Abstract
In this chapter, Schulenberg discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’s second novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928). Throughout his long career, one of the primary concerns of this African American scholar, activist, and artist was to politicize the aesthetic or to advocate the aesthetic as political practice. However, it is argued that Dark Princess is governed by a too rigid private-public separation, and that the latter prevents the author from realizing the idea of an innovative and progressive leftist politics in his novel. This also means that the novel does not fully explore the development from finding to making and that its author employs a rather traditional understanding of aesthetic form. In his novel, Du Bois introduces the idea of a leftist cosmopolitanism as an effective means of confronting the crisis of black leftist politics, but his text does not answer a question that is of the utmost importance: Where is the poets’ place in this leftist cosmopolitanism, transnational radical politics, or Afro-Asian international?
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of Rorty’s private-public distinction, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 204–210; Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 303–321; Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Liberal Utopia,” The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 258–292; Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), 124–138; Simon Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism—Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 19–40; Chantal Mouffe, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–12; and Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 173–179.
- 2.
For a reading of Foucault’s notion of ethics, see Arnold Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, second edition, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 115–140; Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); John Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments. Volume III, ed. Barry Smart (London: Routledge, 1994), 190–207; Wilhelm Schmid, Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst: Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegründung der Ethik bei Foucault (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); and Wolfgang Kersting and Claus Langbehn, ed., Kritik der Lebenskunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). Particularly illuminating in this context is the chapter “Foucault’s ‘ethics of the self’” in Robert Doran, The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 35–59. I have discussed the Foucauldian notion of self-creation in “‘Soucie-toi de toi-même’: Michel Foucault and Etho-Poetics,” Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 169–173.
- 3.
It is crucial to appreciate the status of my suggestions. I shall not offer a critique of the idea that art should function as propaganda and that it is legitimate to instrumentalize the aesthetic. This has been done numerous times, and most of those critiques are convincing. To many literary scholars, the notion of art as propaganda, or the idea of didactic art, is an abhorrence. I hope to offer a new perspective by calling attention to the question of how to interpret and productively use the difference between the theorist and activist Du Bois on the one hand and the political novelist on the other.
- 4.
In this context, see the chapter “Nigger Heaven” in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997 [1979]), 156–197.
- 5.
In this context, see John Dewey, Art as Experience; and Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, second edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In addition, see Winfried Fluck, “John Deweys Ästhetik und die Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart,” Philosophie der Demokratie: Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys, ed. Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 160–193; Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987); and Thomas M. Alexander, “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman, 1–22.
- 6.
For an understanding of the phenomenon of dandyism, the following books are particularly suggestive: Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, ed., Artist-Rebel-Dandy: Men of Fashion (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2013); Susan Fillin-Yeh, ed., Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York UP, 2001); Rhonda Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988); and Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960).
- 7.
In this context, see the chapter “Black Radicalism and the Politics of Form” in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), 225–240. It is crucial to see that my analysis of the politics of aesthetic form in Dark Princess should be seen in connection with my discussion of Adorno’s aesthetics and concept of form in Chap. 4.
- 8.
For a discussion of Du Bois’s Marxism, see Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976), 163–169; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, second edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 185–240; and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 496–553. For Du Bois’s understanding of communism, see the first part of The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 3–35.
- 9.
In this context, see Bill V. Mullen, “Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International,” positions 11:1 (2003): 217–239. In addition, see Robert Gregg and Madhavi Kale, “The Negro and the Dark Princess: Two Legacies of the Universal Races Congress,” Radical History Review 92 (Spring 2005): 133–152; and Amor Kohli, “But that’s just mad! Reading the Utopian Impulse in Dark Princess and Black Empire,” African Identities 7:2 (May 2009): 161–175.
- 10.
Homi Bhabha expands on Du Bois’s notion of solidarity in Dark Princess as follows: “Solidarity, Du Bois seems to be arguing, is never a once-and-for-all experience based on a perception of the ‘likeness’ or similarity of historic conditions. Solidarity must always be open to what is ‘unlikely’—contingent, different and dissimilar—within what appear to be parallel lives and analogical experiences. […] Solidarities need the constant work of crafting a collaborative community while vigilantly guarding against the desire to create ghettoes of ‘exceptionalist interest’” (2010: xxviii).
- 11.
For a critique of Du Bois’s “inability to immerse himself fully in the rich cultural currents of black everyday life” and of his “inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life,” see West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” 56, 57.
- 12.
In Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), the dream of a unity of black and white labor plays a central role: “‘Durned if I don’t think these white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together,’ she declared. / ‘I think so, too,’ Zora agreed” (2008: 306).
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). “This Morning I Read as Angels Read”: Self-Creation, Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Black Politics in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_5
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