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  • To "tell again in many ways":Iteration and Translation in The Souls of Black Folk
  • Adalaine Holton (bio)

After elaborating his notion of double consciousness and introducing the central tropes of the soul, the veil, and the color-line, W. E. B. Du Bois closes the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with a brief, critical statement: "And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk" (107). The rhetorical strategy that Du Bois describes here is one of iteration, of repetition with a difference. He invokes sameness—"the striving in the souls of black folk"—as well as difference—the need to tell the story again in many ways. The story of the "souls of black folk" for Du Bois is not a singular, unified, or consistent narrative, but a multifaceted and fragmented story that demands to be told and retold in "many ways." In Souls, this iterative approach allows Du Bois to explore the complexity of double consciousness, to represent the various experiences of life within the veil, and to give weight to the experiences of the community as well as the individual.1 Not only does this practice of "tell[ing] again in many ways" explain Du Bois's approach in writing Souls, but more importantly, it quite accurately describes his primary mode of discursive and political engagement throughout his long career. Here, I examine how Du Bois's enduring practice of telling again in many ways operates as a diagnostic strategy for analyzing systems of racial, economic, and sexual domination and, at the same time, offers a new matrix for rethinking race and nation. [End Page 23]

Iterability of Racial Discourse

A clear distinction exists between the subversive forms of iteration that Du Bois enacts in his writings and the iterative qualities of the Western discourses of race and coloniality he writes against. Homi Bhabha's notion of "ambivalence" is especially useful for understanding how repetition operates in colonial and racial discourses. As Bhabha explains in The Location of Culture, "discriminatory power"—global forms of colonial domination as well as the hegemonic authority of institutional racism within the nation state—gains strength from its ambivalence and mutability (66). In other words, if state-sanctioned racist practices in the U.S. depend on the notion of blackness as a sign of biological or cultural inferiority, the state must accordingly produce flexible definitions of blackness that are repeatable in different contexts. The flexibility of racial discourse, the ability of the construct of blackness—with its vast arsenal of stereotypes—to mutate depending on the context, means that it is also inconsistent and unstable. Bhabha notes, "The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces" (82). Discriminatory discourse, Bhabha suggests, establishes "fixity" and gains authority not through its consistent and unchanging presence, but through the repetition and reiteration of its "ambivalent" meanings (66-67). The repetition of racial assumptions within scientific explanations of human development, historical narratives of U.S. nationhood, and the commonsense discourse of everyday political life, works to fix race. Bhabha and others have pointed out that these moments of ambivalence and instability in the flexible discourses of social and political domination open up a gap or space for subversive critique.2 It is within this gap that Du Bois does his work.

Most immediately, Du Bois uses his own forms of subversive iteration to critique scientific and cultural-historical racial ideology by exposing the inconsistencies of its iterative structure. In his 1897 essay "Conservation of Races," for instance, Du Bois demonstrates that "color, hair, cranial measurement and language"—the primary criteria through which nineteenth-century scientists sought to differentiate various races of humans—prove themselves to be "exasperatingly intermingled" [End Page 24] among these so-called races (39). Returning to this point...

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