Untitled

HABITATIONS
OF THE
VEIL
SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
—————
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors
HABITATIONS
OF THE
VEIL
Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being
in African American Literature
REBECKA RUTLEDGE FISHER

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge.

Habitations of the veil : metaphor and the poetics of black being in African
American literature / Rebecka Rutledge Fisher.
pages cm. — (SUNY series, Philosophy and race)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4931-9 (alk. paper)
1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism.
2. Metaphor in literature. I. Title.
PS153.N5F536 2013
810.9'896073—dc23 2013002463
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book with much love to my husband, Edwin B. Fisher,
and my mother, Billie Rutledge Killens.
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Poetics of Being Black 1
I
INHABITING THE VEIL: ON BLACK BEING
1 Being and Metaphor 15

A Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s
“Characteristics of Negro Expression” 23
2 African American Philosophy and the Poetics of Black Being 53

Crafting a Poetics of Black Being: Du Bois’s
Philosophical Example 74
Whither Blackness? Du Bois, Black Culture, and the
Contemporaneity of Black Being 76
II
THE POETICS OF BLACK BEING
BEFORE AND AFTER DU BOIS
3 Being and Becoming: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African 89
The Rhetoric of the Image: Being and Becoming in
Equiano’s Use of Portraiture 97
Hope in Narrative: Equiano’s Biblical Turn 115
An Actuated Being 140
viii Contents
4 Remnants of Memory: Metaphor and Being in

Frances E. W. Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life 143
The Evolution of Harper’s Vernacular Poetry 148
Between Metaphor and Black Being: Aunt Chloe’s
Structure of Poetic Memory 156
5 A Technology of Modern Black Being: “The Conservation of

Races” as a Critical Ontology of Race 171
Being in the Occasion of Discourse: “Conservation,”
Metaphor, and the Historical Narrative of Race 179
A Technology of Black Being: “The Conservation of
Races” as the Contested “Mediation by which
We Understand Ourselves” 185
The Interpretation of Black Historicity: Reading
“Conservation” in Context 189
“Conservation” and the Hermeneutics of Race 203
6 Habitations of the Veil: Souls, Figure, Form 217

Incipit and Excipit 220
Poem and Paratext: The African American Spiritual
and the Strivings of Black Being 224
Inspiriting Time: The Spiritual and the Ontology
of the Slave 230
Metaphors of Perceiving, Knowing, and Mourning 232
Metaphors of Journeying and Insight 241
Metaphors of the Temporal and the Atemporal 250
The Fundamental Mythopoetics of Metaphor in
African American Religion 259
The Soul’s Biography: Metaphors of Transition and
Transcendence 268
Navigating the Undulating Waters of Being:
The Spirituals and the Possibilities of Metaphor 278
7 Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground 281

Incipit 281
Mapping Black Ontology and Black Freedom
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” in Context 288
Being Underground 296
8 A Love Called Democracy: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 313

By Way of Conclusion 313
Speaking for the Beloved 318
Contents ix
Love’s Habitation: Blackness, the Uncanny Maternal,

and American Democracy 336
The Repression of the Black Maternal 340
The Irresponsible Dreamer: Reveries of Sexual Love 346
Sacrificing Sexual Desire 355
Black Being’s Moral of Love 359
Notes 361
Bibliography 397
Index 407
Acknowledgments
I want first to thank my family for their continuous love and support.
My husband, Edwin B. Fisher, has supported me unfailingly throughout
the long durée of this project. I lovingly dedicate this book to him and to
my mother, Billie Rutledge Killens, who has always been my biggest fan
and most stalwart believer. Mommy, I love you and could not have done
this without you. My father, Vince Rutledge, Sr., has long been a man of
no-nonsense faith. I thank him for his calming presence and unstinting
strength. My late grandmother, Mrs. Alice W. Smith, bequeathed me her
love of books and words. She is still with me every day. My godparents,
Deloris and William Bell, provided me the warmth and comfort of a home
away from home during my graduate school days, and saw me through
the first iteration of this project. Bill, the book is done! Friends and col-
leagues have provided support, wisdom, and cheer all along the way: James
Coleman, María deGuzman, Gerald Early, Trudier Harris, Errol Hender-
son, Mae Henderson, Donald H. Matthews, Itabari Njeri, John McGowan,
Linda Wagner-Martin, and Rafia Zafar. For reading parts of this project at
various stages, and/or listening to presentations drawn from it and provid-
ing me invaluable feedback, I thank the following colleagues, who are also
dear friends: Minrose Gwin, Ruth Salvaggio, Nahum Chandler, Hortense
Spillers, Nicole Waligora-Davis, Hilary Holladay, and John Charles. The
editors of SUNY’s Philosophy and Race series, Robert Bernasconi and T.
Denean Sharpley-Whiting, championed my project and believed in it from
the start. Andrew Kenyon of SUNY Press provided a sage ear and lasting
enthusiasm. An early draft of this book was completed with the support
of the Spray-Randleigh Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, and a summer residential fellowship at the Virginia Founda-
tion for the Humanities.

xi
xii Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in ESQ: A Journal of the American

Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 55–74. A shorter version of chapter 7 appeared in
Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 11.2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 14–42.
Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience, will reveal
the strange meaning of being black
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Introduction
The Poetics of Being Black
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), from which the epigraph to this introduction is
drawn, is but one instance of Du Bois’s particular brand of historical narration
and metaphorical innovation, wherein he proclaims unhesitatingly, in a voice
that should evoke an unsettling ring of truth as we survey our own contemporary
political landscape, that “the problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of
the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and
Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Souls 372). From the perspective
of the present study, it is not simply Du Bois’s prescient political outlook that
draws us near to him, and him close to us. Rather, Du Bois’s book, radical for
its time and labeled “dangerous” by a number of Southern reviewers because,
one Southern writer claimed, it would incite black men to “rape” white women,
continues to be so very important to the present generation of readers because
from our moment in history, we can see that Du Bois not only revolutionized
the way racialized being (or, as Du Bois termed it, “being black”) was, and
continues to be, discussed in this country; he also brought to bear upon his
analysis of race exceptional, and perhaps unsurpassed, philosophical metaphors
of “being black,” or, what I will refer to as “black being,” that were alternately
(and at times simultaneously) spiritual, secular, historical, economic, feminist,
and, importantly, humanistic in nature.
Indeed, the open-endedness of Du Bois’s ontological and epistemological
metaphors—their fluid capacity to transgress categories of discursive signification
(such as the category of race) and thus their ability to challenge social and
theoretical commonplaces and generate alternative social and political meanings—
marks them as an exemplary mode of conceptual expression, and allows me to
place Du Bois at the core of my analysis of the philosophical possibilities of
metaphor and its relation to concepts of black being in the African American
literary tradition. The metaphorical processes at work in Du Bois’s seminal
text continue to elucidate the philosophical trajectory of his discourse on black
being, and thus they provide a firm foundation for the critical and ontological
inquiry I undertake in this book.
1
2 Habitations of the Veil
In this study, I draw upon Du Bois’s conceptual uses of metaphor in

Souls as a frame through which to examine how African American writers
throughout the history of the tradition have long put into practice what the
philosopher Paul Ricoeur would later describe as language’s—and specifically
metaphor’s—knowledge of its relation to being. For example, when Ricoeur’s
frequent interlocutor on the question of being, the phenomenologist Mar-
tin Heidegger, writes that “language is the house of Being,” we are clearly
reminded of Du Bois’s desire that readers of Souls should, as he writes,
patiently “study my words with me” as they enter into the language of his
text, which describes, in “vague uncertain outline the spiritual world in
which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive” (359). If language
is the house of being, then being is likewise housed in the world of text
and exemplified in narrative. For Du Bois, the worlds “within and without
the Veil” collide in text and produce the existential and plural world of
African American souls, which he portrays for the reader in fourteen essays
that he calls “thoughts.”
It seems natural that Du Bois’s “thought” should assume a central role
when one determines to examine the relation of metaphor and being in the
African American literary tradition. Souls contains at least three of the major
philosophical metaphors that, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies, have persisted in African American philosophical, social, and political
thought to the extent that they have taken on psychosocial descriptive qualities
as they express black being: the veil, the color-line, and double consciousness. In
its ultimate significance as a multidisciplinary work of considerable magnitude,
Souls is itself regularly evoked as a trope of sorts, one that often serves as the
incipit of African American literary studies as well as black political theory, as
the continuing inauguration of urban and rural sociological study in America,
and as a modern philosophy of being that insists upon the values of ethical social
action. From the vantage point of The Souls of Black Folk, this study assumes
a diachronic perspective. From Souls, I look back to the incipient moments
of the literature in the eighteenth century, and forward to the beginnings of
the postmodern era, drawing upon Du Bois’s tropological thought as a critical
lens through which to survey the intersections of philosophical metaphor and
articulations of being that appear in a select number of canonical texts. As I
do so, I describe a poetics that I see emerging from these intersections. I have
called this poetics a “poetics of black being.”
The metaphors that found this poetics of black being have consistently
appeared in African American texts across a long span of time, nascent
not simply in the inaugural moments of the literature itself, but also in the
Introduction 3
historical moments that occasion the modern era: the revolutions (French,
American, and Haitian) that collectively signal the inception of modernity at
the end of the eighteenth century. The opposite limit of the period I examine
is marked by the conclusion of World War II, the rise of the modern Civil
Rights movement, and the early glimmers of African decolonization, which
together augur the onset of the postmodern era in the mid-twentieth century
and the provisional end (in some schools of thought) of the modern era,
though the use of such metaphors of black being persist in various guises—
they inhabit a variety of veils—up to the present time.
While scholars have long extolled the virtues of metaphorical expression
in African American texts, heretofore there has been no overarching study
that seeks to trace the continuum of epistemological and ontological thought
alive in these metaphors. I survey the poetics of such metaphors in a number
of familiar works that appear throughout the modern period: Olaudah
Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789); Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s
Sketches of Southern Life (1872); W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of
Races” (1897), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Richard Wright’s The
Man Who Lived Underground (1944); and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
(1952). Though I can lay no claim to a comprehensive study that presents
an exhaustive overview of all the texts that constitute the African American
literary tradition, I have undertaken a series of close readings of texts that
offer exemplary conceptual metaphors of being. The readings I provide here
may be only incisions in an immense corpus of works, yet they advance a
hermeneutic suggested by the metaphorics of major African American texts.
My hope, then, is that my analysis suggests a theory of metaphor alive in
these works, a theory that will be of use in interpreting other texts concerned
with the poetics of black being.
Part I of the study, comprising the Introduction and chapters 1 and
2, provides the theoretical framework for this study and discusses the
theories of metaphor and being that inform my project. The Introduction
offers an overview of the study. It succinctly summarizes each chapter,
includes a discussion of the concept of being and my use of the concept
in this work, and centers W. E. B. Du Bois’s philosophical metaphorics
as the critical framework for the book. The chapters of Part I deepen our
understanding of the ways in which philosophical metaphors have taken
shape in African American literary thought by providing a genealogy of
this tradition’s epistemological and ontological conceptualizations, from
the early written and oral literature, to the modern discursive stylings of
Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston (specifically viewing “Characteristics of

