Gender Disgussed

by Beauty Bragg, Georgia College and State University, USA

1     Editors Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum have assembled a collection of remarkable essays which enact a "politics of juxtaposition" defined as "a reading practice that deals with the unspoken, disrupted, or unfinished synergies that emerge among and between parts as often as with manifest content and stated import of the text" (8). This is a concept which they derive from Du Bois's own positioning of the question of gender "next to the color line." They argue that, in framing the two questions as adjacent, Du Bois at once connects them and insists on their discreteness. From this fluid image the authors derive a critical methodology that also informs their organization of the essays. The essays presented herein are clustered by categories of analysis that foster complex perspectives on the man and his work.

2     The first three chapters, Vilashini Cooppan's "Move on Down the Line: Domestic Science, Transnational Politics, and Gendered Allegory in Du Bois," Joy James's "Profeminism and Gender Elites: W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett" and Alys Eve Weinbaum's "Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism," are unified by their use of Du Bois's fiction as a touchstone for examining his political vision. Paying particular attention to the allegorical representations of women in The Souls of Black Folk, Dark Princess and Darkwater, Cooppan argues that Du Bois's interstitial notions of race, nation, theory and politics are all enabled by his fixed notions of gender which provide the ground against which the limitations of any fixed notion of these categories are exposed. That is, the women who people his texts are "persons whose conditions of existence constitute a critique of those systems" which formulate the definitions of racial and national belonging he seeks to explode (53).

3     Taking a rather harder line than Cooppan, James's reprinted essay is concerned with reading his fictionalized depictions of black women against contemporaneous figures like Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells who do not appear in his works either as actual figures or even as the bases for depictions that move beyond "the icon of black female martyr or noble sufferer" (75). The absence of any direct mention of these or several other politically active women represents a contradictory feminist practice. Ultimately, according to James, these erasures have the effect of normalizing the African-American male as the architects of black liberation, and "diminish[es] his gender progressivism" (70).

4     Finally, Weinbaum's chapter undertakes to reveal a "heretofore unacknowledged rhetorical detail" of Du Bois's work — the degree to which racial propaganda is predicated on interracial romance in his work. Through extended examinations of Darkwater and Dark Princess, Weinbaum demonstrates how Du Bois uses the form and the theme of romance "as a form of propaganda that conjures a black internationalist response to both U.S. racism and Euro-American Imperialism" and how this strategy inadvertently reproduces a kind of racial essentialism and heteronormativity at both national and international levels (101). The value of Du Bois's use of the trope of romance, despite the limitations she identifies, is that his fictional representations allow him to represent the relationship between democracy and the social choices (including interracial marriage) available to citizens, which his non-fiction writing could only hint at.

5     While the next three chapters also engage Du Bois's fiction to a large extent, they are keyed to Du Bois's understanding of history. In "Late Romance" Brent Hayes Edwards traces "The World of Color" from its initial essay form to the novel form that constitutes the last installment of the Black Flame trilogy. He argues that a certain formal dialecticism — expressed in Du Bois' habit of "afterthought" — structures individual works and may be identified in his complete body of works. This dialecticism, according to Hayes, leads Du Bois to privilege the form of the romance in his later works because its "categorical instability" offers a mode of communication well suited to the task of "track[ing] the many-sided connection between capitalism and the modalities of race" (134).