Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois

Ought’s a ought, figger’s a figger; all for de white man, none for de nigger.

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

W.E.B. Du Bois has been so central to the theorizing of blackness that it is surprising to find that a fundamental element of his style has been overlooked by scholars: there has been no account of the numbers that show up everywhere in Du Bois’s writings.¹ One of the most famous and emblematic phrases in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his account of “the Negro” in “this American world,” is framed as an inescapable numeric pattern: “One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (364-65). This most influential of African-American tropes is an account of a struggle made explicitly quantitative: one and two are the central and repeated terms of this passage, trumping American, Negro, soul, and body. Perhaps these numbers have gone without comment because until very recently literary scholars have understood numbers as falling outside their domain (the as-yet unpublished work of Steven Connor of the University of Cambridge is one example of new work being done on the topic). Yet, as Alain Badiou has recently claimed, “number must be thought,” because “we live in the era of number’s despotism,” number governing our accounts of the political even in the human sciences (1). In truth, neither omission nor attack fills the need for a rhetorical analysis of number, for treating number as absolutely different from other languages submits to its “despotism.” Such approaches naturalize the divide between quantification and letters, rather than treating it as the constructed and historically specific estrangement that it is.

While Badiou’s task is to challenge the regime of number, my more modest ambition is to build a literary history of ideas that grapples with what it means to write and read under the regime of number. Du Bois’s fundamental but often overlooked quantitative bent is a perfect place from which to pursue such a project. Indeed, as a sociologist he participated actively in the intellectual turn by which Badiou sees number as having invaded the conception of “communitarian bonds” over the course of the nineteenth century (2). Susan Mizruchi has shown that Du Bois had a lasting, complicated relation with the European quantitative sociology that he studied at the University of Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century.² Still, the use of numbers in Du Bois’s creative, rather than explicitly sociological, works bespeaks something more than the lingering effects of his graduate training. In the case of his articulation of double consciousness, for example, he does not only deploy one and two for their precision. Number has a more general use for him as a literary device, one he uses as frequently as symbol, and arguably more successfully than character. In other words, a number in Du Bois’s work is every bit as dense in its significance as would be a classical reference or a few bars from a spiritual.

In what follows, I will show that through his literary uses of numbers, Du Bois insists upon a particular concept of personhood.³ Personhood here is distinct from what he means when using the term humanity (which Lloyd Pratt has helpfully elucidated); it is a status not trans-temporal but contingent, constructed, mediated (often by the state), historically sensitive, and hard-fought—this last especially so in light of how the slave trade exposed the heterogeneous, sometimes incommensurable accounts of personhood in the Atlantic world, as Peter Jaros has argued.⁴ Jeannine DeLombard has recently shown how recognitions of black personhood manifested first in accounts of black criminality; personhood available in the eyes of the criminal law translated only with difficulty into that status with associated rights and privileges, distinct from what was meant by “human being” or even “man” in antebellum US letters (6-7). Yet as I’ll suggest below, the assertion of personhood proved indispensable to Du Bois’s interventions into...