Negro Expression” as a contribution to the philosophy of ordinary language),
to the convoluted textures of the black postmodern novel, as practiced, for
instance, by Ralph Ellison. Chronicling the evolution of thought on black
philosophical metaphor as it critiques the exclusion of this discourse from
any number of treatises on the subject, these chapters provide a genealogy
of black conceptual metaphors in oral and written forms, underscores calls
for ethical and moral activism that are usually found at the heart of these
constructions, and encourages us to look more closely at the relation between
race, metaphor, and being.
Part II, comprising chapters 3 through 8, presents close analytic
readings of philosophical metaphors of being that appear throughout the
tradition, both before and after Du Bois’s signal use of ontological and
epistemological metaphor at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter
studies of Part II serve to exemplify and elucidate the theory that undergirds
my overall argument, as it is presented in Part I. In chapter 3, “A Poetics of
Becoming,” the first chapter of literary analysis, I begin with Equiano, since
he stands at the wellspring of the African American literary tradition. In
his Narrative, Equiano adumbrates a finely wrought expression of his own
sense of being in such a way that makes clear its relation to the formation
of modern nation-states as well as the discourses of the Christian Church
that were so important to him. Equiano’s eighteenth-century autobiography
exemplifies his era’s tensions between notions of being based in the sacred
(the dominance of the church as the major organizing force of Western
society) and those anchored in the secular (the rise of the nation-state as
the church fell into decline). It is thus crucial to understanding conceptual
metaphors of black being in the incipient moments of modernity.
In chapter 4, I discuss how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper extends
Equiano’s eighteenth-century metaphorics of the sacred and the secular into
the Reconstruction era of the late nineteenth century, testing its limits by
adding to it the concerns of the feminine. In addition to voicing the condi-
tions of black female existence, Harper’s onto-theological metaphorics prize
a certain mysticism of being that is subtended—as is Equiano’s—by radical
notions of freedom and liberty, and in this way she continues an African
American literary tradition grounded in metaphorics of national belonging
and spiritual existence that is so remarkable in the work of Equiano, Phillis
Wheatley, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass, among
others. This is so even as her use of religious metaphor evolves toward
the quasi-secular expression of black being that would emerge in the new
century with Du Bois’s metaphors of the veil, the color-line, and double
consciousness.
Introduction 5
Du Bois, Wright, and Ellison, three major thinkers of the first half
of the twentieth century, serve as the foci of chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. Each
capitalizes upon the spiritual metaphors of the black vernacular and critical
traditions founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even as they
unveil modern metaphors of black being that tend toward the secular. Du
Bois, as I have said, plays a central role in how the function of ontologi-
cal and epistemological metaphor in African American thought would be
used from his time onward. Certainly if one draws upon the definition
of the “color-line” given by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, one sees
that it functions as a concept-metaphor of both social realities and histori-
cal/political/economic problematics. However, Du Bois’s definition of this
conceptual trope also makes clear that the concept of the color-line comes
into existence practically as a result of the rise of modern nation-states that
took shape during the revolutionary time of Equiano. It tells us that double
consciousness and what Du Bois calls “the shadow of the veil” result, in
good measure, from the widely varied forces that converge around the for-
mation of the modern nation-state, a point I expound in chapter 2. Seeing
Du Bois’s concept-metaphors in this light holds significant implications for
our reading of related ontological metaphors of belonging, duality, and veil-
ing/revealing that we see at work in the writings of Equiano and Harper,
among other early figures who emerged during the era of nation formation.
The prescience of Du Bois’s concept-metaphors in Souls is made pos-
sible, I suggest in chapter 5, by his metaphorization of the very notion of
race itself in his 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races.” Du Bois explicitly
deconstructs the idea of race by, essentially, metaphorizing it, and in so doing
he exposes its anti-humanist import, the aspects of raciology that undercut
the ideals of the Enlightenment (including the twin ideals of liberalism and
democracy), as well as the critical ontology conveyed by the word “race”
itself. When Du Bois calls “race” “the vastest and most ingenious invention
for human progress,”1 he reaches back to the time of Equiano and Harper,
whose metaphorics and social activism contribute to a deconstructionist
theory of race that had been at work in African American thought as early
as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking back to and drawing
upon this literary and activist history, Du Bois uses “Conservation” to lay
the groundwork for his concept-metaphors of the veil, the color-line, and
double consciousness in Souls, which serve as the analytic foci of chapter 6.
Though they both silently and openly reject it as a model, the concep-
tual metaphorics of Souls lights the path followed by Wright and Ellison.
Each writer proffers signal modernist metaphorical constructions that are
as much concerned with the poetics of being as those of Du Bois. Such
constructions reflect the challenges that, for Wright and Ellison, Sigmund
Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of consciousness posed to conventional West-

ern philosophies of being. Through my analyses of selected works by these
writers, I identify and critique the shortcomings of psychoanalytic theories
of consciousness when applied to concepts and expressions of black being.
Each of the writers I treat—from Equiano to Ellison—was deeply
concerned with creating what Richard Wright would call, in the conclusion
to his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, a vital “sense”—that is, a meaning,
an understanding—of the “inexpressibly human” nature of black being. By
way of their ontological metaphors, they demonstrated, as did Wright him-
self, their commitment to building “a bridge of words between [themselves]
and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that
it seemed unreal” (Black Boy 384). At the level of their most conceptual
metaphorical operations, these authors propose alternative, even revolution-
ary ways of knowing and being in the world, an epistemology of modern
black being that is, as Toni Morrison states regarding African-descended
subjectivity, “prized but not privileged” (“Home” 12).
This study differs from those important and necessary projects that
undertake an exploration and explication of what has been called a politics
or even a poetics of “black identity.” For what I am after in this book is
an inquiry into a philosophical concept—being—as it is manifested in the
literary expression of a people deemed—through self-determinative modes
as well as modes externally and overly determinative—“black.” Indeed, iden-
tity forms its own concept as an object of philosophical inquiry. While I
historicize and analyze the ways in which what I call metaphors of black
being accord with modern discourses on freedom and subjectivity, I do not
analyze a politics of racial identity that would accompany social struggles for
black liberation or resistance. Even as it contextualizes and conceptualizes a
“poetics of black being” within such crucial historical contexts as abolition-
ism, black nationalism, and the modern Civil Rights movement, my study
distinguishes between ideologies of black “identity” that may be aligned with
what has come to be called “identity politics,” and concepts of “being” that
engage the longstanding philosophical debate over the nature of human
subjectivity and consciousness. While “identity” may be defined, for the
purposes of my study, in terms of one’s relation to society, government, and
geopolitical spaces,2 I use the term “being” as it relates to concepts of self-
consciousness, that is, who one is in relation to oneself within the contexts
of these social structures. Thus how one expresses oneself metaphorically in
light of evolving intellect, imagination, feeling or emotion, and in relation to
one’s own body and the community of beings one inhabits, is of paramount
Introduction 7
importance in this study. Even as I suggest the importance of the semantic

distinction between identity and being, the concepts can never be cleanly
separated, for their margins continually push one against the other, and
regularly overlap, at times making them indistinguishable. Nevertheless, in
addressing more pertinently the second of these concepts, being, this study
anatomizes the ways in which African American writers, across nearly 200
years of writing, have devised philosophical metaphors to give expression
to their sense of black being, their conception of an ontology. It situates
them firmly within a critical (and, importantly, revisionist) African American
humanistic tradition that pushes at the confines of white Western concepts
of humanitas. Through the relation of metaphor and being, these writers
not only reflect critically upon the world about them, but also insist upon
decisive and ethical humanistic action in response to that world.
A Question of Black Being
At this point, it would be good to take a moment to expand further upon

