On Double Consciousness

What are the historical origins of the Du Boisian notion of “double consciousness”? What explains the enduring existential resonance of the notion in various literatures on the black diaspora, particularly in what Paul Gilroy has rendered poignant as the Black Atlantic? There are unmistakable echoes of the notion of double consciousness in the wider vocabulary of postmodern and postcolonial criticism, particularly in concepts such as “ambivalence” or, increasingly, the religious and cultural identity of the “modern Muslim.” What relations might we, today, draw across these existential and historical dispersals in the senses of the Afro modern? With no aspirations to the exhaustive, I intend to accomplish the following through these and similar questions: a) explore the double roots of double consciousness in the histories of capitalist racial slavery and colonial modernity; b) examine the motives for current practices of characterizing identities by the psychological and cultural conditions of double consciousness; and c) ask in what ways the identities so characterized may or may not be compatible with key features of sociality and transnational conviviality that could be marked as democratically progressive and universal.

Reasons of Empire

In 2001, the United Nation’s Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance declared: “Colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and . . . Africans and peoples of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences.” The contexts of the arguments in the declaration can be found in studies of modern imperial expansions. For example, Niall Ferguson has noted the fact that at the beginning of 1625, the British Isles was an economically unremarkable, politically fractious, and strategically second -class entity, but in a mere two centuries transformed itself into Great Britain—the “largest empire the world had ever seen.”¹ The transition from a small island to an imperial power was marked by colonial expansion: by the mid-twentieth century, the British Empire consisted of forty-three colonies on five continents. The clues to the reasons of this development are obvious: the British relieved the Spaniards of colonial territories, “copied the Dutch, beat . . . the French and plundered the Indians.” But it is also true that “commerce and conquest by themselves would not have sufficed to achieve” the phenomenal imperial expansion. “No matter what the strengths of British financial and naval power,” Ferguson argues, “there had also to be colonization” (Ferguson 51–52, emphasis added). Just as empire was instrumental in the definition to the colonial identity of British modernity, so was, according to the Durban conference, the experience of colonial racism. The double consciousness of the (post)colonially modern is historically integral to the emergence of modern racialism/ racism. If double consciousness is a phenomenon of racial ambivalence, it has to be seen as rooted in imperial capitalist, racist, and ethnocentric experiences and abstracted ideas of Englishness (or Spanishness, Frenchness, Germanness, etc.).

From the perspective of one colonized at the outposts of the empire, in 1789 an Indian observer comments about the colonizers’ habit of “coming for a number of years,” then returning home with as “much money . . . as they can, and carrying it in immense sums to the kingdom of England” (G. H. Khan qtd. in Ferguson 52). In one decade alone, as much as nineteen million British pounds was transferred from India to Britain by that method. But Ferguson, for one, believes that British colonialists did not merely repatriate wealth from India; the colonial enterprise necessitated two other kinds of political and economic underdevelopments that led to greater hardships for the Indian. Because the colonialist taxed the natives in order to raise and maintain a colonial army, it was also the Indians who funded the conquest of their own country. It is said that the tax burdens were greater than the cost of repatriated money, since “the spiraling cost of the Indian Army was the one item of imperial expenditure the British taxpayer never had to pay” (Ferguson 42, 47–48).

There was in fact a connection between capital flight, taxation, and impoverishment of the native. British colonialism...