty by the African troops, and Diagne won a lot of respect from the Prime

Minister. Rogers who knew Diagne very well notes: “Diagne accepted the post for two reasons.

He knew that of the exploiting white powers in Africa, France showed the least color prejudice;

and he felt that if the blacks came to the rescue of France, it would make her more liberal”

(Padmore 98). After Diagne’s recruiting mission and efforts in helping win the War for France,

Clemenceau awarded Diagne with the highest military honor in France, the Legion of Honor, but

he humbly refused. Diagne’s show of humility elevated his status in the eyes of both the

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President of France, Raymond Poincare, and the Premier Georges Clemenceau to astronomical

heights. In that sense, Diagne capitalized on his popularity to help Du Bois to stage the 1919

Congress in France. However, Diagne was not without his critics: “He was called a traitor for

having brought the Africans to fight for France and a tool of the rich white colonial interests.

Others, however, praised him as having done more than any other to strengthen the position of

coloured peoples in the French Empire” (Padmore 99). Thus, the first traditional Pan-African

Congress came off in Paris from February 19-21, 1919, in the Grand Hotel. The executive

committee members were Diagne as president, Du Bois served as Secretary with Mrs. Ida Gibbs

Hunt, and M.E.F. Fredericks of Sierra Leone as members. As Du Bois points out in “The Pan-

African Congresses: The Story of a Growing Movement,” “Fifty-seven delegates representing

fifteen countries were present and among the speakers were members of the French Parliament,

the President of Liberia, a former Secretary of State of Portugal and several other distinguished

persons” (670). The imagined possibilities of Du Bois’s traditional Pan-Africanism had a global

vision of drawing from a common history and experience of black people everywhere in “an

attempt to call the attention of the world in travail to the plight of a race” in both the United

States and the rest of the colonized world (“A Second Journey to Pan-Africa” (662).

Indeed, it is also important to note that the first ever Pan-African Congress organized by

the Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester-Williams, in 1900 to which Du Bois was invited was

starkly different from the 1919 Congress in form. The 1900 Congress was organized because

Sylvester-Williams felt the need to organize African chiefs, who back then visited the Colonial

Office in London to demand certain inalienable rights for their colonial subjects, in presenting a

concerted unified front to the Colonial Office in London. Padmore observes that in an effort

to combat the aggressive policies of British imperialists, Mr. Sylvester-Williams

took the initiative in convening a Pan-African conference in London in 1900, as a

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forum of protest against the aggression of white colonizers and, at the same time,

to make an appeal to protect the Africans from the depredations of the Empire

builders. (95-6)

In 1919, Du Bois broadened the outlook and the mission of the Pan-African movement: “The

Pan-African concept remained dormant until it was revived by Dr. Du Bois after the First World

War. Thanks to his devotion and sacrifice, he gave body and soul to Sylvester-Williams’s

original idea of Pan-Africanism and broadened its perspective” (Padmore 96). Thus, in the

context of traditional and continental Pan-Africanism, I argue that Du Bois was the originator of

traditional Pan-Africanism while Sylvester-Williams can be described as the originator of

continental Pan-Africanism. It is possible that when Rogers mentioned Diagne’s name to Du

Bois, it might have excited the latter, for Ibrahima B. Kake` suggests that Diagne “denounced

Garveyism. He reaffirmed his attachment to France and declared his resolute support for a policy

of association” (203). It could be argued that as a result of Diagne’s castigation of Garveyism, a

representative of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Paris was not invited to

the Congress, and Garvey did not take generously to the snob of his representative. In an effort to

explain the meaning of traditional Pan-Africanism, Kake` notes: “By African Pan-Africanism, it

encompassed those who claimed kinship with Africa by virtue of their ancestral origins, no

matter where they now lived, what their nationalities were, or what quantity of African blood

they had in their veins” (254).

Du Bois’s plan for the traditional Pan-African movement was to craft and lay down a

program toward a gradual path to equality, justice, and decolonization through witty, reasonable,

and knowledgeable demands because he was conscious of the fact that African nations were not

hitherto ready for democratic self-governance. However, starkly antagonistic to the cosmopolitan

ideals and hope of Du Bois’s traditional Pan-Africanism was Marcus Garvey and his UNIA

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movement. In a seemingly spontaneous reaction to the disrespect accorded his representative a

year earlier, Garvey organized his own Pan-African Congress in New York in 1920. Kake`

states: “In 1920, Garvey held his own Pan-African Congress and almost three thousand delegates

attended from all parts of the globe” (255). Garvey radically and provocatively proclaimed, “The

time has come when the entire African continent will be claimed as the motherland of black

peoples” (Kake` 255). Garvey’s radical anti-colonial rhetoric in addition to the colors of UNIA—

black, red, and green—carefully chosen to symbolize skin color, blood, and hope of blacks,

sparked an overwhelming enthusiasm and dignity in black identity, and that resonated with many

blacks. Besides, Garvey’s precipitous and poignant message not only countered Du Bois’s ideal

traditional Pan-Africanism encroached in gradual decolonization, but it also agitated the colonial

powers to action. In an essay titled “Marcus Garvey,” Du Bois comments on Garvey’s 1920

convention: “Early in 1920, [Garvey] called a convention of Negroes to meet in New York City

from the 1st to 31st of August, ‘to outline a constructive plan and program for the uplifting of the

Negroes and the redemption of Africa’” (Du Bois: Writings 970). According to Du Bois, the

convention was attended by delegates from “various parts of the United States, several of the

West Indian Islands and the Canal Zone and a few from Africa. The convention carried out its

plan . . . and culminated in mass meetings that filled Madison Square Garden. Finally, the

convention adopted a ‘Declaration of Independence’ with 66 articles, a universal anthem . . . and

elected Marcus Garvey as ‘His Excellency, the Provisional President of Africa’” (Writings 970).

As a result of Garvey’s influence and his Back-to-Africa Movement, the 1921 tri-city

Congress that Du Bois held in London, Brussels, and Paris, drew unsavory commentaries from

the Belgian media, which bandied Pan-Africanism as a Bolshevist movement and Du Bois, its

culprit. Commenting on the 1921 Pan-African Congress, J. Ayodele has caustically observed:

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“W.E.B. Du Bois Pan-African crusade never recovered its élan after Brussels” (Kodi 263). Kodi

also suggests that “by the time the congress was conveyed in September 1921, the colonial

authorities in Brussels and Boma (then capital of the Congo) had gathered a great deal of

information . . . that convinced them that African Americans led by Marcus Garvey, were bent

on overthrowing European rule in Africa . . . Furthermore, Panda’s collaboration with Du Bois in

the organization of the congress was in Belgian eyes, the confirmation of the Garveyist, and

therefore, disruptive nature of the congress” (264). Du Bois also narrated the difficulties the

traditional Pan-African Congress encountered in 1921: “On the other hand the Pan-African

movement ran into two fatal difficulties: first of all, it was much too early to assume as I had

assumed that in 1921 the war was over. In fact the whole tremendous drama which followed the

war…made any setting of such movement as I envisaged was probably at the time impossible”

(Writings 756). The second problematic was Marcus Garvey: “There came too a second

difficulty which had elements of comedy and curious social frustration, but nevertheless was real

and in a sense tragic. Marcus Garvey walked into the scene” (750). Du Bois then later continues:

“News of his astonishing plans reached Europe and the various colonial offices, even before my

much broader proposals. Often the Pan-African Congress was confounded with the Garvey

movement with consequent of suspicion and attack” (Writings 751). Compelled to react, in 1924,

Du Bois wrote an article in the Crisis and headlined it, “A Lunatic or a Traitor.” Although Du

Bois did not mention Garvey’s role and the disruptive nature of his 1920 Pan-African Congress,

it was clear who the perfidious aspect of the headline was aimed at—Garvey.

If the 1919 Congress was hastily arranged, the 1921 Congress was carefully planned and

meticulously executed although it met simultaneously vitriolic criticism and vituperative

antagonism from the European press, including “the London Times and Daily Graphic, the Petit

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Parisien, Matin and Temps, the Manchester Guardian, and all the daily papers in Belgium”

(Writings 756). Du Bois writes: “Of the Pan African Congresses, I have explained their rather

hurriedly conceived beginning. I was convinced, however, by my experience in Paris in 1919

that here was a real vision and an actual need" (Du Bois: Writings 754). The real vision and the

actual need translated into a useful Congress of British West African States in 1920 in Accra, the

capital of Gold Coast, a name Nkrumah changed to Ghana at independence in March, 1957. Held

under the auspices of attorney J.E. Caseley Hayford, the West African intellectuals demanded a

more equitable treatment politically from the colonial administration through constitutional

reforms: “Mr. Joseph Caseley Hayford formed the West African National Congress to voice the

united political aspirations of the Negro middle-class intellectuals in the four British colonies of

Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria. The W.A.N.C. sent a delegation to England in 1920

to present the demands of the educated Africans for constitutional and other reforms to Lord

Milner, the Secretary of State for Colonies” (Padmore 106). The result of Hayford’s Du Boisian

agitation for constitutional reform from imperial England had an immediate impact on Du Bois,

so he established contact with the attorney from Ghana. Padmore has noted that “Dr. Du Bois

had been in contact with Mr. Caseley Hayford, and welcomed the emergence of the West

African National Congress. Mr. Caseley Hayford, in turn, endorsed the program of the Pan-

African Congress and pledged support” (107).

