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1. From Soul Cleavage to Soul Survival: Double-Consciousness and the Emergence of the Decolonized Text/Subject
- Indiana University Press
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fr om soul clea va ge t o so ul s ur viv al 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that in back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous , and the excuse for this continues largely to be color and race. —W . E. B. Du Bois In 2005, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston showcased an exhibition titled “Double-Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970,” which featured the multigenerational work of artists Terry Adkins, Edgar Arceneaux, Sanford Biggers, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Jennie C. Jones, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, Nari Ward, and Fred Wilson. This exhibition is specifically appealing to me because its contributors approached Du Bois’s theory in much the same way that I do in this project. Not only does its period selection suggest a shift in black artistic expression since the 1970s, the publisher’s review of the corresponding art book explains that “[t]he exhibition’s concept is an aesthetic contribution to the rethinking of Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ theory that asserts that African-Americans are no longer relegated to looking at themselves through the eyes of others, but rather through their own gaze.”1 In general the museum is an appropriate metaphoric site to describe my own ambivalence concerning the continued from soul cleavage to soul survival Double-Consciousness and the Emergence of the Decolonized Text/Subject One 26 wr iting the bl a ck r evol utio nar y d iva applicability of double-consciousness in describing postmodern blackness —is it a concept to be memorialized as a remnant of modernity, or is it still a significant component of black postmodernity? These questions should also be read through the context of the epigraph; what Du Bois wrote in 1953 was true in 1903 and remains true today. Therefore, if the parameters of the color line have remained fairly stable, what about our strategies to deal with these divisions, do they remain unchanged as well? Given that 2003marked the centennial anniversary of the publication of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, the same questions I pose have been asked and answered in various ways in both academic and popular books, conference panels, and commemorative ceremonies that explore the text’s millennial significance. Du Bois has even found a home in the annals of hip-hop culture, the 2004 release of Double Consciousness by Ghanian-born, yet U.S.-university-educated rapper Blitz is one such example. The cover art on the compact disc features a slave woman spinning turntables in the middle of a cotton field while her fellow/sister workers pick cotton in the background. This image suggests a link between slavery’s past and the future while it begs the question: How far have we come as a people? Written in 1903,The Souls of Black Folk has been extolled as the definitive text on black modernity. Not only does Souls articulate the psychological ramifications of racist discrimination on the black psyche, it also expresses Du Bois’s aspirations for the turn of that century—that newly freed African Americans would one day rise above the stigma of blackness and be accorded the privileges of U.S. citizenship. Using the metaphor of a cathartic journey through America’s racist terrain, Du Bois conceived of the development of a new consciousness that would change the “child of Emancipation” into the “youth with dawning selfconsciousness , self-realization, self-respect” (The Souls of Black Folk 14). Souls was bicultural in its structure and in Du Bois’s perception of audience. Structurally, each chapter is headed by an epigraph by a white poet and an excerpt of a “sorrow song,” or rather...