W.E.B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the Staging of Alterity

In his 1995 study Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903, Shamoon Zamir has provided us with one of the most detailed accounts to date of what he calls the "drama of alterity" (115) that Du Bois stages in The Souls of Black Folk. Zamir offers us in particular a fascinating analysis of the role that Du Bois' complex encounter with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit played in his scripting of a drama that has become one of the most important models for thinking about cultural difference today. In 1897, Du Bois first published "Strivings of the Negro People," which, in revised form and under the title "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," became the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. ¹ As is well known, Du Bois in this opening chapter describes a differential duality of "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" (364), a duality which the title associates with "black folk" in general, and which has been related in particular to the black elite that Du Bois describes elsewhere as the "Talented Tenth" (Zamir 116, 147-). What I am interested in here is a certain ambivalence in the staging of the very terms of duality, "twoness," "doubleness" and "double consciousness." ² I will trace a shifting of semantic bonds and valencies of these terms themselves, read through the context of Du Bois' appropriation of Hegel as it has been outlined by Zamir.

Eventually, I will extend this analysis to the language of visibility and ambivalent identification that Du Bois expresses through the metaphor of the veil. The Biblical conceit of the lifting of the veil or drawing aside of the curtain is used as a metaphor for the progression from appearance toward self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology (Hegel 102-3) ³ ; by contrast, as Zamir points out, in Souls the veil descends (Zamir 135-36), for the first time in a scene from Du Bois' childhood in which another child refuses "with a glance" an exchange of gifts (363-64). ⁴ This is a scene of initially negative and then ambivalent identification that marks here the beginning of self-consciousness:

The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. (364, emphasis added). ⁵

I will argue that a model of transparency that would undo the descending of the veil is not easily available to Du Bois inside a Hegelian frame of reference of increasing visibility and identification. This problem will keep closure in abeyance and double-code, at the very end of Du Bois' text, the language of visibility--a moment I will seek to locate with reference to another, quite different reading of Hegel and a model of relation offered by Edouard Glissant that problematizes pure transparency and predictability in recognition.

The terms I will trace here are overdetermined, double-coded, and partially resemanticized because of shifting, but often unresolved, frames of reference and of recognition--a problematic that speaks to many other narratives of collective emergence and cultural positionalities marked by multiple perspectives. "Double consciousness" emerges in Du Bois' text in typically ambivalent fashion. It can carry negative but also positive connotations, according to the stage of the argument and the envisaged totality. On the one hand, double consciousness appears in many formulations as an incomplete stage of reason. On the other hand, Du Bois articulates African American difference as a surplus when relating it to the official values of the American nation. His attempts...