No one did more to include African Americans in the textual universe of speaking subjects, as agents, than William Edward Burghardt du Bois in his canonical work of American literature. “The Souls of Black People,” the masterpiece of Du Bois’ considerable oeuvre, has received all the critical acclaim and explanation it has received since its publication in 1903. Du Bois’s crowning achievement was employing two tropes that so encapsulated the story of a people freed from centuries of human slavery, finally, just 38 years before he published his book, criticizing at the start of a new century the most diabolical attempts to deconstruct the transformations wrought by the 13th, 14th Amendments and 15 and catch the Africans. Americans once again as quasi-citizens forever trapped in the limbo of forms of neo-slavery.
one was “the veil”, behind which the social and spiritual life of a people within a people unfolded in the fullest range of complexity of any other branch of human civilization. Another was “double consciousness,” a metaphor with a long history going back at least to Emerson, if not beyond, to which Du Bois was probably introduced by his mentor, William James. Du Bois’s significant riff on the concept was to insert a “hyphen” as, itself, the liminal space that simultaneously separated but connected the African American’s dual identity, as “an American” and “as a Negro,” as he put it. expressed, “two ideals at war in a dark body.” and third, du bois was the first scholar, I believe, to posit as an equal member of the canon of the artifacts of classical world civilization a specific corpus of the African-American sacred vernacular form, forged within the crucible of enslavement by the enslaved, composed by “black and unknown bards,” as the poet jamesweldon johnson so aptly put it, in a poetic diction that itself was a strikingly convincing example of an africanized refashioning of the english king james.always the same prose poet, du bois, The Victorian sage of black America, he dubbed these “songs of sorrow,” America’s only truly original and genuinely sublime contributions, he boasted, to the greatest monuments of genius in the long history of civilization.
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du bois, in other words, not only gave a rhetorical structure to the historically and dynamically unfolding multiple identity of this black nation within a nation, but found metaphors to name key aspects of its liminal cultural and social being. Above all, he named, with seminal tropes of his own creation, the conflicting identities of being black and being American, tropes that would resonate through canonical texts in the African-American tradition, from James Weldon’s “The Autobiography from johnson’s ex-colored man and jean toomer’s “cane”, through ralph ellison’s monumental mid-century novel “the invisible man”, to toni morrison’s “beloved” and “jazz”, two achievements alone justifying his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although the theme of “souls” is firmly rooted in an early twentieth-century fin de siècle discourse, du bois’s analysis, his metaphors, have traveled extremely well through time and across of space, which remains desperately relevant today, especially today, as Black people continue to face structural and systemic racism, a mutation inscribed between the spaces of our republic’s founding documents, that affects them in ways that even our most sympathetic allies through the color line they can hardly understand without considerable effort. race relations in our wonderful country would be greatly improved if every student had to read this book.
— Henry Louis Gates Jr. Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Director, Hutchins Center for Africans & African-American research
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