Abstract

ABSTRACT:

Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), has typically focused on questions of genre—the interplay of romance, realism, and naturalism—and, more recently, the influence of Du Bois's early sociological studies and his burgeoning socialism. Building on this scholarship, this essay explores an often overlooked aspect of the novel and of Du Bois's early work more generally: the afterlife of the plantation in the cotton South. Suggesting that Du Bois often turned to the black South in his literary works to imagine otherwise, the author analyzes Quest as an "anti-plantation romance" that at once establishes and undercuts the plantation as both a political and socioeconomic formation and a literary genre. Through romance and aesthetics, the author contends, Du Bois reimagines the relationship between blackness and cotton within global capitalism. In so doing, Du Bois attempts to extract cotton and the black female body from the entanglements of the plantation's political and libidinal economies to imagine a new socioeconomic order for southern African Americans—a "cotton future"—that undercuts the violent and exploitative logics undergirding plantation modernity. The essay concludes by demonstrating how Quest anticipates Du Bois's later thought on cotton, the plantation romance, and black southern futures in his 1946 speech, "Behold the Land" and his proposed 1954/56 book project, "The Cotton Slave," which aimed to illuminate the inextricability of slavery, cotton, and American capitalism. What, asks the author, does reading Quest alongside "The Cotton Slave" reveal about the relationship between literature (e.g. the [anti-]plantation romance) and the history of American capitalism in Du Bois's writings and beyond?

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