With contacts that he established at the Sylvester-Williams’s Congress in 1900, the 1911

Races Congress and the 1919 Pan-African Congress, Du Bois was motivated and inspired in

organizing the 1921 Congress, a congress he described as “real Pan-African:” “This congress

really deserved to be called Pan-African and it attracted world-wide attention. There were one

hundred thirteen accredited delegates from twenty-six different groups, including thirty-five

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persons from the United States, thirty-nine from Africa and the rest from West Indies and

Europe” (Writings 755-6). Among the individual countries that sent delegates to the 1921

Congress were blacks from West and South Africa, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, Nigeria

and Ghana. Indians from India and East Africa and colored men from London were also in

attendance.13 For the second successive Congress, Diagne presided, with Du Bois serving as

Secretary. Diagne was a complex character, a man who supported decolonization for Africa but

at the same time was wary of giving up his colonial investments. On his hope for the Pan-African

movement, hope festooned simultaneously in black cosmopolitanism and Fabianism, Du Bois

notified the Belgian Congress on the resolution adopted at the London session, part of which

read: “[W]e came not for revolution but certainly for calm and reasonable complaint.” Du Bois

and his African American group were not prepared to hear the word “Bolshevists” which was

“received in London without protest and was “absolutely inadmissible in Brussels” (W.E.B. Du

Bois: A Reader 663-4). The powerful Diagne was happy that Du Bois and his group denounced

Bolshevism and distanced themselves from it, so he “was beside himself with excitement after

the resolutions were read; as an under-secretary of the French government, as a ranking Negro of

greater France, and perhaps as a successful investor in French colonial enterprises, he was

undoubtedly in a difficult position” (Reader 664). However, it is possible that Diagne’s

dichotomous attitude did not resonate well with Du Bois. In regards to the 1923 Congress in

Brussels, Du Bois laments in The World and Africa:

Resolutions passed without dissent in London contained a statement concerning

Belgium, criticizing the colonial regime in Belgium, although giving her credit for

plans of reform for the future. This aroused bitter opposition in Brussels, and

attempt was made to substitute an innocuous statement concerning goodwill and

investigation, which Diagne of France, as the presiding officer, declared adopted

in the face of clear majority in opposition. (237)

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From that perspective, in “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” an article Du Bois wrote and

published in Alain Locke’s 1925 Harlem Renaissance manifesto, The New Negro, Du Bois

strategically refrained from admitting that he knew Diagne, referring to him only as the

Senegalese deputy. For Diagne’s untoward and somewhat avaricious interests in the colonization

of Senegal, Rene` Maran excoriated Diagne and France, a castigation Du Bois would signify as

blatantly bold:

I know two black men in France. One is [Graftien] Candace, black West Indian

deputy, an out-and-out defender of the nation and more French than the French.

The other is Rene` Maran, black Goncourt prize man and author of Batouala.

Maran’s attack on France and the black French deputy from Senegal has gone into

the courts and marks an era. Never before have Negroes criticized the work of the

French in Africa. (392)

A shift in Du Bois’s world view is noticed in regards to his friendship with Diagne. In his essay

“A Second Journey to Pan-Africa,” Du Bois critiques the dangerous trajectory being trodden by

Diagne and Candace toward decolonization: “The crying danger to black France is its educated

and voting leaders will join in the industrial robbery of Africa rather than lead its masses to

education and culture. This is not yet true but men like Diagne and Candace, while unwavering

defenders of racial opposition, education for blacks and the franchise for the civilized are

curiously timid when the industrial problems of Africa are approached” (Reader 666). Du Bois

felt Diagne was not a strong advocate for decolonization, and he did not condone Diagne’s

attitude.

Another personality Du Bois acquainted himself with at the 1921 Congress was Paul

Panda Farnana, an individual largely regarded as Garvey’s agitator in the Congo, who played an

important role in the 1921 Congress. Du Bois states: “Among the speakers were Florence Kelley

of America, Norman Leys of England, Senator LaFontaine and Professor Otlet of Belgium,

Blaise Diagne and M. Barthelemy of the French Chamber of Deputies, General Sorelas of Spain

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and M. Paul Panda of the Belgian Congo” (Reader 670). Panda introduced Du Bois at the

Brussels session, and that added to the rumor in Congress circles that Du Bois and Garvey were

partners in crime against the colonizing activities of the imperial powers, especially Belgium, a

belief that exacerbated the Belgian press attacks on Du Bois during the session. Kodi has written

that “Congolese intellectual, Paul Panda Farnana had been identified by influential Belgian

newspapers as a Garveyist agitator and as the possible mastermind of Kimbangu’s movement.

Panda helped organize the congress and introduced W.E.B. Du Bois to the colonial authorities”

(264). For example, the Brussels Neptune wrote inter alia on June 14 that the NAACP “has

already organized its propaganda in the lower Congo, and we must not be astonished if some day

it causes grave difficulties in the Negro village of Kinshasa composed of all the ne’er-do-wells of

the various tribes of the Colony aside from some hundreds of laborers” (The World and Africa

237). Here, the Belgium Neptune misidentified Garvey’s UNIA with Du Bois’s NAACP in spite

of the fact that the two organizations differed in philosophy and ideology. While Du Bois

appealed to the wit and reason of black intelligentsia anywhere on the globe, Garvey predicated

his rhetoric predominantly on pathos: As Padmore observes,

Until the dramatic collapse of Black Zionism, Pan-Africanism was on the

defensive. Garvey appealed to the Negro’s emotions, Du Bois to his intellect.

Garvey’s bombastic broadsides against the white man, coupled with his garish

showmanship, had an hypnotic effect upon the unlettered, unsophisticated West

Indian immigrants and Southern Negroes. (116)

Besides, Garvey also indulged in racist rants against Du Bois, accusing him and the NAACP

body-politic as a coterie of black men who were not proud of their black skin, so they wanted “to

become white” (Padmore 117); this statement was also a mischaracterization because Du Bois

stood for integration, not assimilation or passing, and it was because he felt dignified to be a

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black man, was why he campaigned so assiduously to bring dignity and reverence to black

subjectivity.

Thus, Padmore points out that although Du Bois lacked the mass support and fiduciary

backing like Garvey, “Pan-Africanism survived the Back to Africa Movement. But the survival

was not easy” (117). Still at the 1921 Congress, a delegation from the West Indies followed the

West African example by submitting a petition for Home Rule to the Colonial Office

simultaneously as the Congress was in progress. The West Indian delegation would have

succeeded but for the efforts of one South African colonial Army General, Jan Christian Smuts.

Probably, one of the most reprehensible characters to garner the attention of Du Bois at the 1921

Congress was Smuts. In regards to the West Indies’s appeal for Home Rule, “there was a force

that curiously counteracted them” (“The Negro Mind” 401). Smuts fought for a perpetual

subordination of blacks to whites; he fought to exclude India from political and social equality in

the empire, and he fought “for peace and good will in a white Europe which can by union present

a front to the yellow, brown, and black worlds” (“The Negro Mind”402). Seemingly, Smuts’s

overriding mission was to help the British in protracting colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the

Caribbean.

In spite of the Garvey distraction that tainted the quality of the 1921 Congress, it was still

regarded as the most successful of the congresses as Du Bois got the opportunity to interview

officials of the League of Nations in Geneva. During the interviews, Du Bois talked with

Rappard who headed the Mandates Commission and saw the first meeting of the Assembly” (The

World and Africa 240): “I had an interesting interview with Albert Thomas, head of the

International Labor Office. Working with Bellegarde of Haiti, a member of the Assembly, we

brought the status of Africa to the attention of the League” (The World 240). In a succinct

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appraisal of the 1921 Congress, Du Bois outlined the noble achievements of their effort in a

spirit of black cosmopolitanism:

1) It brought face to face and in personal contact a group of educated Negroes of

the caliber that might lead black men to emancipation in the modern world 2) It

discovered among these men more points of agreement than of difference 3) It

expressed the need for further meetings and strengthened the permanent

organization. (Reader 667)

It was in that survival mode, the need to organize more meetings in anticipation of fortifying the

permanent organization that Du Bois organized his Third Pan-African Congress in London and

Lisbon in 1923. As a result of the demagogical campaign against Du Bois that occurred at the

Pan-African session in Brussels, a clever propaganda that was aided and abetted by Diagne, the

French Foreign Ministry refused Du Bois’s request to have Paris as one of the hosting cities for

the Third Pan-African Congress. Du Bois points out, “The Third Pan-African Congress was

called for in 1923, but the Paris secretary postponed it. We persevered and finally without proper

notice or preparation met in London and Lisbon late in the year” (The World 241). Although the

London session was small, Du Bois managed to persuade dignitaries such as Harold Laski, a

professor at the London School of Economics; Lord Olivier, and author H.G. Wells to address

the session while Ramsey McDonald of the Labor Party, who went on to win the British general

elections in 1924, promised to do anything to advance the cause of the people the Pan-African

movement represented.

The London session was small, but the Lisbon session emerged as more successful as it

was embraced by Liga Africana of Portugal, an organization in Portugal that served the interests

of Africans in the Peninsula, which had as one of its influential members a renowned physician

and professor. In Lisbon, Du Bois met the industrious physician and wily politician from São

Thome, Dr. Jose de Magalhaes a practicing specialist and professor in the School of Tropical

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Medicine. Dr. Magalhaes was a “deputy in the Portuguese Parliament from São Thome, Africa.

Thus, the Angolese African educated in Lisbon and Paris was one of the nine colored members

of European Parliament . . . There is so much ancient black blood in this Peninsula” (“The Negro

Mind” 386). After Lisbon, Du Bois decided to host one Congress in the Caribbean in 1925 with

sessions spread across various Caribbean nations, including Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Guiana,

but the ship Du Bois wanted to charter for the Congress was priced out of his pecuniary range--

$50,000—so the 1925 Congress was canceled due to logistical reasons. Du Bois laments in The

World and Africa:

I planned a Fourth Pan-African Congress in the West Indies in 1925. My idea was

to charter a ship and sail down the Caribbean, stopping for meetings in Jamaica,

Haiti, Cuba, and the French islands . . . but eventually no accommodation could

be found on any line except at the prohibitive price of fifty thousand dollars. I

suspect that colonial powers spiked this plan. (244)

If colonial powers conspired to block the 1925 Congress from taking place on the islands, a

group of visionary and versatile women refused to allow abeyance to creep into Du Bois’s efforts

at decolonization and racial parity for the colored peoples of the earth, so they raised nearly

$3,000 for the 1927 Pan-African Congress in New York. The Circle of Friends and Foreign

Relations under the stewardship of Mrs. A.W. Hunton raised the amount needed for the Congress

and finalized the logistics for a successful Congress whose theme was akin to the 1900

continental Pan-African Congress held by Sylvester-Williams. Du Bois notes in The World and

Africa: “So far, the Pan-African idea was still American rather than African, but it was growing

and it expressed a real demand for examination of the African situation and a plan of treatment,

from the native African point of view” (242). Padmore voices his admiration for the fabulous

efforts of the virtuous women: “While these Negro women had no intention of voluntarily going

back to Africa, they, like so many of their men folk took a lively interest in the land of their

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ancestors. Their sympathies found expression in generous contributions and social welfare work

on behalf of various American organizations . . . carrying out medical, educational, and

evangelical work among native African tribes” (121). When Du Bois felt discouraged and

weakened, the Negro women inspired him to continue with his great work.