and contextualize the concept of “being” and its relationship to metaphor
before going on to a more pointed discussion of metaphor theory and
expressions of black being in the next two chapters. Martin Heidegger,
whose philosophical writings Richard Wright began studying in earnest
in the 1940s3 (and this in spite of Heidegger’s racism, a social ill that
likewise afflicted his philosophical predecessors Immanuel Kant and Georg
W. F. Hegel), was the twentieth century’s foremost Western philosopher of
the concept. In Being and Time (1929), Heidegger presents “Being-in-the-
world” as a quasi-spiritual concept that is central to understanding human
existence (83), for it signifies not only being in relation to other worldly
entities (entities that may be living or inanimate, but that are not human),
but, more pointedly, it indicates the quality of concern that is constitutive
of human being, which he calls “Dasein.”
Dasein is a term that may be translated, in the vernacular, as “existence,”
but it is usually and best left untranslated. Heidegger sees Dasein, which
is a combination of two German words, “Da,” meaning “there,” and “sein,”
meaning “being,” not as equivalent to a holistic self, but as a subject
constituted temporally and existing in space without being limited to any
specific time or place. For Heidegger, Dasein is characterized not only by
its historicity, but also by its care and concern, which are crucial ways of
Being-in-the-world:
Dasein’s facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always

dispersed [zerstreut] itself or even split itself up into definite ways
of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following
examples: having to do with something, producing something,
attending to something and looking after it, making use of
something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking,
accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing,
determining. . . . All these ways of Being-in have concern as
their kind of Being. . . . Leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing,
taking a rest—these too are ways of concern; but these are all
deficient modes, in which the possibilities of concern are kept
to a “bare minimum.” (83, italics in original)
In short, a crucial characteristic of Dasein is its “care,” or “concern,” which

Heidegger uses as an “ontological term for existentiale” (sic 83). Care, he
writes, “is always concern and solicitude if only privately” (238–39). Each of
the writers I discuss in this study, from the eighteenth century through the
twentieth, employs ontological metaphors to project a sense of being that
is not simply concerned with what Heidegger calls “private” care, but care,
and more importantly caring action, in the public sphere. Specifically, each
calls for concerted humanistic action in response to the horrific situations
of chattel slavery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and
in battle against Jim Crow discrimination, racial and economic injustice,
and segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the
central aspect of Dasein as Heidegger conceives it certainly lies in its modes
of caring action or doing, each author examined in this study places vital
importance upon humanistic action that will ameliorate or eradicate social
ills that emerge from racist thought and practices, an emphasis that is lacking
in most European and American treatises on being. ( Jean-Paul Sartre is,
of course, a notable exception in this regard, though his own work on the
topic has not escaped the criticism of Frantz Fanon, for instance.4) While I
underscore throughout this study that a sense of noetic movement (from one
pole of thought to another) provides for metaphor and its “possibilities,” a
Heideggerian notion that correlates well with Ralph Ellison’s more pointed
concept of and insistence upon human possibilities (I consider this point in
chapter 8 of this work), I also emphasize that such movement is specifically
conceived in response to the harsh realities of Western racial injustice. In
all of this, one notes the ways in which Wright’s and Ellison’s metaphors
silently comment upon and quite obviously evolve from Du Bois’s metaphors
of the veil, the color-line, and double consciousness. Yet Du Bois’s own
Introduction 9
metaphors of being do not emerge sui generis, as I argue above. Indeed,

Du Bois profits from even as he modernizes and partially secularizes the
anagogic metaphorics of Equiano and Harper, who then serve as his literary
forebears.
Thus I encourage a consideration of the writings of these authors (and
of others who contribute metaphors of being to the tradition of African
American literature and who thus help establish this poetics of black being)
as conceptual, complex, and nuanced statements of philosophical thought
demanding the very sort of close reading and critical analysis that we have
become accustomed to giving works such as Dante’s Inferno, Montaigne’s
Essais, Franklin’s Autobiography, and Sartre’s Nausée (to mention four
examples that represent the genres under examination in this study). Care
is, for instance, a central theme critically and polemically at play in Wright’s
The Man Who Lived Underground, a theme that is not always credited in
the literature on this work, but to which I turn my attention in chapter 7.
Ellison casts care as “love,” and features within his expansive metaphorics
an insistence upon a moral democratic practice. Chapter 8, entitled “A Love
Called Democracy,” expounds this point.
Throughout this study, I will use terms such as “being,” “consciousness,”
“subjectivity,” and “existence” rather than the less familiar “Dasein,” though I
hope my meaning will nonetheless be clear. I will also refrain from capitalizing
the term “Being” in my own usage, though, when needed, I will reproduce
it as it is used by Heidegger and others. I will use instead the lowercase
“being” to indicate at once an embrace of ideas of existence, consciousness,
care, humanistic action and concern, and a refusal of metaphysical concepts
of absolute presence or determinate selfhood. In Being and Time, Heidegger
used Dasein as a rejection of Aristotelian categories of being (including the
notion of “essence,” which Heidegger sought to counter), and universalist
“Being” or absolutist notions of “Being” that came about in the work of
both Kant and Hegel. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger sought to refute these
absolutist notions. He would do so later in his oeuvre by placing Being
“under erasure”—the sous rature adapted, somewhat differently, by Jacques
Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967)—showing both the unreliability of the
term and its indispensability.
Even so, Heidegger’s later thinking on humanitas does not “think” the
essence of human being in ways adequately radical to deconstructing the
privileging of what might be called white Western being. This I point out
in chapter 4 of this study when I read his concept of a primordial homo
humanus critically against the philosophy of black being exemplified in the
poetry of F. E. W. Harper, and again in chapter 7, when I read Heidegger
critically in light of the thought of Richard Wright. Later in his oeuvre,

in 1947, Heidegger intended to recuperate a sense of universal humanism
once its earlier, degenerated form had been put to rest. Thus he proposed
a renascent humanism that cherished not an absolute sense of being (as
was prized in the Hegelian dialectic), but a pluralistic humanist perspective.
This proposition was articulated in Heidegger’s well-known “Letter on
Humanism.” Written in response to a query from the French philosopher
Jean Beaufret,5 who had posed to Heidegger a number of questions regarding
his approach to phenomenology, among them, significantly, the question of
how to restore meaning to the term “humanism,” Heidegger argues:
Your question not only presupposes a desire to retain the word

“humanism” but also contains an admission that this word has lost
its meaning. It has lost it through the insight that the essence of
humanism is metaphysical, which now means that metaphysics
not only does not pose the question concerning the truth of
Being but also obstructs the question, insofar as metaphysics
persists in the oblivion of Being. But the same thinking that has
led us to this insight into the questionable essence of humanism
has likewise compelled us to think the essence of man more
primordially. With regard to this more essential humanitas of
homo humanus there arises the possibility of restoring to the
word “humanism” a historical sense that is older than its oldest
meaning chronologically reckoned.6
Although Heidegger claims the project of conceptualizing a “primordial”

man, a conceptualization that will, he argues, restore to humanism its sense
and purpose even as it works to avoid the pitfalls of a false metaphysics,
he continues to embrace a conceptualization that focuses, almost exclusively,
on white Western human being. As Heidegger puts it to his Japanese
interlocutor, the practically anonymous Professor Tezuka of “A Dialogue
on Language”: “I was trying to think the nature of phenomenology in a
more originary manner, so as to fit it in this way back into the place that is
properly its own within Western philosophy” (On the Way to Language 9. My
emphasis.). Given his purposeful situation of his project at what he considers
the origins of the genealogy of Western philosophy alone (to the exclusion
of the philosophical traditions of non-Western societies such as Japan), his
vision of homo humanus is, quite obviously, not anterior to or conceived
radically against concepts of race and racialized being that crystallized in
the West during the modern era. Indeed, as Heidegger indicates, his own
Introduction 11
conceptualization of being—which still holds its place as the preeminent

conceptualization of being in twentieth century Continental philosophy—
remains largely ascribed to the confines of Western European historicity
without challenging the philosophy and limits of such historicity. Rather,
Western historicity is, for him, the “standard conception”: “. . . [S]pace and
time do not only serve as parameters [of the “neighborhood” of Being, that
is, its simultaneous “nearness” and “remoteness”]; in this role, their nature
would soon be exhausted—a role whose seminal forms are discernible early
in Western thinking, and which then, in the course of the modern age,
became established by this way of thinking as the standard conception” (On the
Way to Language 102. My emphasis). Heidegger’s “neighborhood” of Being,
the originary one from which all others are cast as simply derivative, appears
to remain segregated, a gated community in which black being is neither
welcome nor recognized.
Metaphor, which Heidegger ultimately rejected as locked within an outmoded

