Listening to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: After James

[Black Reconstruction] is a wonderful book! Something ought to be done about it.

—C. L. R. James

In 1971, C. L. R. James delivered a series of lectures at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. The second lecture (titled “The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction: A Comparative Analysis”) offers a good point of entry, since Du Bois’s text seems to have provided a most important precedent for James’s own historiographical approach. Indeed, James here acknowledges generously his debt to Du Bois in words worth quoting at length:

[Du Bois] had opened out the historical perspective in a manner I didn’t know. He had been at it for many years. He was a very profound and learned historian. . . . Did you ever think that the attempt of the black people in the Civil War to attempt democracy was the finest effort to achieve democracy that the world had ever seen? . . . You have to grapple with that. . . . Du Bois knew about it, and he said the tragedy of these millions from Africa was a tragedy that “beggared the Greek.” . . . Du Bois taught me to think in those terms. . . . That was a tremendous thing for Du Bois to say!

(“Lectures” 85–86)

Indeed, Du Bois’s “tragic” mode of emplotment above appears to have had a lasting impact on James, whose second edition of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963; originally published in 1938), then, seems to have taken its historiographical cue in part from Du Bois. To be sure, some of the most theoretically sophisticated readings of The Black Jacobins have been narratological readings, aiming to understand the formal literary qualities of James’s historical masterpiece. In Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), for example, David Scott close-reads James’s second edition “less as a Romantic narrative of anticolonial overcoming than as a tragedy of colonial modernity” (167): “Toussaint is a tragic subject of a colonial modernity to which he was, by force, conscripted. His tragedy inheres in the fact that, inescapably modern as he is obliged by the modern conditions of his life to be, he must seek his freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations in which modernity’s rationality has sought his enslavement” (168). To make his case, however, Scott focuses his hermeneutics on James’s ideological entanglements with Hegel and Aristotle. But there is no mention of James’s important Du Boisian leanings—more important, in spite of what Scott’s text may claim, than James’s indebtedness to Aristotle or Hegel. Unfortunately, Conscripts of Modernity seems to overlook James’s important comparison between The Black Jacobins and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), which Scott mentions only in passing (248). Indeed, if the first edition of James’s historical narrative seems to have been exhausted by the historian’s own struggle to comprehend and simplify complex realities—“realities,” James tells us, “to which the historian is condemned” (Black Jacobins 291)—then the second moves away from the “Romantic” mode of emplotment altogether, toward utopian, more “Du Boisian” modes of hermeneutics.

Taking James’s notes on Black Reconstruction as its point of departure, this article theorizes Du Bois’s revisionist history in terms of the latter’s specific narrative and metanarrative strategies. A close reading of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, then, reveals one of the most defining and unifying (if well-known) features of Du Bois’s literary style: his intertextuality. Indeed, Du Bois’s radical intertextuality and revisionist historiographical approach to the genre are especially evident in his epigraphs, where the author performs and elicits a certain kind of affect nowhere felt in the previous histories to which Black Reconstruction seems to have laid waste. While Du Bois’s prose attempts to recapture something of the position of the enslaved and afterlife of slavery—what, after Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, we might call “the position of the unthought” (“The Position of the Unthought” 184–185; “Gramsci’s Black Marx” 226 ), or “the unthought position,” as Huey...