From the perspective of addressing the needs of continental Pan-Africanism, the Circle of

Friends and Du Bois invited experts on African and Caribbean affairs to address delegates. The

connoisseurs included M. Dantes Bellegarde, former Minister of Haiti to France, former Member

of the Assembly of League of Nations and Commander of the French Legion of Honor; Dr.

Melville Herskovits, a history professor at Columbia University; Dr. Charles H. Wesley and

Professor L.W. Hansberry of Howard University, Chief Amoah II of Ghana, Mr. Leslie Pinkney

Hill and Mr. H.H. Phillips of Cheney University; Dr. Wilhelm Mensching of Germany, and Mr.

John Vancook.14 Du Bois, impressed with the Fourth Pan-African Congress, noted: “All the

sessions were well attended and the evening sessions were often crowded. The total attendance

aggregated five thousand persons. There were 208 paid delegates, representing 22 states and the

District of Columbia, Haiti, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Barbados, South America,

Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia, West Africa, Germany and India” (Reader 671).

Again, resolutions were passed for the imperial nations to speed up decolonization

efforts. The resolutions broadly assert:

Negroes everywhere need 1) a voice in their own government. 2) Native rights to

the land and its natural resources. 3) Modern education for all children. 4) The

development of Africa for Africans and not merely for the profit of Europeans. 5)

The re-organization of commerce and industry so as to make the main object of

capital and labor the welfare of the many rather than the enriching of the few. 6)

The treatment of civilized despite differences of birth, race or color. (W.E.B. Du

Bois Reader 672)

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Padmore was particularly appreciative of the courageous contribution of Chief Amoah II at the

Congress: “The right of Africans everywhere to have a voice in their government had always

been one of the basic demands of the Pan-African Congress. Now, it was being recognized by

the British in a modest way, a fact commented on by Chief Amoah II of [Ghana] and other

representatives from West Africa” (121). After the success of the Fourth Congress, Du Bois

planned for a continental Pan-African Congress to be held on the continent for the first time in

Tunis, capital of Tunisia in 1929, but when the French government heard of it, they barred any

Pan-African Congress to be held on the continent at that time; rather, the French government

proposed Marseilles or any other French city, but the depression set in in the United States in

1929 and then, followed by World War II, both of which turned out to be calamitous events that

conspired and effectively thwarted any effort to organize a Pan-African Congress until 1945.

Under the auspices of the Trinidadian, George Padmore, author of Pan-Africanism or

Communism (1955), the last traditional Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in the

United Kingdom in 1945. Until the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, the Du Bois-led

congresses made purely idealistic demands to imperial governments for the self-governance of

indigenous Africans, which was sagacious and prudent because of the attachment of the Negro

Problem to the continental African Problem. In 1945, however, an element of radicalism

accompanied the demands for self-government. At the 1945 Congress, some of the issues

discussed were the applicability of Gandhian non-violent and non-co-operative principles to

create civil unrest in the struggle for independence as well as tactics and strategies for national

freedom fights. Articles in that regard were published in International African Opinion, the

mouth-piece of the Pan-African Federation and edited by the West Indian historian, C.L.R.

James.15

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Padmore was a convert from Communism who saw Pan-Africanism as an alternative

ideology for Communism and imperialism. A staunch communist who rose to the rank of

Colonel in the Red Army, Padmore soon became disillusioned with Communism after being

stationed in Moscow in 1929. He saw no difference between Communism and imperialism

because he felt both used blacks as pawns in the chess game of politics to serve their needs, so in

1933 he resigned from Communist International (Comintern) and a year later, he was expelled

from the Communist Party.16 Padmore has written in Pan Africanism or Communism of

Communism’s dearth of sympathy toward the marginalized and as a result rendered its professed

interest in blacks and other minorities as a mask to exploit them: “Communism exploits misery,

poverty, ignorance, and want” (Padmore xix).

Padmore arrived as a student in the United States in 1924 as Malcolm Nurse and attended

Du Bois’s alma mater, Fisk University with an initial objective of becoming a physician, but he

later transferred to New York University and Howard University.15 On becoming a Communist,

Nurse changed his name to George Padmore to avoid detection. After resigning from Communist

International, Padmore went and settled in London, and it was from there that he became the

chief architect of the Fifth Congress in Manchester. Richard Wright, in a foreword to Pan-

Africanism or Communism aptly sums up the raison d’etre of Padmore’s rupture from

Comintern: “But when George discovered that…Stalin and his satraps looked upon black men as

political pawns of Soviet power politics to be maneuvered in Russian interests alone, he broke

from the Kremlin” (xviii). Padmore became Nkrumah’s closest adviser, but unfortunately, he

died in 1959, two years after Ghana had gained her independence. The independence of Ghana in

1957 that rendered her the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to wrestle her freedom from

imperial Britain, endeared Ghana’s first President to Du Bois, so he anointed Nkrumah as his

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successor to extend the stimulating activities of the Pan-African movement. Toward that end,

Nkrumah organized the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Accra in 1958, which was also the first

continental Pan-African Congress to be held in Africa. Although Du Bois was invited to attend,

he could not because of the confiscation of his passport by the State Department, so his wife,

Shirley Graham represented him at the Congress.17

Similar to Padmore, Nkrumah, at some point in his life, changed his name. His birth

name was Francis Kofi Nwiah, but he changed it to Kwame Nkrumah on leaving the United

States where he had studied at Lincoln University in PA. Nkrumah spent a decade in the United

States, from 1935 to 1945. He earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1939, and he

proceeded to graduate school at Lincoln and University of Pennsylvania concurrently.17 Du Bois

has noted that after graduation, Nkrumah “wanted to study journalism at Columbia but he had no

money…he studied at the Lincoln School of Theology at Lincoln and Master of Science in

Education at the University of Pennsylvania, 50 miles away; so that in 1942 he became Bachelor

of Theology at Lincoln and Master of Science in Education at the University of Pennsylvania”

(“Prime Minister of Ghana” in The World 299). Nkrumah earned the Master of Arts in

Philosophy in 1943 from University of Pennsylvania but “lacked only a thesis to secure a

doctorate” (299). He left for England in May 1945 after recuperating form a bout of pneumonia,

the result of his working in frigid weather conditions in a New York shipyard. While in the

United States, Nkrumah was labeled a Communist, so when he arrived in England in 1945, he

adopted a nom de guerre, Kwame Nkrumah, to conceal his identity.

Although Nkrumah had seen Du Bois before in New York, the former was officially

introduced to the founder of traditional Pan-Africanism at the Fifth Congress in Manchester,

where Nkrumah, who played a leading role, was introduced to Du Bois by Padmore. “In October

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of that year, I saw Kwame Nkrumah for the first time in Manchester, England, where we were

holding the Fifth Pan-African Congress”18 (300). Du Bois has observed that “Nkrumah was busy

with organization work . . . He was in earnest and intelligent and I never forgot him” (300). As

Padmore has argued, “A program of Positive Action, based on the Gandhist technique of non-

violent, non-co-operation, was endorsed by the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945, and first

applied in the Gold Coast in 1950 by Kwame Nkrumah who had served as one of the joint

secretaries of the Congress” (129). Before applying the Gandhian principle of non-violent co-

operation to create civil unrest in Ghana, Nkrumah founded a political party, the Convention

People’s Party in 1949 to catalyze the path toward a democratic self-governance. In the cause of

advancing self-governance by Africans, Nkrumah took a chapter from the pages of reforms

organized by J.E. Caseley-Hayford’s West Africa National Congress that sent a petition to the

Colonial Office in London in 1920, so when Nkrumah won the elections, he rewarded the son of

J.E. Caseley-Hayford, Archie, with a cabinet position.19 In 1951, Nkrumah won Ghana’s first

elections massively to emerge as Ghana’s first Prime Minister. On March 6, 1957, Ghana

became an independent country and in 1960, she became a Republic and Nkrumah, her first

President. With Nkrumah’s victory in a mélange with Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah who

together with Padmore were elected as joint secretaries at the Fifth Congress in Manchester,

helped in making continental “Pan-Africanism take root on African soil and the fulfillment of

Dr. Du Bois’s dream” (Padmore 107).

Other Africans Du Bois met in Manchester included Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and

Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, both of whom went on to lead their respective countries to freedom.

In November 1960, Du Bois visited Nigeria on the strength of an invitation from then Governor-

general, Azikiwe. For more than a quarter of a century, Azikiwe agitated for an independent

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Nigeria.20 An excellent trait about Nigerians is that they are proud of their black identity, so they

“stride into this modern world with no dream that their color is a disgraceful insignia of

inferiority” (The World 326). Azikiwe was made the first black Governor of a British colony

because “Britain in a last subtle move had decided to yield to Nigeria’s irresistible demand for

independence by granting to a Nigerian the formerly powerful office of Governor-general, now

shorn of its power to make laws and dictate policy, but still robed in the tinsel of pomp and

circumstance” (326-7). While Azikiwe was Governor, in a bid to appease Northern Nigerians, a

teacher from the North, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a University of London-trained teacher, who

had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was appointed Federal Prime Minister; as should be

expected, that created some dissension in the country (Du Bois 327). In the end, however, both

Azikiwe and Balewa, as was Nkrumah, were all ousted in military coups d’etat.