version of metaphysics and which Jacques Derrida critiqued for its linkages
to what he called a “white [Western] mythology,”7 may nonetheless push past
the gates that separate beings into racialized communities. This is, at least,
the way in which I see conceptual metaphors at work in African American
thought. At times, such thought takes shape in what has been called, in light
of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on language games, a philosophy of ordinary
language. (I address such through a discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s
work on vernacular metaphor in “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
in chapter 1.) At other times, these conceptual metaphors engage much
more directly ideas of conscious being under debate in Enlightenment-era
continental philosophy, as reflected in the work of Equiano (whom I read
against other contemporary philosophical writers on church, state, and race,
such as Alexander Pope and Immanuel Kant). At still other times, the
metaphors under examination debate the challenge Freudian psychoanalysis
raised to continental philosophy’s concepts of being, mind, consciousness,
and language, a point I make in chapters 7 and 8. At all times, however,
these metaphors have been inherently ontological and onto-theological, and
often orientational. For their functioning, they depend, either implicitly or
explicitly, upon the verb “to be,” and thus they reflect upon human existence
and experience, and regularly serve as linguistic and literary modes of
personification. They also speak to one’s place in the world (even as one
seeks to negotiate the gap between temporality and the atemporal), or a
sense of displacement from it, since they not only voice proscribed being in
the face of racial oppression, but also deviate from accepted conventions of
language and thus challenge traditional categories of meaning, a movement
that I examine consistently throughout the chapters of this book.
Because they both profit from a long but under-examined tradition of
philosophical metaphorics in African American literature and have left an
indelible mark on the conceptual processes of metaphor that come in their
wake, W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphorics serve as a powerful and productive
critical framework through which to examine and analyze the tradition of
philosophical metaphor in African American writing. In Habitations of the
Veil, I draw upon the theory implicit in Du Bois’s work to analyze African
American metaphors of being as they are embedded within the social and
intellectual upheavals from which they emerge and which they critique and
clarify. I aim to establish these conceptual metaphors as tropes that func-
tion at the level of discourse and that articulate black being after a manner
that is crucial. While attaining their status as what Aristotle calls the mark
of genius, black philosophical metaphorical constructions, as we learn from
our understanding of Du Boisian metaphorics, regularly do the work of
epistemology and speculative thought that is so unyieldingly demanded by
the social context in which the writer writes. The metaphors I examine in
this study point out the problem of language encountered by many African
American thinkers, since the existing lexicons of their societies are often
simply inadequate to the issues and questions they encounter in being—in
conscious lived experience. In response, many of these writers regularly make
of ordinary language a conceptual discourse intent upon critiquing conven-
tions of meaning as they establish new meanings and exhort humanistic
activism, and this is regularly done through metaphorization. They put into
play a critical discourse capable of conveying their lived experiences: meta-
phoric discourses of black being emerge from their writings in a humanistic
gesture toward a social praxis aimed at ensuring a viable future for black
people. This study introduces a new hermeneutic of these cultural, linguistic,
and textual structures of metaphor.
I
Inhabiting the Veil

On Black Being
1
Being and Metaphor
There is more to be said about the concept of being, and particularly about
the relationship between concepts of black being and metaphor, but first
a fair amount of context is necessary to ensure our understanding of the
discourses surrounding these concepts. This context will permit us to see
more clearly how African American philosophical metaphors appeared in
the literature well before Du Bois’s seminal work in The Souls of Black Folk,
even as they have persisted throughout the modern and postmodern periods
in the aftermath of Du Bois’s pivotal contributions.
African American philosophical metaphors have long demonstrated a
penchant for voicing being or consciousness, and yet they have consistently
participated in a genealogy of African American and, more broadly,
Western philosophical thought whose historiography largely excludes them.
Beginning with the classical period and granting significant attention to the
modern contributions made by Zora Neale Hurston, chapter 1 discusses
a number of theories specific to philosophical uses of metaphor in both
African American and white Western aesthetic discourses before addressing
its regular appearance in African American literary and cultural expression.
Chapter 2 examines in detail the evolution of thought on the role of
philosophical metaphor in African American literary theory, criticism, and
philosophy, in particular.
Most of us understand metaphor generally as an ornament of
language. African Americanists have long noted metaphor’s capacity to
enact what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called parodic signification.1 In the
African American tradition, these might be such metaphors as “you sho’ is
propaganda,” and “sobbing hearted,” both of which Zora Neale Hurston
gives as examples of metaphor in her 1934 essay, “Characteristics of Negro
Expression.” However, while metaphor certainly operates as this sort of
linguistic and textual embellishment—what some philosophers of language
15
call “mere” or “fancy” metaphor, but what I will refer to more pertinently in
this instance as vernacular metaphor—it also functions in modes that may
be characterized as philosophical. On the one hand, vernacular metaphors
constitute what Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw as the “primary imagination,”
which “perceives and operates within the ordinary world” through language
(Hawkes 47). Philosophical metaphors, on the other hand, “[re-work] this
world, and [impress their] own shape upon it” (47) in such a way that
they reveal their epistemological potential and ontological qualities. These
might be such metaphors as “I’ll make me a world,” which James Weldon
Johnson uses in his 1927 poem, “The Creation.” Johnson’s metaphor carries
at least two senses: in the first sense, the poet indicates an intention of
creating a world around him or her; in the second sense, the poet collapses
the distinction between self and world by articulating his/her intention to
remake him/herself as a world, as a sphere of habitation for the spirit, soul,
and mind. Such an image of world-creation connotes systemic knowledge.
Philosophical metaphors are said to accomplish this world-making process
through such modes as resemblance, deviance, and analogy. The especial focus
of this study is upon those modes that are described as epistemological and
ontological, those that, like Johnson’s metaphor, are specifically concerned
with the nature and meaning of being.
Western philosophical inquiry into the intersecting nature of metaphor
and being dates back to the time of Plato and Aristotle, and actually appears
in the works of both philosophers.2 Metaphor has today remained at the center
of a number of contemporary debates on being alive in much continental
philosophy for two related reasons. First, as the aesthetician Clive Cazeaux
puts it, “the fact that key epistemological concepts have metaphors at their
root, for example, ‘mirroring,’ ‘correspondence,’ [and] ‘sense datum,’ is taken
as evidence of the contingent, communal, subjective basis of knowledge”
[sic]; and second, “because metaphor (as a form of dislocated or dislocating
predication) works by testing the appropriate with the inappropriate, it is
seen as a means of challenging the boundaries whereby one subject defines
itself in relation to another.”3 That Aristotle, even more so than Plato,
stands at the center of this epistemological but transgressive contemporary
perspective on metaphor is central to this debate, as witnessed in the work
of the Italian philosopher Guiseppe Stellardi. Aristotle’s perspective on
metaphor provides the foundation for both a semantic theory of metaphor
and for what Stellardi calls “a possible conjunction between poetics and
ontology, which if carried forth to its logical consequences, would place
metaphor right at the heart of the processes of knowledge acquisition.”4
Being and Metaphor 17
This conjunction between poetics, ontology, and epistemology explains

why Aristotle’s definition of metaphor is largely considered to found the
cornerstone of contemporary metaphor theory. While his Rhetoric contains a
detailed treatment of tropes, Aristotle’s major treatise on metaphor appears
in the Poetics, a classical work on the origins of tragic drama and epic
poetry, and one of the earliest works of western literary theory. There he
defines metaphor as “the application [to something] of a name belonging
to something else” (108). In Aristotle’s analysis, metaphor is defined in four
modes, each of which entails a “movement” or shifting of meaning. The
definition is extended and fairly laborious, but it must be grasped if we are
to understand the fundamental workings of metaphor.
The first mode of metaphor takes place in the movement “from the
genus to the species,” or from a general concept (a genre or universal type)
to its outward form or specific manifestation. The metaphorical example
Aristotle gives is, “Here stands my ship.” In this instance, the verb “stands”
functions as the genus, which takes the place of the species, “lying at anchor.”
The metaphor then consists in drawing the image of a ship “lying at anchor”
to the mind of the reader via the use of the genus “standing.” The second
mode comes about when metaphor moves in the opposite direction, that is,
when the species takes on the function of the genus. An example of this
mode is found in a quote Aristotle draws from the work of the poet Homer:
“ ‘truly has Odysseus done ten thousand deeds of worth’: for [the species]
‘ten thousand’ is [part of the genus] ‘many,’ and Homer uses it here instead
of ‘a lot.’ ” An instance of the third mode, in which metaphor moves from
one species to another, is found in such a phrase as “[killing a man by]
‘draining out his life with bronze,’ ” that is, with a weapon made of bronze.
This example provides a metaphor whose core is, essentially, a metonym. (A
metonym is a word that is used as a substitute for something with which
it is closely associated. In this case, the word “bronze” comes to stand in
for a dagger or sword.) And lastly, metaphor may operate “according to
analogy,” where “b is to a as d is to c; for [the poet then] will say d instead
of b, or b instead of d” (Aristotle 108). In the analogical mode of metaphor,
the poet is free to make outright substitutions of words that evoke similar
imagery or that carry similar meanings, and that therefore test the limits
of meaning conveyed in each word. As an example, Aristotle writes, “the
wine-bowl stands to Dionysus as the shield does to Ares: so [the poet] will
call a wine-bowl ‘shield of Dionysus’ and a shield ‘wine-bowl of Ares’ ” (109).
Aristotle considers metaphor the most important of the five principal
tropes, the others being simile, metonymy, personification, and synecdoche.
Indeed, in the Rhetoric, he concludes that “simile is also a metaphor; the

