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ELH 69.3 (2002) 775-803



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"More than Romance":
Genre and Geography in Dark Princess

Dohra Ahmad


W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess: A Romance tends to cause problems for genre-minded readers. The 1928 novel, Du Bois's second of five, partakes in the conventions of Bildungsroman, adventure, social realism, messianic prophecy, and, as its subtitle would indicate, romance. As such, the novel provides an interesting and often misdiagnosed case study in generic pastiche and parody. In Arnold Rampersad's frequently cited formulation, the novel is a "queer combination of outright propaganda and Arabian tale, of social realism and quaint romance." 1 Du Bois's contemporaries, too, found the conjunction of mundane and elevated language, of politics and romance, of local and international settings, to be unsettling or inappropriate. 2 An alternate view finds such readings inadequate, based as they are on a constricting realist viewpoint. Claudia Tate, in her introduction to the novel's latest edition, holds that "if his critics had judged the novel according to the values of an eroticized revolutionary art instead of the conventions of social realism, they probably would have celebrated Dark Princess as a visionary work." Both Tate and Paul Gilroy see the novel, and especially its closing scene of multicultural pageant, as a model for a new black political idealism. 3 Critical responses, then, tend to be split between those put off by the novel's mix of registers between realist and romantic, and those who celebrate its turn to prophetic messianism.

Certainly Tate is right to point to early reviewers' racially informed genre-based preconceptions; however, the novel's shifts in genre are too deliberate and too pronounced to be ignored. In fact we must pay closer attention to what those shifts signal. Rampersad attributes the shifts to the tension between secular and sacred; Tate, in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, sees them as demonstrating the incompatibility of social activism and eroticism. 4 What no critic mentions is that the novel's shifts in genre coincide with shifts in geography: the realistic and romantic sections of Dark Princess each correspond to a specific locale, already historically associated with that type of [End Page 775] writing. Du Bois writes Chicago in a hard realist mode reminiscent of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair; he renders India, its history, and its people in a language much like the decadent, otherworldly Orientalism of Baudelaire and other figures of the romanticist Oriental Renaissance; and he dreams of the American South as a hazy agrarian motherland familiar from Harlem Renaissance works. These three locales—Chicago, India, and the American South—offer the key to an understanding of Du Bois's strategic deployment of genre. The three will in fact become only two, for the romanticized India and American South ultimately merge, opening out into a mystical and expanded global South. As Kautilya, the titular Princess, declares: "from Hampton Roads to Guiana is a world of colored folk . . . South is Latin America, east is Africa, and east of east lies my own Asia." 5 In its portrayal of a consolidated global South, Dark Princess offers a prehistory of the region which would come to be conceptualized as the third world. Attention to literary form, in this case the novel's deliberate discontinuities, reveals some of the practical difficulties with that conceptual category and with Dark Princess's politics of global solidarity.

Du Bois conveys each locale through a representative female figure: Chicago through the calculating and materialistic Sara Andrews; India, of course, through our eponymous revolutionary; and the American South through protagonist Matthew Towns's nameless but eternally wise mother. 6 Just as India and the American South ultimately blur together, so too, as we will see, do Kautilya and Matthew's mother. Those characters, Princess and mother, support each other on the levels of plot, language, and politics; together they oppose the compromisingly pragmatic Sara. Taken together, then, the three women in effect inhabit and represent only two geographies: Chicago, carefully researched and rendered in a pristine realist mode; and India/Virginia/global South, depicted in flights...

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