Another African leader Du Bois came into contact with was Patrice Lumumba of the

Congo. Lumumba would become the first post-colonial African President to be ousted from

office and brutally assassinated to render his reign one of the most fleeting phenomena in the

annals of African political history. Belgian hypocrisy and atrocity led to a struggle for power

among the indigenous Congolese population, many of whom had received minimal education

because of the unwillingness of colonial Belgium to introduce the Congolese to high education

and culture: “Instead of Negro ambition being confined and drained off slowly into an

intelligentsia such as both France and Britain had produced, the Congolese movement had within

almost silently and then suddenly burst into a demand for complete independence—a demand led

by young men like Patrice Lumumba” (The World 323). One of those young men was Tsombe, a

military stooge and sycophant of the Belgians, in an attempt to lead the copper-rich region of

Katanga to secede from the Congo, captured Lumumba and savagely decapitated him.

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Lumumba’s death brought a protracted struggle for power in the Congo until General Mobutu

seized power to consolidate the political situation in that country. Mobutu would emerge as one

of Africa’s most corrupt leaders when he duped his country of millions of dollars and stashing

most of it in a Swiss bank account.

The curse of Lumumba reigned on until a few years back when the country was divided

into two independent countries: Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a

result of a civil war. Always the prophet, Du Bois foresaw the war in the Congo. In 1960, he

wrote an article originally published in the National Guardian headlined “The World Must Soon

Awake to Bar War in Congo” in which he forewarned the world of the impending doom and

gloom in the Congo if the world sat idly by and did nothing. In 1958, when Shirley Graham who

read Du Bois’s message at the first continental Pan-African Congress in Accra returned to tell

Du Bois about Lumumba’s demand for independence for the Congo, Du Bois thought “he was an

unthinking fanatic” because he felt the people of the Congo were hitherto not ready and

unprepared for independence. Unfortunately, Du Bois was proved right as the Congo was

plunged into a civil after Lumumba had been assassinated, a war still having ramifications in the

Congo today. Du Bois complained about the attitude of imperial Belgium and wanted Ghana to

partner with China and the Soviet Union to “furnish capital and technical skill to keep the great

wheels of Congo enterprise running; but running not for profit of white skilled labor and the idle

rich, but for the starving sick, and ignorant Africans” (The World 319). Indeed, Du Bois was

conscious of the fact that with the limited education of Lumumba, the trials and tribulations of

the Congo had just begun because of the determination of Belgium to prove Lumumba wrong:

For, “the luxury-loving West, which was parading and yachting, gambling and horse-racing,

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dressing and dancing and keeping darkies out of highly paid unions, was not going to give up

Congo’s millions without a desperate struggle even if it involved world war” (The World 319).

In furtherance of Du Bois’s dream of Africa and Asia collaboration, in 1955, Nkrumah in

conjunction with President Jawaharlal Nehru of India and President Ahmed Sukarno of

Indonesia organized the first Conference of Non-Aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia, a

conference Robert J.C. Young has argued, sparked and engendered the postcolonial era. In their

overt declaration to remain detached to neither East nor West, the twenty-nine nations that

initiated the Bandung Non-Aligned conference echoed Du Bois’s age-long crusade for peace and

justice: “The Cold War was played out through rivalries staged in the colonial and decolonized

arenas. To counter this situation, many of the leaders, from Sukarno to Nasser, spoke of the

desire to assert an Asian-African voice as a moral force for peace, hoping that Africa and Asia

would become a vast region of tranquility” (Young 13). Among the leaders in attendance were

Nehru, Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Chou En-lai,

Premier of China, and Ho Chi Minh, Prime Minster of North Vietnam. In the absence of Du

Bois, African America was represented by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell from Harlem,

New York and novelist Richard Wright “whose presence as observers helped to consolidate

identifications between African Americans and Third World nations” (Young 11).

From the perspective of Du Bois’s missing the 1955 Bandung Conference, another Non-

Aligned Movement Conference was held in Harlem in 1957, with Du Bois as the keynote

speaker. In his address, “The American Negro and the Darker World,” Du Bois simultaneously

grounds and elaborates on black cosmopolitanism. He traced the history of the slave trade and

the disquieting attitude of some of the enslaved through revolts to announce their intentions to

return to their home continent. The revolts in the New World led to an autonomous state for

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Haiti, which is central to Nwankwo’s black cosmopolitanism project.20 But, there is a shift in Du

Bois’s view of black Americans in regards to their relationship with the rest of the darker worlds.

As Du Bois points out,

In our efforts to be recognized as Americans, we American Negroes naturally

strove to think American and adopt American folkways. We especially withdrew

from all remembrance of kinship with Africa and denied with the white world that

Africa ever had a history or indigenous culture. We did not want to be called

‘Africans’ or Negroes and especially not ‘Negresses.’ We tried to invent new

names for our group. We began to call yellow people ‘chinks’ or ‘coolies’; and

dark whites ‘dagoes.’ This was natural under our peculiar situation. But it made

us more easily neglect or lose sight of the peculiar change in the world which was

linking us with the colored peoples of the world not simply because of the

essentially unimportant fact of skin color, but because of the immensely important

fact of economic condition.21

Du Bois spoke at length on the causes of the two global wars as purely predicated on economic

grounds because “other nations with fewer or no colonies, led by Germany, demanded a re-

allotment of colonial wealth. This brought on the First World War” (Mullen and Watson 51). Du

Bois also complains about internal oppression of workers in Europe and Central America: “The

workers of Eastern Europe, South and Central America were not as badly off as the American

serf and Chinese coolies. But they were sunk in poverty, disease, and ignorance. They were

oppressed by their own rich classes working hand in glove with white western investors”

(Mullen and Watson 51-2). Du Bois believe in fairness to all the races, so injustice anywhere on

the globe that he became aware of, he castigated spiritually in his writings.

In another shift from an earlier ideological position that African Americans should lead

the darker races, Du Bois notes, “Whither now do we go? We American Negroes can no longer

lead the colored peoples of the world because they far better than we understand what is

happening in the world today. We can learn about China and India and the vast realm of

Indonesia rescued from Holland” (Mullen and Watson 55). On the whole, the entire spectrum of

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Du Bois’s speech at the second Bandung Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Harlem, New

York, covered global issues on war, socialism, capitalism, poverty, economics, the history of the

slave trade, and Negro diffidence on some of these problems. Du Bois was not able to attend the

Bandung Conference, but many agreed the Pan-Asian, Pan-African conference was his brain-

child. Mullen and Watson have suggested, “[T]hough neither Bandung nor China’s Communist

Revolution fulfilled the promise of Afro-Asian solidarity to which Du Bois devoted much of his

life, W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia provides evidentiary affirmation that Du Bois’s ‘call’ throughout

his life work did earn the Asian response” (Intro. xxx).

One aspect of Du Bois’s international influences that needs more critical examination is

his Asian connection in the formulation of his black, brown, and yellow alliance in the

internalization of the Negro Problem. Bill Mullen and Cathryn Watson have noted that “[m]any

of the major biographies of Du Bois including the best ones, gloss or ignore the trips Du Bois

made to the Soviet Union, China and Japan, and tend to neglect the writings he did towards the

end of his life” (Introduction: Crossing the World Color Line ix). Du Bois went to Asia in 1936

and 1959; in both visits, especially in his latter visit, he was triumphantly received and accorded

the reverence of a great intellectual and thinker in China and Japan. The Chinese announced Du

Bois’s 91st birthday nationally in 1959. Curiously, Du Bois, as Mullen and Watson have alluded

to in Crossing the World Color Line, Du Bois fiercely believed that the histories and cultures of

Africa and Asia intertwine, so he riveted his attention as much on Africa just as on Asia, in spite

of the fact that the activities of Japan, after the refusal of Europe and the United States to

recognize it as a superpower in global affairs led to a rebellion against Asia and the rest of the

colored world. While in China in 1959, Du Bois touted the diligence, inventiveness, tolerance of

the Chinese, even as he advised Africa to liaise with China in its stride toward progress because

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China and Africa share a common experience. Addressing more than a thousand students and

faculty at Peking University, Du Bois observes, “China after long centuries has arisen to her feet

and leapt forward. Africa arise, stand straight, speak and think! Act! Behold a people, the most

populous nation on this ancient earth which has burst its shackles . . . by patience and long

suffering, by hard backbreaking labor and with owed head and blind struggle, moved up and on

toward the crimson sky” (The World 311). In a statement akin to asking China to enter into a free

trade agreement with Africa, Du Bois unabashedly proclaims, “Africa does not ask alms from

China nor from the Soviet Union nor from France, Britain, nor the United States. It asks

friendship and sympathy and no nation better than China can offer this to the Dark Continent”

(The World 313).

When Du Bois first visited China in 1936, Mao Tse-tung had just led his brave band of

Communists, including Chou En-lai, who would later become the Prime Minister of China, and

Chu Teh on a 6,000-mile-long March from Kiangsi to Yenan. It was the March that sparked the

Communist Revolution in China. When Du Bois visited again in 1959, a trip he described as “the

most fascinating eight weeks of travel and sight-seeing he had ever experienced,” he was

shocked to learn that the Chinese were able to keep Mao’s March an open secret that nobody was

willing to discuss in 1936: “The Soviet Union was scarcely mentioned, although I knew how the

Soviet Union was teaching the Chinese. Nothing was said of the Long March which had just

ended its 6,000 miles from Kiangsi to Yenan, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh” (Du Bois

Reader 431). Du Bois states: “Of the Kuomin-tang and Chiang Kai-shek, almost nothing was

said, but hatred for Japan for its betrayal of Asia was amply pointed out” (Reader 431). Du Bois

“spent four hours with Mao in 1959 and dined twice with Chou En-lai, the tireless Prime

Minister of China” (Reader 432). Du Bois extolled Chinese endurance in harboring suffering and

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oppression for more than 2,000 years before extricating itself from imperialism. He panegyrizes

the dignity of the proletariat in China because “Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh and half a

dozen others undertook to lead a nation by example, by starving and fighting, by infinite patience

and above all by making a nation believe that the people and not merely the elite composed the

real nation” (Reader 434). By his admission, Du Bois observes that “China is no utopia.”

However, that nation has been able to excise the inscrutable trepidation that grips majority of

people in the West: “The Chinese worker is happy. He has exorcised the Great fear that haunts

the West; the fear of losing his job; the fear of falling sick; the fear of accident; the fear of

inability to educate his children; the fear of daring to take a vacation. To guard against this

catastrophe, Americans skimp and save, cheat and steal, gamble and arm for murder” (Reader

435).