difference is but slight,”5 and that metaphors can likewise take the shape
of metonymy and synecdoche. Aristotle allows that writers may employ
catachresis (which is more than simple malapropism) in the making of
metaphors by inventing relationships between images, objects, and actions.
To do this, the writer must take advantage of definitions accepted in the
language-culture, such as “to scatter seed is to sow” (109) if he or she wishes
to invent a metaphor such as “[scattering] radiance from the sun,” which
“has no name,” or whose semantic and logical relationship was heretofore
nonexistent (109). The writer may then turn about to say, “sowing god-
wrought radiance,” a metaphor whose inventive conceit is ensured only
by the participation of the reader or auditor. The success of innovative
metaphors depends fully upon the reader/auditor’s being able to understand
the relationship implied in the metaphor itself. In other words, the metaphor
must make sense in the culture and society in which it is expressed, even
if the relation it claims is distant. It is nonetheless important to note that
each of the modes of metaphor described by Aristotle implies a logical
relation that ties the terms of the metaphor together, and thus we see that
metaphors can indeed serve ornamental purposes, but they can as well serve
as propositional structures of meaning.
From Aristotle’s definition, we see that metaphors can be words or
phrases; they can be simple or complex. In the Poetics, they are described as
a type of dynamic naming that can also be, especially in the fourth mode,
analogy, vehicles for making new meaning and for reasoning. Importantly,
Aristotle identifies them as the cornerstone of specific sorts of aesthetic
language use in various genres of writing, particularly epic poetry and drama.
Central to our understanding of metaphor and its use in African American
literature is that Aristotle points toward mimesis, or representation, as
foundational to metaphor, for in transferring the name of one thing to
something else, there must be present some sort of recognition of the word
that makes the transference work. In other words, metaphors make sense
because they lead the reader or auditor to recognize the similarities between
two seemingly disparate concepts or actions, as in “sowing god-wrought
radiance.” Hence (and this point Aristotle does not make directly) metaphor
itself may be understood as inherently paradoxical, even as it extends toward
a provisional unity of thought. Metaphor presents a continuity within an
apparent discontinuity.
This dialectic of metaphor, wherein metaphor effects the displacement
of one sense or meaning by substituting another, by claiming the nearness
(contiguity) of another conceptual image whatever its semiotic distance,

obtains not only between the similar and the dissimilar (between sameness
and difference), but also between the written and the spoken. The oral/aural
seems to be as significant as writing to the role of metaphor in literature,
especially since metaphor serves, in speech as well as in writing, to make
the spectator of the play or reader of a poem “see” things that would not
otherwise be perceived. Aristotle writes that the “liveliness” of metaphor is
achieved by “using the proportional [analogical] type of metaphor and by
being graphic (i.e., making your hearers see things).” And by “ ‘making them
see things’ I mean using expressions that represent things as in a state of
activity” (Rhetoric 190. Italics in original).
Effective and ingenious metaphors, Aristotle argues, exploit this
dialectical relation between the aural and the visual, the oral and the literate,
for their function. What is more, Aristotle, in underscoring the importance of
action (“things as in a state of activity”) as well as perception (“making your
hearers see things”), makes clear the centrality of agency and embodiedness
to the conception and success of metaphors. For only bodies, whether they
be human, animal, or celestial (as in plants, stars, and galaxies, which we
significantly and metaphorically refer to as heavenly bodies), can undertake
activity, and only human beings are thought capable of using advanced
reasoning, engaging in action as they perceive differences and conceive
linguistic innovations. Thus, from the inception of the history of the theory
of metaphor, there courses the importance of representation, displacement,
and epistemological deviance. Aristotle underscores the centrality of sound,
sight, speech, and writing to successful and powerful metaphors. And,
perhaps most critical to the purposes of this study, Aristotle makes clear
the relation of phenomenological presence and metaphor, casting into clear
relief the bond between ontology (as a central element of metaphysics) and
the ordinary and poetic uses of metaphorical language.
The paradoxical nature of metaphor—its process of articulating
discontinuity within continuity, its recognition of similarities in dissimilar
entities, its collocation of the written and the oral/aural, and its simultaneity
of transcendence and immanence—makes it uncommonly well-suited to the
double-voiced character of modern African American cultural forms such
as Spirituals, the blues, and gospel music. Metaphor simply abounds in the
African American vernacular tradition. This is nowhere better exemplified
than in the Sorrow Songs, which Du Bois treats at length in Souls as
early African American poetry set to music, not unlike the early poetry of
Europe sung in feudal and pre-modern monarchical lands by troubadours.
Many of the Spirituals date back to at least the eighteenth century, at the
inception of the modern period. Canonical Spirituals such as “Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot,” do not simply allude to the promise of home represented
by the lines referring to an afterlife in heaven (“Steal away, steal away, steal
away to Jesus / Steal away, steal away home”), but also evolve over time to
suggest the metaphorical train of the underground railroad, which would
carry the slave northward to earthly freedom. The Spiritual “Go Down,
Moses,” puts forward analogical metaphors that consist in drawing an
implicit comparison between the situation of the Jews in captivity and that
of African slaves in bondage, a lyrical gesture that has been made explicit
in such eighteenth-century writings as the narratives of Quobna Ottobah
Cugoano6 and Olaudah Equiano. Many scholars agree that “Go Down,
Moses” is a transgressive song of open protest, a defiant melody that might
only have been sung in the absence of white slaveholders and overseers.7
Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century blues songs, which evolved
from Spirituals and work songs, are widely characterized as double-voiced
expressions of concerns and care.8 Their lyrics operate via metaphor, allusion,
and innuendo. The double-voiced character of the blues is described by
Albert Murray as being at once sacred and profane, a duality that supports
what I see as the evolution of the use of metaphor in modern African
American literature. Witness the “How Long Blues,” first recorded in 1928:
“The brook runs into the river, the river runs into the sea / If I don’t run
into my baby, a train is going to run into me / How long, how long, how
long?” The repeated interrogatory phrase “how long?” is drawn from the
Spiritual and gospel traditions, which regularly produced songs that queried
God on the duration of human suffering. (How long must earthly suffering
endure before the slave reached her heavenly rest? How long would men’s
sins prevail before the vengeful coming of the Lord?) Various elements
of metaphor contribute to the figurative nature of language in the “How
Long Blues”: the repetition of words and themes; the play of orientational
tropes (as discussed by Lakoff and Johnson, 15) that capitalize on sundry
uses of the prepositional phrase “run into”; and the echoing of the first
line by the second. Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” (1939), one of her
more memorable blues performances (many commentators agree that while
Holiday at times recorded blues standards, she was more of a jazz vocalist
than a blues singer9), employs metaphor more forthrightly: “Love is just
like a faucet / It turns off and on / Love is just like a faucet / It turns
off and on / Sometimes when you think it’s on, baby / It has turned off
and gone.” We understand the simile, the explicit comparison—Aristotle’s
“full blown” metaphor—between love and a faucet, as a humorous trope

employing ontological and somewhat personified descriptions of “love” and
“faucet” because popular Western culture understands “love” as a capricious
human sentiment that we may hope to contain (through the controlling
mechanism of the faucet), but can never quite manage to fix.
The literature of African America is no less ripe with metaphor than
its oral tradition. Metaphor is seen in its earliest examples, beginning with
the often discussed “trope of the talking book” in the eighteenth-century
narratives of John Marrant (A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with
John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova Scotia) Born
in New-York, in North-America, 1785) and Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
Written by Himself, 1789), among others.10 Sojourner Truth’s metaphors of
“substance” and “shadow,” and her ontological declaration of herself as a
“sign unto this nation,”11 along with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s layered
framework of metaphor, memory, testimony, and being in Sketches of Southern
Life, punctuate the mid-nineteenth century in preparation, as I show in
chapter 4, for Du Bois’s metaphorics of black ontology in Souls. Likewise,
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask” anticipates the
“two-ness” of African American existence expressed most poignantly and
poetically by Du Bois nearly a decade later. Dunbar most famously writes:
“We wear the mask that grins and lies/It hides our cheeks and shades our
eyes/This debt we pay to human guile/With torn and bleeding hearts we
smile/And mouth with myriad subtleties.” The mask of which Dunbar sings
foreshadows Du Bois’s figures of the “veil” and the “color-line,” as well as
the latter’s germinal trope of “double consciousness.”
Standing at the crossroads of a metaphorical and ontological tradition
of modern black expression, Du Bois develops these tropes at length and
with eloquence not only in The Souls of Black Folk, but across his oeuvre, as
I discuss in chapters 5 and 6. In the African American literary tradition, Du
Bois’s tropes are rivaled in importance only by Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of
“invisibility” as elaborated in Invisible Man. Du Bois’s metaphorics provide
a bridge between Dunbar’s “mask that grins and lies” and the invisible man’s
determination to “yes ’em to death” with false acquiescence. Just as Ellison’s
narrative inherits much from Du Boisian metaphorics, it also underscores
the crucial sense of double consciousness that provides the motivity to Souls
as well as to James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man (1912/1927), which is taken by many critics to be a model for Ellison’s
novel.12 Johnson, in one of his narrator’s more explicit moments, writes that
the “delicate” and “subtle” concerns that weighed upon the thought of the
“coloured man” gave
every coloured man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of

dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only
in the freemasonry of his own race. I have often watched with
interest and sometimes with amazement even ignorant coloured
men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain
this dualism in the presence of white men. (Autobiography 21–22)
Ellison, whose protagonist likewise suffers from a multiple sense of

being akin to double consciousness, begins Invisible Man with a chiasmus
(from the Greek for “a placing crosswise”), a metaphorical construction
resembling an “X,” not unlike the image of the crossroads that figures
so prominently in the blues music Ellison loved: the novel’s prologue is
actually the introduction to the memoir of the narrator, who tells us near
the conclusion of the novel that the “end was in the beginning” (Invisible
Man 431). We the readers know that even as the end is in the beginning,
the beginning is also in the end; the past is prologue to the present time
of the novel.
Ellison’s structures of time and space in Invisible Man were, as is
well known, strongly influenced by Richard Wright’s 1944 novella, The
Man Who Lived Underground. Wright highly valued and regularly profited
from textual metaphors that revealed both a critical ontology and a critical
epistemology, such as those pioneered by Du Bois. He calls our attention
to metaphorical matters of the text when he opines, in the 1937 essay,
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” (which, in chapter 7, I read in context with
earlier aesthetic statements on the role and function of tropes in literature
written by F. E. W. Harper and Du Bois), that the “image and emotion” of
literature “possess a logic of their own.” He insists that affect and imagery—
including, specifically, figures of language such as conceptual metaphors that
approach the level of catachresis—are capable of granting form, meaning, and
access to a new and better world. Like Souls before it, The Man Who Lived
Underground paradoxically points the way to life in such a world through
the complexity of its philosophical metaphors. I see Wright’s fundamental
metaphor of psychic and bodily descent as emblematic of the ways in which
archetypal ontological tropes of death and life, guilt and freedom, time and
space, memory and oblivion, and dreaming and waking facilitate the African
American text’s demand for a new and better world.
A Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s

