"Can We Imagine this Spectacular Revolution?": Counterfactual Narrative and the "New World Peasantry" in W.E.B. Du Bois' Scorn and Black Reconstruction

This essay recovers W.E.B. Du Bois's debut, unpublished novel, Scorn: A Romance (1905), positioning this neglected text as a literary precursor to his narrative of the enslaved revolutionary subject in Black Reconstruction. Reading Du Bois's canonical historical work alongside his forgotten experimental novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction uncovers Du Bois's development of a peculiarly self-negating form of counterfactual speculation. Moving from an analysis of Du Bois's political economy of slavery and capitalism in Black Reconstruction to a close reading of his experiments with narrative form and the fraught textual revisions revealed by the archive on Scorn, the essay locates Du Bois's elliptical counterfactual impulse in his attempt to narrate a precarious class subject, a subject that Scorn names the "new world peasantry." As well as offering the first reading of a politically and artistically significant novel, this comparative approach reassesses how narrative and speculative thought mediate a historical materialist account of the plantation form.