As was his inured characteristic, Du bois showed a profound appreciation of the industry

and determination of Chinese women, who have overcome the ancient pain associated with their

foot-binding ritual to rise above the veil of asininity and torture to freedom where they contribute

gloriously to their nation’s progress and advancement. Commenting on the newly found liberty

of Chinese women, Du Bois notes: “They wear pants so that they can walk, climb and dig, and

climb and dig they do. They are not dressed simply for sex indulgence or beauty parades. They

occupy positions from ministers of state to locomotive engineers, lawyers, doctors, clerks and

laborers” (Reader 435). Du Bois draws the curtain on the write-up on his visit to China

poetically, festooning the conclusion with hyperbole and anthropomorphism to capture

succinctly China’s rise from the trenches of suffering and debasement to occupy an ethereal

position of superpower:

Fifteen times I have crossed the Atlantic and once the Pacific. I have seen the

world. But never so vast and glorious a miracle like China. This monster is a

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nation with a dark-tinted billion born at the beginning of time, and facing its end;

this struggle from starved degradation and murder and suffering to the triumph of

that Long March to world leadership. Oh beautiful, patient, self-sacrificing China,

despised and unforgettable, victorious and forgiving, crucified and risen from the

dead. (Reader 436)

China exhibited this Christ-like attribute at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks United Nations conference

where it proposed the incorporation of “human rights, justice, and especially racial equality in

the UN Charter. But Russia debunked the idea, the Brits and the Yankees were coy about it”

(Anderson 37). As usual, Du Bois “noticed the disrespectful way in which the Allied Forces

treated China and saw that as indication of Western contempt for non-whites” (Anderson 38).

China’s insistence on individual nations to be able to enforce human rights and justice arose out

of the realization that the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council had the mandate to

“promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms but no power to enforce them”

(Anderson 36). China also provided moral support for the Non-Aligned movement in Bandung in

1955. China’s Premier, Chou En-lai was present at the conference but sat unconcerned as leaders

of the Asia-Africa alliance unequivocally declared their intentions, in the words of Young, “to

live free from the control or intervention of either of the world’s superpowers” (12). However,

the ramifications of the Non-Aligned Movement’s overt declarations of its desire to operate from

the position of neutrality have been grotesquely problematic to some of the so-called Non-

Aligned nations. The Non-Aligned nations became a fecund recruiting ground for both the West

and the East. In the Cold War era, President Truman came up with the Truman Doctrine where

mouth-watering economic and political aid was promised countries that would lean toward the

capitalist West while John Foster Dulles, who castigated the Dumbarton Oaks Conference as

problematic in its only encouragement of allowing “a few big powers to get together on how to

run the world” (Anderson 38), came out to promise military assistance to countries that would

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support the United States in the attempt to stem the spread of Communism. As Anderson has

written, “The complexity of the political situation in which the Bandung nations found

themselves caught in the midst of Cold War politics, and the extent to which that context

determined their own position, is not often acknowledged” (Young 13). Young also suggests,

“The 1947 Truman Doctrine, proclaiming U.S. military and economic assistance for all countries

to maintain their independence was rapidly giving way to John foster Dulles’s foreign policy of

military alliances in order to ‘roll back communism’” (13).

Another area of Du Bois’s scholarship that is least acknowledged by scholars is his

relationship with India. In 1928, Du Bois came into close contact with an Indian poet and a

Gandhi disciple, Sarojini Naidu in New York. Later, as Nico Slate points out, “Du Bois credited

Naidu with stoking his interest in Gandhi and India” (97). Du Bois’s black cosmopolitan zeal

allowed him to stay abreast with events in Asia, using the Crisis as his main source of

communication with Indians to encourage them, even as he supported their decolonization

activities. Through the non-violent, non-cooperative activities of Gandhi and his massive

followers, India became the first British colony in Asia to win its independence in 1947. Du Bois

would also describe India’s independence as the greatest event of the 19th and 20th centuries. In

an article, “The Freeing of India,” Du Bois remarks,

The fifteenth of August deserves to be remembered as the greatest historical date

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is saying a great deal, when we

remember that in the nineteenth century, Napoleon was overthrown, democracy

established in England, Negro slaves emancipated in the United States, the

German Empire founded, the partition of Africa determined upon, the Russian

Revolution carried through, and two world wars fought. Nevertheless, it is true

that the fifteenth of August marks an event of even greater significance than any

of these; for an on that date four hundred million colored folk of Asia were loosed

from the domination of the white people of Europe. (W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia 145)

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However, unfortunately for India, Gandhi, her influential spiritual leader was assassinated, and

Moslems led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah seceded to found Pakistan.

India’s story after independence encapsulates the problems many of the decolonized

nations faced after independence from Britain. In Ghana, Britain convinced some fiery Ashantis

for non-cooperation with Nkrumah’s regime. That non-cooperation led to six assassination

attempts on Nkrumah’s life until February 24, 1966 when on a visit to Asia, he was overthrown

in a military coup d’etat led by an Ashanti, A.A. Afrifa. Although there was no civil war in

Ghana, Nkrumah’s overthrow led to a series of coups d’ etat in the succeeding years until 1982

when Jerry John Rawlings stepped in to stabilize the country. The same story unfolded in Nigeria

where Azikiwe, who was elevated from Governor-general to President in 1963 after Nigeria

became a Republic and Prime Minister Balewa were toppled in a military takeover in which

Balewa was brutally murdered in January 1966. A year later in 1967, Nigeria was engulfed in an

unsavory civil war that lasted until 1970.22 The horrid case of the Congo is another testament to

the callousness and avarice of some of the imperial nations, who played central roles in the

colonizing club. The colonizers did not leave quietly, and their disquiet is still exacting its toll on

some of their erstwhile colonies.

Du Bois first heard of Mohandas Gandhi during World War I, a war in which blacks

fought to help upend German colonization ambitions. It is possible that although Du Bois heard

about Gandhi during the War, it was not until 1928 that he became fully interested in the non-

violent doctrine of Gandhi after he had been debriefed by Naidu: “With the First World War

came my first knowledge of Gandhi. I came to know Lajpat Rai and Madam Naidu” (W.E.B. Du

Bois on Asia 155). When the Depression struck in 1929 and a specter of uncertainty and doom

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filled the American landscape, Du Bois wrote to Gandhi, asking him to send a motivational

message to African Americans to be published in the Crisis. On May 1, 1929, Gandhi wrote:

Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the

grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being a slave owner. But let us not

talk of honor or dishonor in connection with the past. Let us realize that the future

is with those who will be pure, truthful and loving. For as the old men must have

said: Truth ever is, untruth never was. Love alone binds and truth and love accrue

only to the truly humble. (Du Bois on Asia 155)

Commenting on Gandhi’s message in the Crisis, Du Bois noted: “Agitation, non-violence,

refusal to cooperate with the oppressor, became Gandhi’s watchword and with it he is leading all

India to freedom. Here and today, he stretches out his hand in fellowship to his colored friends of

the West” (Slate 98). Another famous Indian Du Bois established contact with was poet and

philosopher, Rabindrath Tagore. Du Bois, an admirer of great minds and intellectual sagacity,

published a note from Tagore in the Crisis in the January 1929 edition under the headline, “As

the Crow Flies:” “What is the great fact of this age? It is that the messenger has knocked at our

gate and all the bars have given way. Our doors have burst open. The human races have come

out of their enclosures.” Reacting to Tagore’s message, Slate notes that although some blacks in

America were then held as captives by the dogmatically strong arms of oppression and chained

by de facto Jim Crow laws in the South, “Tagore’s words could be read as a prophecy of future

change and a call for the kind of colored cosmopolitanism that Du Bois and the Crisis

championed” (99).

Later, when the India police killed journalist Rai for protesting against the condescending

attitude of imperial Britain against India and for his stirring activities against the colonial

government, Du Bois condemned the killing in the Crisis, a newspaper that was regularly read in

India at the time. As Slate points out, “In November 1928, Lala Laipat Rai died from a police

beating he received while peacefully protesting an all-white commission sent to India to consider

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constitutional reforms” (78). “In the Crisis, Du Bois called Lajpat Rai ‘a martyr to British

intolerance and every member of the 800,000,000 darker peoples of the world should stand with

bowed heads in memory of Lajpat Rai, the great leader of India who died of English violence

because he dared persist in his fight for freedom’” (Slate 78). Mullen and Watson describe Rai as

“one of the founders of modern India nationalism” (Introduction: W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia ix).

Du Bois also came into contact with Cedric Dover, born in Calcutta, India but raised in the

United Kingdom and author of Half Caste, who would later confess to Du Bois that he adored

him. ”A self-proclaimed disciple of Du Bois, Cedric Dover, would prove to be among the most

important links between Black and Indian socialists and next to Du Bois himself, the most

persistent champion of colored cosmopolitanism” (Slate 83).

One of the countries that informed Du Bois’s colored cosmopolitanism is Japan. Just like

in China in 1936, Du Bois was warmly embraced in Japan, culminating in his calling the

Japanese “colored.” Du Bois had been particularly impressed with Japan’s victory in the Russo-

Japanese War, and in 1904 he endorsed Japan’s victory as an important triumph against racism

and imperialism. However, events that unfolded after that victory, including the dearth of

reverence Japan got from the West made it embrace fascism, and Japan unfolded its imperial

intentions by colluding with Hitler and Mussolini in 1937. Du Bois lamented in 1944 after the

Dumbarton Oaks Conference in a radio address, “The Negro and Imperialism” in which he notes

the UN’s decision to neglect China’s call for a mandatory enforcement of human rights and

justice as a travesty similar to the UN’s neglect of Japan as a force in global affairs at the apogee

of World War I: “The working people of the civilized world will thus largely be induced to put

their political power behind imperialism and democracy in Asia and Africa, and democracy in

Europe will continue to impede and nullify democracy in Asia and Africa” (Mullen and Watson

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5). As the two authors have noted, “The occasion for the essay is Du Bois’s outrage that the

preliminary conference of the United Nations Organization at Dumbarton Oaks failed to include

direct representation of colonized countries. He cited in particular China’s exclusion, and linked

it to the League of Nations refusal to recognize Japan’s proposal for a ‘racial-equality declaration

among nations’” (5). In spite of that, Japan no longer became part of Du Bois’s agenda for the

“colored” world.