“Characteristics of Negro Expression”
Wright would, of course, implicitly (though not explicitly) distance himself

from Du Bois and other earlier black writers in “Blueprint for Negro
Writing.” Nonetheless, “Blueprint,” an indispensable piece on African
American language, culture, and political aesthetics regarding the function
and mission of the artist, was published three years after what was probably
the single most important essay on African American language to appear
before World War II, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro
Expression” (1934). In many ways, Wright and Ellison alike would profit
from the insights on vernacular expressions of black being that Hurston
documents in “Characteristics” and puts into play in her fiction, though
Wright in particular would distance himself from Hurston’s art.13 Hurston’s
discussion of metaphor as foundational to African American vernacular
expressions such as the blues and folklore, and as relational to its social
context resonates in crucial ways with Aristotle’s classical discussion of
metaphor in the Poetics. Thus it actually advances the question of ontological
metaphor towards what mid-twentieth-century philosophers would come to
call the philosophy of ordinary language.
A product of what is now known as the “linguistic turn” in philosophy
during the 1950s and 1960s, the philosophy of ordinary language emerged in
contrast to analytic philosophy. While the latter treats with some suspicion
what it sees as language’s tendency toward opacity, ordinary language
philosophy claims that meaning resides precisely in the use of words, that
words mean what they are used to mean in certain contexts. Though Hurston
is generally not read within the context of this discourse, she is, in fact,
the first African American literary and cultural critic to have published a
piece specific to language, sociolinguistics, and cultural expression among
African Americans before 1950,14 and thus her short piece on language is
the most pointed and, perhaps, most important work of sociolinguistics and
the philosophy of ordinary African American language produced prior to
the Black Aesthetic movement. It therefore bears an extended discussion,
after which I will elaborate the ways in which Hurston, Wright, and Ellison
engage Du Bois’s theory of metaphor in its insistence upon a philosophical
grounding in the exigencies of everyday black being.
The original venue for Hurston’s essay, published the same year as
her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Jonah’s Gourd Vine, was Negro: An
Anthology (1934). Edited by the British shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, a
poet, writer, and biographer whose passion for African and African American
culture and history was well known in transatlantic circles, Negro was not
only large and broad in scope (it contained at least 231 entries and was
divided into seven sections, including “America,” “Negro Stars,” “Music,”
“Poetry,” “West Indies and South America,” and “Africa”), it also boasted of
such African American contributors as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes,
Sterling Brown, and Arna Bontemps. White authors who contributed to the
collection included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, and Cunard
herself. The then fledgling writer Samuel Beckett, whose most famous
work is the play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1952), undertook a
number of translations for inclusion in the work. Among these is the piece
“Murderous Humanitarianism,” submitted by The Surrealist Group in Paris
and signed by André Breton, Paul Élouard, and René Char, among others.
Negro constituted something of an act of daring. While The New Negro
(1925) was presented by its editor, Alain Locke (who also contributed to
Cunard’s anthology), as the voice of the Harlem Renaissance, the throaty
song of the New Negro poet and intellectual in the United States, Negro
laid claim to the world as its stage. In her anthology, Cunard implicitly
framed the cultural artifacts of African-descended peoples as “diasporic.”
The term exists nowhere in her Foreword to the work, yet it is silently
spoken from each page comprising the text. She also framed the book as
one that responded to the needs of the Negro through the activism of the
Communist Party, and this she did explicitly.
Hurston seems to have been oblivious to Cunard’s purpose. In her
autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she makes no note of her
involvement in producing Negro. In fact, she does not mention it at all. The
very structure of Hurston’s essay on “Negro expression” appears to serve a
specific purpose quite apart from that of Cunard. Hurston’s goal seems not
to have been the disruption of any sort of authority—imperialist, capitalistic
(these were Cunard’s stated aims for Negro), or otherwise. She strikes one
as being much more intent upon expressing what she describes, in a letter
to Carl Van Vechten, as the beauty of “Negrodom” and the complexity of
its expression, which she chronicled not through the singular practice of
writing, but multiply through story, song, and dance.
“Characteristics” unfolds in twelve parts: “Drama”; “Will to Adorn”
(which treats metaphor and simile, the “double-descriptive,” “verbal nouns,”
and “nouns from verbs”); “Angularity”; “Asymmetry”; “Dancing”; “Negro
Folklore”; “Culture Heroes”; “Examples of Folklore and the Modern Culture
Hero”; “Originality”; “Imitation”; “Absence of the Concept of Privacy”; “The
Jook”; and “Dialect.” I will limit my discussion to the two sections of the
essay that are most pertinent to the focus of this study: “Drama” and “Will
to Adorn.”
It should not be lost on us that Hurston, like Aristotle, approaches her
theory of figurative language through a discussion of human action, human
drama. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines metaphor as reliant upon mimesis—
representation—for its formation. He addresses metaphor not simply through
a discussion of the parts of speech, but also through the major genres of his
day: epic poetry and tragic drama. Primary or “primitive” epic poetry such
as that composed by Homer—whose work Aristotle prized above almost
any other poet—was largely oral. Indeed, it was mimetic—it was performed
and, because of its metaphorical innovations, it bore, as Alexander Pope saw
it, the mark of inventive genius.15 In speaking of metaphor, which is her
major concern in the first two sections of the essay, Hurston likewise insists
upon the importance of the relation between metaphor and mimesis, and
she does so in terms of the dramatic mimicry that she sees at the center
of black cultural life.
The “Negro’s universal mimicry” is “evidence of something that
permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama,” Hurston writes (1019).
In a way that reflects the anthropological work she had been carrying out
since 1926,16 Hurston’s discussion of the drama that characterizes everyday
Negro expression analyzes it in something of a naturalistic way, that is, with
regard to environmental and social relations, and, perhaps most importantly,
in relation to vernacular culture. (As an anthropologist, Hurston makes clear
throughout the essay that her focus is the black “folk” or what she calls the
“average Negro” [1022] and not middle-class African Americans, whose
culture is, in her eyes, derivative of that of whites.) The peculiar language
that Hurston sees the Negro employing in his/her self-expression is highly
imagistic and replete with terms capable of enacting the drama of black
existence. “His interpretation of the English language is in terms of pictures”
(1019), Hurston insists.
Hurston’s choice of “interpretation” as a key term in this phrase appears
quite deliberate. She might instead have chosen the word “translation,”
which would indicate a movement or transference of meaning across the
boundaries of two or more different linguistic and social contexts. While
“translation” indicates an articulation of meaning across language’s own
limits, “interpretation” would instead indicate the act of taking meaning
to a point of exchange and there rendering it otherwise in a gesture of
displacement. Where translation appears to be directly linked to language
as it is written, interpretation refers to language as it is spoken. Thus by

choosing “interpretation” as a critical term of analysis, Hurston remains
true to her goal of discussing the performative (mimetic) aspects of Negro
vernacular expression (performance in language being one of the central
tenets of the philosophy of ordinary language). “Interpretation” permits
Hurston to shed light on what she sees as the dramatic and mimetic nature
of African American speech as it displaces white American norms, and there,
for her, lay the very essence of African American culture.
Hurston goes on to argue that everyday African Americans routinely
use metaphorical analogy in their version of American English: this newly
interpreted language is expansively employed to “describe [one act] in terms of
another,” and this sort of systemic analogy is the basis for “the rich metaphor
and simile” that characterize folk expression (1019). These metaphors are, to
Hurston’s mind, “primitive,” since it is “easier to illustrate” meaning by way of
pictures “than to explain because action came before speech” (1019). In fact,
she concludes, the Negro “thinks in hieroglyphics.” And this compared to the
thought process of “the white man,” who “thinks in a written language” (1020).
The analogy Hurston provides (“Let us make a parallel,” she writes)
in support of her controversial contention that the Negro’s “language and
thought are ‘primitive’ ” is striking. It underscores the significance of her
decision to employ the term “interpretation” rather than “translation.”
Interpretation highlights an act of not only excavation, of tunneling through
layers of signification in order to attain to a deeper, hidden meaning; it also
emphasizes the act of exchange Hurston sees at work in black vernacular
expression. We should recall that the “parallel” that Hurson draws itself
functions as an analogy, a tropological form that Aristotle deems to be one
of the four fundamental types of metaphor.17 Beginning with yet another
metaphorical construction, a simile, described by Aristotle as a “full-
blown” metaphor,18 Hurston writes: “Language is like money. In primitive
communities, actual goods, however bulky, are bartered for what one wants.
This finally evolves into coin, the coin being not real wealth but a symbol
of wealth. Still later even coin is abandoned for legal tender, and still later
for checks in certain usages” (1019–1020).
Hurston likens the barter system, an early system of trade characterized
by economists as cumbersome and inconvenient, to the Negro’s ostensibly
“primitive” use of language. Bartering evolved into a more sophisticated
monetary system in which coin came to be exchanged for goods. We might
add that the use of money in lieu of barter allows for a more extensive
network of exchange in a marketplace. Barter severely limits the number of
players in a market, because it largely eliminates intermediaries or “middle

