Du Bois on Double Consciousness and the Veil Flashcards
How does Du Bois describe Black individuals at the heart of his aesthetic and political theory?
Du Bois characterises Black individuals as “a sort of seventh son,” cursed to live “behind the veil” of racial prejudice.
What philosophical tradition influences Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness?
Having studied in Berlin during a Hegelian revival, one can discern a tradition of Hegelian dialectics across Du Bois’ canon, particularly the “master-slave” dynamic.
Why is Souls considered a precursor to modernism?
His emphasis on a fractured psyche made Souls a harbinger of the modernist movement that would begin to flower a decade later in Europe and in America.
How does the structure of Souls reflect the theme of twoness?
Each chapter is pointedly “bicultural”, prefaced by both an epigraph from a white poet and a bar of what Du Bois names “The Sorrow Songs.”
How does Du Bois transpose Hegel’s theory into his own?
Du Bois transposes this concept to describe the social predicament of the African American experience of “two-ness”-a self shaped both by internal conflict and by external perceptions from a society defined by white supremacy.
What is Du Bois’s famous quote on “two-ness” from Souls?
“One ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts…two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
What are the two overlapping registers of double consciousness?
First, as a psychological condition of being, echoing William James’s notion of a ‘second personality’ and Alfred Binet’s ‘bipartition’ of consciousness; and second, as a social and epistemic condition produced through race.
What genres does Du Bois fuse in Souls and to what end?
Du Bois fuses autobiography, history, and sociology to provide a notion of the recurring theme of ‘doubleness’ and what it means to be a “coworker in the kingdom of culture.”
How does Du Bois use music in relation to double consciousness?
Music is introduced as a sensory register; double consciousness is not only thematised but enacted through aesthetic structure.
What formal techniques does Du Bois use to stage racialised experience?
Du Bois’s use of silence, repetition, and lyric epigraphs functions as an aesthetic strategy for staging racialised experience.
What is “second sight” in the context of the veil?
This veil enforces what Du Bois calls a ‘second sight’– the unsettling experience of ‘being in the world but not of it.’
How does Du Bois describe this moment of racial self-knowledge?
Du Bois narrates the tragedy of coming to racial self-knowledge as a sensory-epistemological opening.
MARRIAGE..
What role does lyricism play in Du Bois’s writing here?
Lyricism is critical to Du Bois’s marriage of phenomenological and political subjectivities as he collapses the distinction between narrating and narrated subjects.
What tension does Du Bois aim to reflect in this story?
His authorial intention here is to reflect the tension inherent in everyday moments which belong simultaneously to individual and collective experiences.
How does Du Bois fuse literary and musical traditions in Chapter I?
Du Bois fuses elegiac Symbolist lyricism with the anguished resilience of Black spirituals.
What are the epigraphs in Chapter I of Souls?
The chapter opens with a lyric from Arthur Symons (“O water, voice of my heart…”) and a bar from the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
What broader structural effect does this chapter’s pairing initiate?
This pairing initiates a structural call-and-response between two worlds — white poetic abstraction and Black musical testimony — performed throughout the entire book.
What is “second sight” according to Du Bois?
This veil enforces what he calls a “second sight”—the unsettling experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a hostile society.
How does Du Bois depict double consciousness as both burden and insight?
This condition is both a burden and a kind of skill—a tragic gift that offers insight into the contradictions of modernity.
What are “The Sorrow Songs” and what do they represent?
Slave spirituals Du Bois describes as “the only American music, which welled up from black souls in the dark past.”
How does Du Bois refuse literary hierarchy?
These lyrical openings signal a literary commitment to both Anglo-European and African American traditions, refusing any hierarchy between them.
How does Du Bois describe the racial production of subjectivity?
Du Bois describes the racial production of subjectivity.
Why does Du Bois ask, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
To grasp the relevance of The Veil to Du Bois’s political theory, it is necessary to consider the conceptual framework he employs to convey the dual identity African Americans are forced to adopt in a racially divided society.
What metaphor does Du Bois use for the racial barrier between Black and white Americans?
Intrinsic to this question is a metaphor for the racial barrier between Black and white Americans; Black people operate ‘behind the veil,’ which distorts their view of themselves and others’ view of them.