Du Bois did not visit India on his two trips to Asia, but he wrote eloquently about that

country to cement the passion he had for the colored people in their struggle to combat

imperialism, colonialism, and racism. In the same vein, Du Bois did not visit other Asian

countries like Indonesia, (host of the 1955 Bandung Conference), Malay (now Malaysia), and

Burma (now Myanmar), but they garnered his attention in his extension of the problem of the

color line to Asia. Du Bois points out that Indonesians “are colored people, and deeply colored.

They range from yellow to dark brown, carrying in their veins the blood of Africa and Asia, and

forming a great and ancient center of history and civilization” (W.E.B. Du Bois: Crossing the

Color Line 176). It is in the spirit of the blood of Africa and Asia that President Sukarta hosted

the Non-Aligned nations. Myanmar, was another British colony bedeviled by unrest. Du Bois

notes, “But the Burmese are not satisfied. It is a little difficult to know the details about the basis

of their dissatisfaction, but it depends as everywhere in Asia upon the economic situation”

(Crossing the World Color Line 180). The economic situation compelled “the Karens, a people

forming less than a tenth of the population, have pressed for autonomy, but beyond this, a large

number of the Burmese want better control of industry, better division of land and a higher

standard of living” (Crossing the World Color Line 180). With Malay, Du Bois describes it as

the last frontier of colonialism that symbolizes the abject poverty engulfing some colonial

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subjects. Du Bois laments, “In every colony, the people are wretchedly poor and deceased, so

that colonial regions are the sick poverty stricken regions of the world” (Crossing the World

Color Line 185). Indeed, Crossing the World Color Line is a confirmation of Du Bois’s profound

interest in black, brown, and yellow problematic that he internationalized.

Evidently, Du Bois’s interaction with African, Asian, and Caribbean intellectuals,

politicians, and activists influenced his shifting world views in his grand project of decentering

the West from its empiric mission. In such an endeavor, Du Bois took advantage of the

international range of acquaintances he met at the many conferences he attended, including the

1911 Races of Congress conference in London, the Pan-African Congresses, beginning with the

first one in 1900, and the 1924 National Congress of British West Africa in Sierra Leon.23 One of

the crucial shifts Du Bois made in his black cosmopolitan thought and elaboration was his

withdrawal of support for Japan after she joined forces with Hitler and Mussolini in 1937. In

addition, Japan’s foray into Western idealism, which came with the desire to colonize the rest of

Asia, was an aggression that shocked Du Bois, compelling him to call on China and Japan not to

resort to war to solve their problems.24 Finally, it is to fair to conclude that Du Bois’s

international connections enlightened him more on the prevailing conditions of global issues to

help him make informed decisions, regardless of whether or not his decision was right or wrong,

popular or unpopular. In the end, although in Du Bois’s configuration of traditional Pan-

Africanism and concerns about Pan-Asian ideals, he interacted with intellectuals and politicians

from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean to envision the possibility of an equal social and political

order for the ‘colored peoples” of the world, that vision in the post-colonial world is still yet to

be realized. However, merely by thinking about it and promoting the idea through his traditional

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Pan-African Congresses, the possibility is there that it can occur. What Padmore has said of Pan-

Africanism could also be true for cosmopolitanism and its variants:

Pan-Africanism recognizes much that is true in the Marxist interpretation of

history, since it provides a rational explanation for a good deal that would

otherwise be unintelligible. But it nevertheless refuses to accept the pretentious

claims of doctrinaire Communism, that it alone has the solution to all the complex

racial, tribal, and socio-economic problems facing Africa. It also rejects the

Communist intolerance of those who do not subscribe to its ever-changing party

line even to the point of liquidating them as ‘enemies of the people.’ Democracy

and tolerance cannot be built on intolerance and violence. (Author’s Note xvi)

Certainly, neither universal and discrepant nor black cosmopolitanism accommodates treatment

of others based on violence and intolerance, and in relation to Du Bois’s fiction,

cosmopolitanism has provided a rational interpretation to explain the driving force behind all of

Du Bois’s novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess, and The Black Flame.

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NOTES

1. Several authors have written on Du Bois’s American and European influences. See

Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for

Equality and the American Century, 1919-1863; Bloom, Modern Critical Views: W.E.B. Du

Bois; Gates, “The Black Letters on the Sign.”

2. Du Bois’s connection with Asia is an area that has been neglected in many respects. See

Mullen and Watson, “Introduction.”

3. As a man who wrote protractedly on local, national, and international matters, Du Bois’s

world views shifted according to global occurrences. See The Autobiography, 64- 167.

4. Padmore was an authority on Pan-African affairs. See chapter 8 in Pan-Africanism or

Communism.

5. For a contrasting view on cosmopolitanism, see Held, “Cosmopolitanism in a Multipolar

World,” 28-39.

6. For a profound analysis on Caseley-Hayford and the British West Africa National Congress,

see Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, 127.

7. See Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, for a

modified definition of Pan-Africanism.

8. Sylvester-Williams came up with the original idea of Pan-Africanism. See Padmore 95-96.

9. Du Bois’s dream was to see Africa through Pan-Africanism to create its own history and

rectify past prevarications about black identity. See Du Bois, The World and Africa: An inquiry

into the part which Africa has played in world history, 297.

10. For the unique role played by some of Du Bois’s international allies to help him organize

his first traditional Pan-African Conference, see Padmore 98.

11. Du Bois had a firm belief in Nkrumah to lead Africa out of its zero image to a continent

that everyone respected. See Du Bois, “A Future for Pan-African: Freedom, Socialism, and

Peace.”

12. Du Bois had initial difficulty in organizing the first Pan-African Conference in Paris. See

Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 670.

13. For a comprehensive information on the delegates to the first Pan-African Congress, see

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 671.

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14. The fourth Pan-African Congress was unique in the sense that for the first time it was

organized outside Europe and women were in charge. See W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 671;

Padmore 120.

15. C.L.R. James also did a lot for the cause Pan-African identity. See Padmore for a profound

analysis, 128.

16. Padmore’s birth name was Malcolm Nurse. To avoid anyone tracing his background after

he converted to Communism, he change his name. See also “Padmore” in Encyclopedia of World

Biography, 2004; Nwafor xxv.

17. Because his passport had been confiscated, Du Bois could not attend the first continental

Pan-African Conference in Accra in 1958; he was represented by his wife, Shirley Graham Du

Bois. Many authors have written on Du Bois’s inability to attend the first Pan-African

Conference held outside Europe and America. See Du Bois, “The Prime Minister of Ghana,” The

World and Africa: An inquiry into the part Africa has played in world history. 298-300.

18. Although Du Bois reveals that he saw Nkrumah for the first time in 1945, Nkrumah says

in his autobiography that he saw Du Bois a decade earlier in New York. See The World and

Africa, 300.

19. Caseley-Hayford brought political consciousness for self-government to West Africa in the

1920s, so Nkrumah rewards his son, Archie, with a cabinet position. See Padmore 107.

20. See “Nigeria” in The World and Africa, 326.

21. Nwankwo has posited that “Black Cosmopolitanism traces the dialectics of a cosmopolitan

from below. It is one that came of age at the same time that the forces of hegemonic

cosmopolitanism in the Atlantic world were forced to reconfigure themselves to deal with the

new threats posed by the uprising in Haiti.” See Black Cosmopolitanism, 14.

22. Read all about the devastation of the Civil War in Nigeria. See “Nigerian Civil War,” The

Polynational War Memorial. Web.

23. Caseley-Hayford was the doyen of West African politics in the 1920s.See “The Future of

Africa” in the W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, 664.

24. See Du Bois’s formal appeal to Japan and China to strive for peace in “Listen Japan and

China,” W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, 74.

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EPILOGUE

DU BOIS, NKRUMAH, AND OBAMA AS

UNHERALDED COSMOPOLITANS

W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Barack Obama are arguably three important

cosmopolitan figures whose efforts at making the world a better place for all races warrant more

scholarly attention. Although Du Bois operated as a writer, professor, activist, and politician in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Nkrumah was President in the mid-twentieth

century and Obama is a millennial leader of the world, they share a cosmopolitan élan in their

efforts to create the possibility of a just social, economic, and political world order. Re-reading

W.E.B. Du Bois’s five novels with the lenses of universal, discrepant, and black

cosmopolitanism has revealed the pristine African American intellectual has an important writer,

whose fiction demands more critical attention. Du Bois was committed to helping find solutions

to the race problem, what he termed “the riddle of the sphinx,” during most part of his life. In

such an endeavor, Du Bois internationalized the “Negro Problem” to draw global attention to the

race problem in the United States. Du Bois’s fiction is the mirror that reflects his thoughts,

ideological, and political views and a meticulous reading or re-reading of his fiction could

culminate in alternative ways of analyzing his texts. Many critics, including Arnold Rampersad

and Keith Byerman, view Du Bois as an excellent writer of books but who was not so good with

novelistic styles because they find it difficult to situate his novels to fit into any particular genre.

For example, in Rampersad’s critique of Dark Princess, he writes, “If Dark Princess seems old

fashioned or clumsily tailored, the novel’s failings are only partly owing to the limitations of Du

Bois’s fictive gift and his lack of creative practice” (218). But with cosmopolitanism, just like

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with Marxist interpretation of history, “it provides a rational explanation for a good deal that

would otherwise be unintelligible” (Padmore xvi).

Re-reading Du Bois’s novels is crucial because, for the most part, The Quest of the Silver

Fleece, (1911), Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), and the trilogy—The Ordeal of Mansart

(1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds in Color (1961)—have been overshadowed

by his more famous and popular books, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Darkwater: Voices from

within the Veil (1920), and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography (1940). The

Quest of the Silver Fleece is an epic that traces the transformation and development of Zora from

a state of ignorance and primitiveness to become an autodidact and a leader in the Black Belt, a

position that exemplifies a universal cosmopolitan vitality that is grounded in Western

Enlightenment notion and the Greek tradition; together with Bles Alwyn, the two delineate a

fierce independence that echoes the primordial American described in Letters from an American

Farmer (1782 and 1792).1 Indeed, the two protagonists exemplify the Horatio Ager attributes by

lifting themselves up from abject poverty through sheer diligence, courage, and some luck to

social estate to help elevate other blacks in the Black Belt. The success story of Alwyn and Zora

is embodied in universal cosmopolitanism informed by the Hellenistic tradition.