men”: it demands that those who wish to make the exchange make it more
or less directly with one another. Bartering seems to be, like the so-called
“primitive” Negro expression Hurston describes, a system in which the only
ones who can participate are those who “belong” to the language community
in question, those who are situated in the cultural tradition of the local
place. Quite possibly, it is the anthropologist in her that leads Hurston to
see the Negro’s expression in such naturalistic terms. Ferdinand de Saussure,
the father of modern linguistics whose work I discuss further below, built
his analysis of human language in good measure upon similar concepts of
value and exchange, though Saussure was more likely to value the “check
words” that Hurston attributes to whites.
It must be pointed out that, from the perspective of Claude Lévi-
Strauss, to reference the thought of yet another modern sociolinguist
and anthropologist, such expression does not indicate the “ineptitude” of
so-called “primitive people” for abstract thought, as Hurston argues in her
essay. Hurston insists that a more evolved, conceptual language expressed in
“check words” remains the province of whites. Lévi-Strauss, who regarded
highly the work of Hurston’s mentor, Franz Boas, takes the counterview:
It has long been the fashion to invoke languages which lack the
terms for expressing such a concept as “tree” or “animal,” even
though they contain all the words necessary for a detailed inventory
of species and varieties. But, to begin with, while these cases are
cited as evidence of the supposed ineptitude of “primitive people”
for abstract thought, other cases are at the same time ignored
which make it plain that the richness of abstract words is not a
monopoly of civilized languages. In Chinook, a language widely
spoken in the north-west of North America, to take one example,
many properties and qualities are referred to by means of abstract
words: “This method,” Boas says, “is applied to a greater extent
than in any other language I know.” The proposition “the bad
man killed the poor child” is rendered in Chinook: “The man’s
badness killed the child’s poverty”; and for “The woman used
too small a basket” they say: “She put the potentilla-roots into
the smallness of a clam basket.”
In every language, moreover, discourse and syntax supply
indispensable means of supplementing deficiencies of vocabulary.
And the tendentious character of the argument referred to in the
last paragraph becomes very apparent when one observes that

the opposite state of affairs, that is, where very general terms
outweigh specific names, has also been exploited to prove the
intellectual poverty of Savages. . . . The proliferation of concepts,
as in the case of technical language, goes with more constant
attention to properties of the world, with an interest that is more
alert to possible distinctions which can be introduced between
them. This thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most ne-
glected aspects of the thought of people we call “primitive.” Even
if it is rarely directed towards facts of the same level as those
with which modern science is concerned, it implies comparable
intellectual application and methods of observation. In both cases
the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a
means of satisfying needs. (Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1–2.
Emphasis added.)
Lévi-Strauss’s conclusions, of course, appeared in 1962, well after the

publication of Hurston’s “Characteristics” and after Hurston’s death in 1960.
Nonetheless, Lévi-Strauss not only quotes Hurston’s mentor, Franz Boas, in
his critical comments countering the supposed lack of abstract thought among
so-called “primitives” (above, I have highlighted Lévi-Strauss’s references
to the “concepts,” “knowledge,” “thought,” and “intellectual application”
of such to peoples); he also echoes Ferdinand de Saussure’s pioneering
findings.19
In his authoritative 1914 work (published posthumously by his
students as the Course in General Linguistics), Saussure opined that
“[s]cholars were . . . wrong in assuming that the absence of a word proves
that the primitive society knew nothing of the thing that the word names”
(Course 225). In “Characteristics,” Hurston seems unwilling substantiate her
notions of what she calls black “primitive” expression, which in some ways
went against the prevailing linguistics of her day. Yet we can be certain
of the force of her opinion, delivered through the tropological form of
analogy: if Negro expression is primitive expression likened to a primitive
system of trade known as bartering, and if bartering is itself a limited
form of economic interaction, it becomes clear that, in Hurston’s logic, the
“primitive” forms of metaphor used by the class to which Hurston refers
are largely viewed by members of that group itself as closed social media
of exchange that unfold within what James Weldon Johnson referred to as
the “freemasonry of the [Negro’s] own race” (Autobiography 22). These forms
thus require their own interpretation from someone inside the group, a task
that Hurston readily takes up.
The implication one draws from Hurston’s analogy is that systems of
language likewise evolve as systems of exchange wherein language not only
carries concepts that are embellished by human linguistic inventiveness and
enhanced by the drama of human experience, but also, on quite another
register, carry an exchange value relative to a sense of community, social
class, and even racial and ethnic identity. While Hurston’s stance on the
“primitive” nature of African American expression ignored significant aspects
of Saussure’s and Boas’s theories of primitive language, her adaptation of a
value-based perspective of language was not out of line with the currents
of linguistic theory in the 1920s and 30s. Indeed, it had been sanctioned
in Saussure’s Course.
Saussure had largely been concerned with value in relation to synchronic
linguistics, but made it clear that value was of “prime importance” to the
general study of linguistics. For him, language is a system of “pure values”
whose “characteristic role” is “to serve as a link between thought and sound”
(Course 111–12). In defining more pointedly the role of value in language,
Saussure returned to his conclusion regarding the arbitrary nature of the sign:
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of

sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form,
not a substance. These views give a better understanding of what
was said before about the arbitrariness of signs. Not only are the
two domains that are linked by the linguistic fact shapeless and
confused, but the choice of a given slice of sound to name a given
idea is completely arbitrary. If this were not true, the notion of
value would be compromised, for it would include an externally
imposed element. But actually values remain entirely relative, and
that is why the bond between the sound and the idea is radically
arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why in turn the
social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is
necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and
general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is
incapable of fixing a single value. (Italics in original, 113)
Having addressed the question of linguistic value, and being duly

careful to avoid the sense of essentialism carried by the notion of language
producing a “substance” rather than a “form,” Saussure would eventually come
to issues of race and ethnicity in relation to language. He felt certain that

“a common language [would not imply] consanguinuity, that a family of
languages [does not necessarily match] an anthropological family” (222), but
he did believe that ethnic identity was reinforced by common language usage:
“The social bond tends to create linguistic community and probably imposes
certain traits on the common idiom; conversely, linguistic community is to
some extent responsible for ethnic unity. In general, ethnic unity always
suffices to explain linguistic community” (223).
In spite of Saussure’s insistence on the centrality of the linguistic
community when it comes to evolving a system of language, in late twentieth-
century theory, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. emphasized—after a fashion that
seeks to critique what he characterizes as a pertinent oversight—Saussure’s
assurance that the “signifier . . . is fixed, not free, with respect to the
linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter.”20
(Curiously enough, however, in his theorization of African American
vernacular expression, Gates does not locate African American vernacular
speech along the diachronic/syntagmatic x-axis of Saussure’s model—the axis
of dynamism and change—but along the synchronic/paradigmatic y-axis,
the static axis of language to which Saussure grants the preponderance of
his attention as he formulates his theory of structuralist linguistics. I shall
return to this point shortly.) Yet Saussure’s conclusion should ultimately be
read in its fuller context. Saussure’s comment that the signifier is “fixed, not
free” should be interpreted only in the greater context of his ideas regarding
the simultaneous, but seemingly incongruous “immutability and mutability
of the sign” (74). As Wade Baskin, editor of the English translation of the
Course puts it, “It would be wrong to reproach F. de Saussure for being
illogical or paradoxical in attributing two contradictory qualities to language.
By opposing two striking terms, he wanted only to emphasize the fact that
language changes in spite of the inability of [individual] speakers to change
it” (Course 74ff ). Although Saussure was quite clear in arguing that no single
member of a linguistic community could alter the course of language, he
did agree that through an innovation (made by one or more speakers of
whatever race or ethnicity) subsequently adopted by the group, a community
of speakers could indeed alter language. The ability of language to evolve
through linguistic communities is especially important in understanding
diachronic language, which is mapped along the x-axis. Saussure writes:
[E]verything in diachronic language is diachronic only by virtue

of speaking. It is in speaking that the germ of all change is found.
Each change is launched by a certain number of individuals
before it is accepted for general use. . . . the new form, repeated

many times and accepted by the community, [becomes] a fact
of language. But not all innovations of speaking have the same
success, and so long as they remain individual, they may be
ignored, for we are studying language; they do not enter into
our field of observation until the community of speakers has
adopted them. (Course 98)
It is useful to return to Hurston with Saussure’s words in mind. As

