W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man

Contemporary critics have read The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a masculinist text that, in Hazel Carby's words, reveals the “highly gendered structures of intellectual and political thought and feeling” in Du Bois' work. However, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic R ace Man” argues that Du Bois's concern with black male leadership style began before the writing of Souls and continues well after it, in his less well-known writing. While still a young scholar, Du Bois wrote about an African American “feminine man” who, in joining with the more “masculine” Teutonic would produce a common human/American civilization by a racial division of labor. In his 1928 novel, Dark Princess, this “feminine man” finds his story as a dandified Du Bois-like member of the Talented-Tenth charged with fomenting a revolution against a world-wide color line. With this activist-dandy, whose nattily-clad body signifies on, rather than blindly accepts, masculinist tropes, Du Bois realizes a long-standing wish for racial leadership by what he calls “men who were--different.”