In Du Bois’s second novel, Dark Princess: A Romance, there is a shift from universal to

discrepant cosmopolitanism, the result of the nationalistic fervor of the Japanese, the Egyptian,

and the Indians except the Princess, so Du Bois’s utopian mission in the novel is unfulfilled;

instead, a black messiah, Madhu is born to lead the world, following the conjugal consummation

of Princess Kautilya and Matthew Towns. In his last novels, a historical fiction collectively

known as The Black Flame, the analysis of the trilogy is grounded in black cosmopolitanism and

Pan-Africanism. On Du Bois’s historical novels, what Azinna Nwafor wrote about George

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Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism is equally true of Du Bois and The Black Flame.

Nwafor points out:

George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism shares the distinction—

common to most great works of historical writing as with Thucydides,

Machiavelli, and Trosky’s History of the Russian Revolution—of being the

creation of a participant as historian. For next to the colossal figure of W.E.B. Du

Bois, Padmore—the political revolutionary—holds an exalted position in the

pantheon of Pan-Africanism; and in his chef d’oeuvre he has presented us a most

vivid account of that movement in which he played so exemplary a role. (xxv)

The colossal figure of Du Bois captures Black American history from the end of Reconstruction

in 1876 to the end of de jure segregation in 1954. It is a trilogy in which Du Bois is vicariously

represented and holds his exalted position in African American history through his fictional

characters. Although the protagonist’s father, Tom Mansart is lynched by the Ku Klux Klan at

the end of Reconstruction, his son, Manuel grows to become the black flame that slowly burns

the tumultuous alley of ignorance engulfing many Southern blacks because of the lack of

education to help educate his people. Indeed, my dissertation project will make it possible for a

re-reading of Du Bois’s fiction to redeem his image to those less familiar and less satisfied with

his work to enable them to view Du Bois as an authentic Harvard-educated American writer.

Du Bois’s mission was to make the world a better place, not through politics but through

mastery of dialectics in his books and novels, in which he made a case for Black America to the

rest of the world to assist in stunting the lynching of blacks and other minorities in America. Du

Bois confesses in Dusk of Dawn, “Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and

enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the

social order and economic development into which I was born” (27). Thus, the Epilogue

discusses Du Bois as an intellectual who was unheralded in his own country because he had the

courage to stand up against America’s involvement in global wars. However, the fact was that

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Du Bois was a cosmopolitan who was against America dropping the atomic bomb on any

country again after Japan’s torrid experience when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in

World War II. As a matter of fact, Padmore has pointed out that Communism is a doctrinaire

ideology that is intolerant of alternate views and abhors democracy while cosmopolitanism

operates in an atmosphere of tolerance, brotherhood, and democratic ideals.2

In spite of visits to Russia in 1926 and 1936, Du Bois was not charged with stoking

Communism in America, but as soon as he formed his Peace Information Center in New York in

1949 in an attempt to garner support for disarmament, he was lacerated with a trump-up charge

of refusal to register as an agent of a foreign principal--the Soviet Union and indicted in 1950.3

Du Bois went to trial in 1951 and was acquitted. Judge McGuire, in acquitting Du Bois, said

inter alia: “The Government has alleged that Peace Information Center was the agent of a

foreign principal . . . in this case the Government has failed to support, on the evidence adduced,

the allegations laid down in the indictment. So, therefore, the motion, under the circumstances,

for a judgment of acquittal will be granted” (The Autobiography 385). After his acquittal, the

Justice Department promised to provide fresh evidence to incriminate Du Bois within nine

months, but it never materialized, even as the State Department continued to withhold his

passport. Du Bois would wait for eight agonizing years for the restoration of his passport.

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover’s intimidating tactics had petrified many of Du Bois’s allies and

close associates away from him. Left with a few friends in America, Du Bois decided to look for

joy outside the peripheries of the United States. After his second visit to China in 1959 on the

occasion of the release of his passport by the State Department, Nkrumah offered him the

opportunity to go to newly independent Ghana to revive the Encyclopedia Africana which Du

Bois had painstakingly tried in 1900 to begin.4 Nkrumah told Du Bois: “We must unite Africa

217

and know its history and culture” (A Reader 319) so that Africa would have its history written

without bias to forever cement its position in her contribution to world civilization that had been

tainted for so long. Du Bois accepted the invitation in 1961, denounced his American citizenship

out of frustration while embracing Communism at the ripe age of 93. Thus, the Cold War politics

that pitted the United States against the then Soviet Union became a concrete political problem in

which Du Bois was caught in the middle of its firepower. As Tate argues in the introduction to

one of the editions to Dark Princess, “In 1961 Du Bois officially joined the Communist Party,

perhaps as a public display of his anger at U.S. betrayal as a repudiation of the possibility of U.S.

democracy” (xvi). He died two years later in Accra on the eve of the March on Washington in

1963.

To Du Bois, any system that sought to extend equality and justice to its marginalized

poor was worth believing in. After relocating to Ghana in 1961, Du Bois might have realized

Communism’s weaknesses, so in his Autobiography published posthumously in 1968, he wrote

that Communism would be a fleeting ideology that would not endure. Du Bois writes in The

Autobiography that he was impressed with Russia’s effort to eradicate poverty from among its

citizens, and he was equally astounded with the then Soviet Union’s effort to provide health care

and education to all of its citizenry:

What amazed me and uplifted me in 1926, was to see a nation stoutly facing a

problem which most other modern nations did not dare even to admit was real: the

abolition of poverty. Taking inspiration directly out of the mouths and dreams of

the world’s savants and prophets, who had inveighed against modern industrial

methods and against progress and poverty, this new Russia founded by Lenin and

inspired by Marx and Engels, proposed to build a socialist state control with

production for use and not for private profit; with ownership of land and capital

goods by the state, and with state control of public services, including education

and health. It was enough for me to see this mighty attempt. It might fail, I knew,

but the effort in itself was social progress and neither foolishness nor crime. (Du

Bois 30)

218

Du Bois’s concerns for justice and equality for the poor, the marginalized, and working-

class minorities, it can be argued, were borne out of a profound spirit enshrined in

cosmopolitanism, be it universal, discrepant, or black. In pursuit of that cosmopolitan zeal, Du

Bois attended a World Peace Conference in Oslo in 1949 after the dropping of the atomic bomb

on Hiroshima that effectively ended World War II. Du Bois would return to form the Peace

Information Center, headquartered in New York to garner support for disarmament. He was able

to harness two million signatures in that regard. It was likely because of Du Bois’s efforts for

peace in the world that the United States did not pulverize North Korea and Vietnam with atomic

bombs during the wars with America. When Du Bois was being tried, he defiantly told Judge

McGuire that “the same government that was consistently unable to find even one statute to

protect African Americans from lynching could have absolutely no problem in contorting

legislation to go after an 83-year old man” (Anderson 89). In what Du Bois signifies as a

violation of his First Amendment rights, he reminds the power-brokers of the Truman regime of

the danger inherent in the deprivation of individuals of the right to free speech and association.

In a rather long compound sentence couched in sarcasm, Du Bois writes:

Even if some thought peace at present dangerous and did not believe in socialism,

they knew that democracy was to survive in modern culture and in this vaunted

‘Land of the Free’ and leader of ‘free nations,’ the right to think and to speak; the

right to know what others were thinking; particularly to know opinion in that

Europe which, despite our provincial and vulgar boasting and Golgotha of world

wars, is still our main source of science and culture—that this democratic right of

freedom of thought and speech must be preserved from Truman and McGrath;

McCarran and Smith; from McCarthy and little Georgia’s Joseph Wood

leading the reactionary slave South—or America was dead. (The Autobiography

388)

As a matter of fact, Du Bois felt strongly about socialism because his mindset was that if in

America’s darkest moments, President Franklin Roosevelt adopted the ideas of Marx and Engels

219

to rescue America out of the depression, the nation should not wait for disaster to strike before it

adopts methods enshrined in socialism.

Finally, in spite of the antagonisms against Du Bois, arguably the cosmopolitan

effervescence that led him to reconfigure the Pan-African Movement became his saving grace as

he accepted Nkrumah’s offer and went and died in Ghana. Indeed, Du Bois’s relationship with

Nkrumah is an area of inquiry that can be further explored because not much has been written

about it. When Ghana gained her independence in 1957, it was Padmore who became Nkrumah’s

advisor until the latter’s death in 1959.5 Nwafor has argued that in the “midst of the Cold War,

George Padmore became ‘the intellectual fore-runner of the theories of non-alignment’ and

positive neutrality which the emergent countries of Africa and Asia adopted in their foreign

policy declarations and in their involvement in world affairs” (Pan Africanism or Communism

xxx). Nwafor’s argument could be the underlying reason why Padmore became Nkrumah’s

advisor. Just like Du Bois, Nkrumah’s cosmopolitan enthusiasm is under-appreciated. In 1945,

Nkrumah served as joint secretary to the Fifth Pan-African Congress, and in 1955, together with

Presidents Nehru and Sukarta, they organized the First Non-Aligned Movement conference in

Bandung, and in 1958, he organized the first continental Pan-African Congress in Accra to fulfill

Du Bois’s dream of organizing the Congress in Africa, a dream Du Bois had nurtured since the

Fourth Congress in New York in 1927 when Tunis was proposed for the 1929 Congress, but

France and the Great Depression dismantled the idea. Paul Gilroy correctly asserts in an

interview with Tommie Shelby that Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism went beyond particularities

since “it is about thinking of the planet as one place . . . of understanding the radical relationality

of developments and through that, understanding the pivotal power not only of European

expansion and state-making but also of colonial administration, colonial government, and

220

colonial war. Those processes produce the social relations we inhabit and against our better

judgment, naturalize most of the time” (117). Du Bois did, indeed, inhabit the social relations

produced by his cosmopolitan effervescence, resulting in his death and burial, not in the United

States but in Accra, Ghana in 1963.

