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1 World Literature and Antiquity Classical Surrogates in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Belt Like Edward Wilmot Blyden at Liberia College, W. E. B. Du Bois briefly held a professorship of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University. Alongside their humanist enthusiasm for Greco-Roman culture , both men inherited and promoted a counter-discourse of antiquity increasingly marginalized over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, an intellectual shift whose story Martin Bernal has popularly documented in his Black Athena volumes. This counterdiscourse emphasized the variously shaded African roots of classical antiquity, reminding an amnesiac Europe of Greece and Rome’s debts to Egypt and Ethiopia, as recorded by ancient and modern sources alike. Du Bois, furthermore, proceeded to significantly refashion this counter-discourse, with significant consequences for how we read the literature of the African diaspora within the field of world literature. The vindicationist historiography of his predecessors, as Wilson Jeremiah Moses writes, “sought to defend Africans by proving the African origin of ancient civilizations and demonstrating the indebtedness of modern humanity to those civilizations.”1 Exploding the linear calculus by which “the riddle of Egypt . . . led to Greece,” in the words of Jeremy W. Pope, Du Bois taps a hermetic strain of classical historiography to subtly thread an esoteric, palimpsestic hermeneutics of antiquity.2 Supplementing a teleological history of successive monolithic civilizations, Du Bois in the historical treatise The Negro attends to the rhizomatic, cosmopolitan networks of the ancient scene, crisscrossed by obscure histories and mysterious affinities. These obscure histories and mysterious affinities provide the hermetic key to deciphering the allusive textures of The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Both texts make plain that Du Bois shares with Goethe “a sense of classical antiquity as the ultimate 20 World Literature and Antiquity treasury to plunder for themes, formal models, and even language,” as David Damrosch writes.3 Yet for Du Bois, this foundational archive of world literature is not merely an impressive collection of artifacts, destined to inspire intertextual engagement by littérateurs or to elevate the minds of the oppressed and disenfranchised. Radically calling into question racialized hierarchies of elite and folk culture, this archive persists embodied in the vernacular practices of the Black Belt, where preachers , teachers, activists, and ordinary folk are what Joseph Roach calls “surrogates” who carry it forth as if in unbroken communion with an antiquity whose loci always bear hermetic traces of Afro-Oriental relations and inversions.4 Du Bois’s hermeneutics of world literature thereby brushes the surfaces of text and performance against the grain in order to excavate living traces not only of “African survivals” but of a cosmopolitan circum-Mediterranean antiquity. By modeling twentieth-century African diaspora literature’s spectral continuity with this revised classical scene, Du Bois galvanizes a counter-discourse of world literature that charts an alternative to ideologies of literary-anthropological cultural nationalism and global modernism that did and continue to spatially and temporally subordinate the cultural products of Africa and its diaspora within world literature. It also offers a reading protocol attentive to oscillatory and fragmentary processes of memory and transmission, an anti-positivist protocol that sutures the poetics of diaspora to the foundational , nineteenth-century German discourses of world literature. From the late eighteenth century onward, the semiotics of classical antiquity became a prime vehicle for touting Europe’s world-historical ascendance. From the Greek Revival in architecture to the pedagogy of the French lycée, Prussian gymnasium, and English public school, imperial self-regard aped the spatial and linguistic forms of Greece and Rome, their vaunted origins. Surveying the globe-spanning archive of world literature available for plunder, Goethe warned: “We should not think that the truth is in Chinese or Serbian literature, in Calderón or the Niebelungen. In our pursuit of models, we ought always to return to the Greeks of antiquity in whose works beautiful man is represented.”5 The elite emplotment of an expansionist European culture as the revival of classical virtue, reason, beauty, and might invited many skeptical second looks at antiquity as a site of origins. Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote: “Unfortunate inhabitants of the forests, these proud Greeks took everything from strangers. The Phoenicians taught them the use of letters; the arts, the laws, all that elevates man above the animals, they owed [3.146.37.35] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 00:22...

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