Introduction: On W. E. B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking

The idea for this special issue of boundary 2 has a complicated genealogy. Its beginnings go back to the summer of 1985, when I had been asked by Harold Bloom to contribute an original essay for the Ralph Ellison volume of his Modern Critical Views series. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota at the time and had just met Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the Cultural Critique conference in Berkeley, California, on minority discourse. It was Skip to whom I was indebted for the opportunity extended by Bloom, which I botched. That failure, however, was the occasion for the beginning of the idea for this issue of boundary 2.

I had begun to write a piece on the theory of language entailed in Ellison’s understanding of the blues as an ironic practice of signification in which experience has no categorical foundation. In particular, I was trying to think about how the Negro, ever lurking in Invisible Man, and boldly delineated in Ellison’s Shadow and Act essays, figured in his theory of the blues. Did it figure in as the agency of signifying practice, or as a function of the practice, the origin of whose agency was indeterminate? Pursuing the history of this question brought me, in due course, to the theoretical writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. The reasons for this are very direct. I had already begun, for my own purposes, an inquiry about the history of the Negro as a figure, with the principal postulate that while hardly anyone wants to be a Negro anymore, even fewer know what it is they think themselves to not be. The predominant attitude of our time—“I know what I am, but I do not know what I reject”—strikes me as a perversion of the insight Montaigne deployed in contradiction to the then emerging anthropological habit. That inquiry had already prompted me to begin as systematic a study as possible of the writings of Du Bois on this question. It was in the course of this that “Sociology Hesitant” came to my attention, first in Francis Broderick’s essay published in the Phylon Quarterly in 1958, entitled “German Influences on the Scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois,” and then in his book.¹ After that, I found reference to it in Dan Green and Edwin Driver’s collection of Du Bois’s theoretical writings on sociology, W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, the introduction of which is a reworking of their 1979 Phylon essay, “W. E. B. Du Bois: A Case in the Sociology of Sociological Negation.”² Both of the Green and Driver references were elaborations on Broderick’s 1958 essay and his unpublished notes on “Sociology Hesitant.” The impression they leave is that this important essay is no longer accessible.

I was quite surprised, then, when, in the course of my project of gradually reading through the microfilm of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, I discovered “Sociology Hesitant” cataloged. The significance of this I will take up in a moment. At that time, it was with some excitement, tinged with a bit of incredulity, that I contacted the Special Collections and Archives section of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries and requested an official copy of the essay. It arrived within a week. What I read so directly addressed the theoretical problematic of concern to me about the relationship between the figure of the Negro and epistemology, providing a key to the many vexing fits and starts and seeming contradictions about this issue in the corpus of Du Bois’s work, that I became engrossed in fitting together the pieces. This resulted in a lengthy, and somewhat incoherent, essay on the problem of nescience and ethics in Du Bois’s work, entitled “Alethiology in Althamaha.” Unfortunately, it was not...