Forty-five years after Du Bois demise and thirty-six years after Nkrumah’s death,

President Barack Obama declared himself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world in Berlin in

2008 soon after winning that year’s election to establish himself as the first black man in the

annals of American presidential history to occupy the White House. As a result of the

declaration of his cosmopolitan heritage, he became a nemesis to a section of American

politicians, especially Conservatives. However, more importantly, Obama’s winning of the 2008

presidential elections became a symbolic realization of Du Bois’s foreshadowing of the black

messiah in Dark Princess and the attempt through cosmopolitanism to include oppressed peoples

in the attainment of what Tavia Nyong’o calls the “national Thing.” Nyong’o observes the

problematic that disjointed the cosmopolitan sensibility in Dark Princess with a similar

exclusionary tactic grounded in provincialism in American democratic politics. Nyong’o notes

that Americans, who hitherto never envisioned a black man being elected to the presidency of the

United States, got a stark lesson in cosmopolitanism when Barack Obama became the first black

president of the United States. As hope for a post-racial America went on the upswing, many

were quickly reminded of the pessimism unleashed by some black conservative intellectuals, of

whom the most fiery and vicious were Stanley Crouch and Barbara Dickerson. These

conservatives claim that because of Obama’s cosmopolitan heritage, he should be excluded from

membership into the African American community (Introduction 4). Nyong’o sounds

221

emphatically, [D]oes the conjugal union of the races work as a depoliticizing catchall,

preempting a more critical engagement with the trauma of the American past?

Obviously, Du Bois extends the de-politicization catchall of the conjugal union between

Princess Kautilya and Matthew Towns beyond the trauma of the American past to the rest of the

colored world in an attempt to provide a global dimension to the Negro Problem. Consequently, I

have argued that using the lenses of cosmopolitanism to expound Du Bois’s fiction, one can

clearly see, even appreciate, Du Bois’s vision, especially in the context that Obama is the

President of the United States today. Thus, if Nkrumah fulfilled Du Bois’s dream in the 1950s,

Obama epitomizes his messianic proclamation in Dark Princess in the first and second decades

of the twenty-first century. Wilson Jeremiad Moses has written that the messianic proclamation

heralding the birth of a black Messiah is couched in Ethiopianism, a late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries tradition “based on the cryptic prophecy of Psalm 68:31, ‘Princes shall come

out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Introduction 16). In another

article, “The Poetics of Ethiopianism: W.E.B. Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism,” Moses

is more explicit in the Psalm’s connection to the United States and Africa in a contemporary

sense:

The verse was seen by some as a prophecy that Africa would ‘soon’ be saved

from the darkness of heathenism, and it came to be interpreted as a promise that

Africa would ‘soon’ experience a dramatic political, industrial, and economic

renaissance. Others have insisted that the real meaning of the scripture is that

someday the black man will rule the world. Such a belief is still common among

older black folk today. (58)

As is clearly evident, the belief of older black folk came to be realized in 2008 to fulfill the

scriptures. Under Obama, Africa has experienced political stability and economic renaissance as

the continent has emerged among the sixth fastest growing economies in the world, and Africa is

enjoying relative stability and peace. In August 2014, Obama accentuated his position as an

222

apostle of Du Boisian ideals with the hosting of fifty African heads of states in Washington, D.C.

to pledge the support of the United States to Africa in her developmental efforts. For progress to

be tangible and palpable on the continent, electricity is key, so the Obama administration and

private investors invested $26 billion in the provision of electricity to some countries on the

continent, including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo.6 However, in the words of

one delegate from Egypt, for Africa to be able to compete with the rest of the world, the United

States must enter into a protracted free trade agreement with Africa. Currently, the United States

has a free trade agreement with only one African nation—Morocco—a situation the delegate

regarded as not adequate enough.7 President Obama expressed his belief in Africa’s position as

part of the global community and the need for America to partner Africa to ensure a bright future

for children in Africa and America. Obama notes: “I do not see the countries and peoples of

Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world-partners

with America on behalf of the future we want for all our children. That partnership must be

grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect.”8

From this perspective, there is the possibility that if black conservatives like Crouch and

Dickerson would display a level of maturity to observe and analyze issues not based on warped

concepts like eugenics and one’s political affiliations to rivet their energies on facts and pure

common sense, they would realize Obama’s cosmopolitan desire to make the world a better

place for all of humanity as an excellent phenomenon borne out of the President’s innate

humanism. When in 2008, Obama declared in Berlin, Germany, “I am a citizen of the world,” it

did not render him any more un-American than President John F. Kennedy’s declaration in 1961

“Ich bin ein Berliner; as a matter of fact, Kennedy is still largely regarded as arguably America’s

most popular president. That declaration in Berlin, the same city in which Du Bois studied for

223

two years and Matthew Towns and Manuel visited in Dark Princess and Worlds of Color,

respectively, only affirms Obama’s cosmopolitan leaning and substantiates his heritage in his

commitment to making the world a better place. In this sense, what Rampersad has written about

Du Bois’s fictive characters in The Black Flame is equally applicable to Obama: “Each character

and each event has to be related to the total ambition of The Black Flame. Each reflects on its

presentation of Du Bois’s brooding on that riddle of the sphinx to the solution of which he

devoted his lifework: the mystery of the world and its injustices, the lowly position of his own

people in the hierarchy of race, and the fate of the man of principle in a world hostile to ideal”

(Du Bois’s Art and Imagination 269). In his role as President of this United States, Obama has

firmly established himself as a man of principle, but in a political arena where Republicans have

sworn to oppose him in every way possible, he finds himself trapped in the hostile political

network of the opposition.

My approach in this dissertation project focuses on Du Bois’s contribution to literary

criticism in general and American literary scholarship in particular by writing novels informed

by the variants of cosmopolitanism to add to the many existing literary tropes and theories in the

analyses of fiction and non-fiction. In this sense, I suggest alternative ways of reading Du Bois’s

novels as informed by cosmopolitanism to complement the important variety of scholars on the

subject of modern cosmopolitanisms. It also demonstrates the salience of extrapolating Du

Bois’s cultural, educational, economic, educational, and Pan-African treatises to

cosmopolitanism. Indeed, while some scholars of cosmopolitanism have demonstrated the

material meaning of the concept as a marker of uplift from the denigration inflicted by the

concept of Africa as a dark continent, ossification imposed on black subjects through slavery,

segregation in America, and colonization in Africa and Asia, they have largely left unexplored in

224

dissertation projects the application of cosmopolitanism as a competing theme in dislodging the

Western hegemonic gaze branded on the oppressed in Du Bois’s treatises. Finally, this

dissertation concludes that Du Bois’s quest for an egalitarian social order for the “darker

peoples” of the world, which is interpreted through the prism of a forceful vision of universal

humanism and discrepant cosmopolitanism fell short in its aspirations but was transformed into a

more distinct black cosmopolitanism that encouraged African and Asian nations in their

struggles for freedom from European colonization before his death in Ghana. Before Du Bois’s

death in Ghana, he expressed his belief in the leadership of Nkrumah to carry on with the mantle

of traditional and continental Pan-Africanism and bring its ideals to fruition into the world at

large. Du Bois’s dream is still extant in President Barack Obama’s policies and in his

engagement with Africa.

In a fitting tribute to Du Bois, Harold Bloom has written that Du Bois’s longevity

culminated in a stimulating seventy-year campaign in black activism, matchless in “epic

grandeur, and sometimes Quixotic in its later gestures” (3). On the timelessness of his texts,

Blooms notes: “Quite aside from his enormous and ongoing influence upon later and current

African American intellectuals, Du Bois remains perpetually readable. A bitter ironist, Du Bois

ranks high in any hierarchy of American polemical writing. His anger, inevitable and incessant,

is disciplined by his need to persuade as well as exhort” (3). On the basis of Bloom’s

proclamation, I suggest alternate readings of Du Bois fiction, especially The Black Flame, his

historical novels that have been long neglected by scholars and students. Furthermore, the fact

that Nkrumah and Obama helped bring Du Bois’s dream to fruition is another fecund area of

scholarship that might require further exploration by scholars.

225

In “Africa,” Du Bois seems to have portended his death and burial in Africa. In the short

prose-poem, Du Bois romanticizes Africa:

The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning

my drowsy, dreamy blood. This is not a country; it is a world—a universe, in

itself, a thing Different, Immense, Menacing, Alluring. It is a great black bosom

where the Spirit longs to die. (The Reader 646)

Du Bois’s contribution to humanity is enormous. Impressively, he was conscious of his own

brilliance and profound talent, and he selflessly put his ingenuity at the mercy of a world that

gave him no true comfort by its blatant refusal to appreciate him as a human being first and his

talent later. But he fought on relentlessly and confidently with the hope that someday his dream

of an egalitarian world order would be fulfilled. Du Bois wrote fiercely and courageously, so

Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and parts of the white world--European and American--came calling

for his help, and he never hesitated to extend his helping hand whenever it was needed. Best of

all, Du Bois will be smiling in his grave because his prophesy of a black messiah and messenger

in the Dark Princess: A Romance has been fulfilled with President Obama’s success in the 2008

Presidential elections, a feat he repeated in 2012.

226

NOTES

1 See Crevecoeur, “Myth Criticism and the American Dream: Huckleberry Finn as the

American Adam” in Guerin, et al, 187.

2 For a profound analysis, see Padmore, “Author’s Note,” xii-xx.

3 See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography, 356, 387.

4 After the State Department returned Du Bois’s passport to him, he made his fifteenth trip to

Europe and Asia with China, Japan and Russia being some of the countries he visited. It was a

long trip that endured from August 8, 1958 to July 1, 1959. See The Autobiography, 269.

5 For a detailed analysis, see Padmore. Pan-Africanism and Communism.

6 U.S.-Africa Business Forum. Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Washington, DC. 5 Aug. 2014. Web.

15 Oct. 2014.

7 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. “Investing in the Next Generation.” White House. 4-6 Aug.

2014. Web. 15 Oct. 2014. Address.

227

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