we have seen, Hurston grants close attention to the African American
community of speakers, but does not ignore whites. When writing of white
communities of speakers, or of persons belonging to various European ethnic
groups (which Hurston does not specify), she deems their language to be
more highly evolved: “Now the people with highly developed languages have
words for detached ideas. That is legal tender” (1020). By contrast, she argues,
the “primitive man,” and by implication Hurston here refers to the Negro,
“exchanges descriptive words.” Even if a so-called “primitive” being such as
the Negro is possessed of “detached words in his vocabulary—not evolved
in him but transplanted on his tongue by contact,” Hurston maintains, he
must first refashion this vocabulary and “add action” so as to “make it do
[sic]” (1020). This is the reason for such “characteristic” Negro expressions as
“sitting-chair” and “chop-ax,” Hurston tells us. She juxtaposes these sorts of
Negro expression, which she terms “double-descriptives” and which she also
describes as metaphorical action-words, against what she deems abstractions
or concepts used primarily by whites. The Negro “has in his mind the
picture of the object in use. Action. Everything illustrated. So we can say
that the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in
hieroglyphics” (1020).
There is something unsettling about the ease with which Hurston
assigns “true” Negro expression the label of “primitive” and associates
advanced thought and expression with whites alone.21 And it is striking that
she is less than progressive in her views regarding the possibilities inherent
in black speech and knowledge. Yet in arguing assiduously that Negro words
are action words and are of a piece with the oral culture of which they form
the largest and most significant element, Hurston’s analysis accomplishes an
extraordinary measure from the perspective of contemporary theory. While
poststructuralism has tended to characterize metaphor rather simplistically
as a form of verbal and literary ornamentation that is inexorably tied to
the transcendent and the abstract (and placed firmly on Saussure’s vertical
synchronic/paradigmatic y-axis), Hurston insists upon its predicative
qualities, in which metaphor performs acts of verbalization that exemplify

the immanent and the embodied, the everyday. Put otherwise, Hurston
argues, avant la lettre—that is, before the “linguistic turn” in philosophy,
and before the revolution in metaphor theory that was ushered in by Paul
Ricoeur’s work on the topic in 1975, and before Gates’s work in The Signifying
Monkey (1988)—that metaphor does exactly what poststructuralists claim it
cannot do.22 She demonstrates that it is living rather than static, and this
living quality of metaphor permits us to draw further conclusions: that
metaphor moves capriciously between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic
lines of Saussure’s axis of language; that it is epistemological, such that it
is capable of voicing the structures of meaning at work in a community;
and that it is ontological—it is immanent and embodied at the same time
that it gives expression to the fluid and living ideals of a group of people.
For Hurston, Negro expression, especially its metaphorical forms, is
redolent of the everyday lives of ordinary African Americans. Again, it is
important to note that Hurston’s analysis is a class-based one. This she
herself argues when she differentiates between the “average Negro” and the
“sophisticated” Negro, who has no real culture, in her estimation. In “average
Negro” life, “[a] bit of Negro drama familiar to us all is the frequent meeting
of two opponents who threaten to do atrocious murder one upon the other,”
she narrates (1020). Significantly, this line stands alone as a paragraph in
the essay; it marks a transition in the text, and serves to introduce the
paragraphs that conclude the essay’s first section, “Drama.” In the wake of
this declaration, Hurston renders language ironically and strategically mute.
While for Hurston, the body takes the place of metaphorical language as
a focal point, language still speaks from the silence of the mimetic: “Who
has not observed a robust young Negro chap posing upon a street corner,
possessed of nothing but his clothing, his strength, and his youth?” Hurston
asks. Important to her is the innate drama that characterizes two young
people who take on the mantle of performance, and that which they perform
is the everyday use of black language. Such performance, such drama,
Hurston argues, is inherent to the cultural traditions of black folk, just as
Aristotle insisted—through his attention to epic, tragedy, and his fleeting
reference to comedy—that drama is germane to the cultural traditions of the
Greeks. As Hurston places her two actors in motion, their embodied genders
speak their words for them. The body, and the social presence it affords
them, seem to be all the two young players need. Through the body, the girl’s
shoulders and hips put forth all the action. The “chap’s” eyes and posture
“speak” with authority, she tells us, and “no one ever mistakes the meaning”
(39). With this line, Hurston links her philosophy of ordinary language
with phenomenology and the black body with metaphorical expression,

disallowing the possibility that any meaning could slip away in the process.
Hurston alerts us to something important here, but never quite
arrives at crystallizing its significance; she seems more interested in the
supposed “primitive” characteristics of the people she describes. Yet we
can still get closer to the philosophical import of such performativity as
Hurston illustrates. Reflecting upon the phenomenological possibilities
inherent in ordinary language philosophy, such as that which Hurston
employs, Paul Ricoeur writes that as an intellectual and philosophical project,
phenomenology tries
to extract from lived experience the essential meanings and

structures of purpose, project, motive, wanting, trying and so
on. I note in passing that phenomenology [. . .] had already
attacked problems which are now in the forefront of the school
of linguistic analysis with the philosophy of action. But if it was
phenomenology, it was existential phenomenology in the sense
that these essential structures imply the recognition of the central
problem of embodiment, of le corps propre. Anyhow, whatever
might be the relation between phenomenology and existentialism
[. . .] this kind of philosophizing did not yet raise any particular
problem of language, for a direct language was thought to be
available. This direct language was ordinary language in which
we find words like purpose, motive, and so on. This is why I
now believe that there is an intersection of the philosophy of
ordinary language and phenomenology at this first level. (The
Rule of Metaphor 316)
I take Ricoeur’s assessment of the relation between phenomenology

and the philosophy of ordinary language to be particularly instructive to any
reading of Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which not only
analyzes the levels of metaphoricity at work in black performativity and
black vernacular discourse, but also posits a theory of embodied agency—
action—alive in folk expression, even if she does not assess this language
for its possible contributions to black knowledge and radical action, as does
Richard Wright. One might say that Wright presents an example of the
existential phenomenology of black knowing and black agency, indirectly
extending Hurston’s focus on drama in everyday black life by introducing
his reader to Bigger Thomas and Fred Daniels, two everyday “black boys”
(like Wright himself ) whose daily trials and heavy existential burdens were
meant to force upon readers the realities of black life by dramatizing black
experience.
Ralph Ellison chose a different pathway in his fiction. Hurston’s
emphasis on black vernacular expression and the black body is cast into
relief yet again when we consider that Ellison, who metaphorically ren-
dered the black body “invisible” in his novel (implying that the ontological
condition of invisibility was a universal human condition that applied to
all African American men if not, in fact, all African Americans), chal-
lenged Hurston’s and Wright’s links between black corporeality and black
epistemology and ontology. Even if in a differential fashion—one focused
on literature as well as orality and mimesis, and concerned with black folk
traditions as well as the crises of the emerging black middle class—Ellison
is one of a small number of mid-twentieth-century African American writ-
ers who take up the task of characterizing black expression that Hurston
began, in light of Du Bois’s own articulations in Souls, near the close of
the Harlem Renaissance. In doing so, Ellison returns us to the phenom-
enology of metaphor so wonderfully on display in Du Bois’s work. It is a
phenomenology that is rooted in black folk culture: Ellison trusts that black
folk culture has a radical message to bring to the world. He anchors his
phenomenology of black being in vernacular expression, and through his
criticism of this expression, especially in the forms of the blues and jazz,
elevates these vernacular forms to the realm of “high” art without wishing
to “dry up the deep, rowdy stream of jazz until it becomes a very thin
trickle of respectable sound indeed.”23
Likening the underlying message of his novel to the quest for existential
identity each American must undertake, Ellison proffers the propositional
metaphor of home as democracy and, by extension then, democracy as love
(see “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” 1953). Democracy is the ideal
that each American, of whatever color, must grasp, for it is only by realizing
the ideal of democracy (a radical democracy, Ellison argues implicitly)
that Americans can overcome the oblivion of invisible black being and
corporeality, and live up to the moral call issued by the man for whom
Ellison was named. Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom Ellison often referred,
in a moment of ruminating and theorizing the state of American politics,
called for politics as an expression of love. Ellison goes so far as to echo
Emerson in the novel, prompting his protagonist to ponder this very point.
In the final chapter of this study, I argue that Ellison’s concern in deploying
the metaphor of love as democracy is to give voice to a sense of homelessness
or a crisis of belonging that culminates in a state of social invisibility and
that is, itself, indicative of a crisis in American democracy. The black state
of invisibility is a crisis that, Ellison seems to say in a moment of great

phenomenological and existential import, can be overcome only by love of
an active, moral, and maternal sort.
As did Ellison, Hurston actually hearkens back to Du Bois and his
work on African American culture in The Souls of Black Folk and elsewhere. If
for Du Bois it is in the vernacular, spiritual expressions of African Americans
that one may find the “souls” or being of black folk, it is so for Hurston as
well, even if she disagrees with Du Bois’s characterization of the Spirituals
as “Sorrow Songs.”24 Wright likewise considered African American folklore,
Spirituals, and the blues to be a font of “racial wisdom” (“Blueprint for
Negro Writing” 1405), and he agreed with Du Bois, Hurston, and Ellison
that Negro culture stemmed from the black church and African American
folklore. However, Wright argued that black folk expression, especially in
the Spirituals, was not only a simple stage along the way to transcending
an overly simplistic black ontology, but that black folk expression in the
Spirituals and other vernacular forms could, at the same time, be tapped as a
source for the transcendence of the worldly limits of racism and oppression,
a way of attaining, however tenuously, a state of psychic freedom and the
realities of bodily freedom.
In light of path-breaking works such as those I examine in this study, works

that show conceptual metaphors to be central not only to African American
expression, but indeed African American culture more broadly defined,
many African Americanists—theorists and philosophers alike—agree on the
importance of metaphor as central to voicings of black consciousness and
being. I shall come to the philosophers in chapter 2, but will attend here
to some of the pertinent analyses that have been proffered by a number of
literary theorists and critics.
Karla F. C. Holloway, for instance, is quite specific about the noetic
location in which she situates her inquiry in Moorings and Metaphors (1992),
which, not withstanding its pointed focus on gendered language, resonates
with my own study in its aims: “Its center is where behavior, art, philosophy,
and language unite as a cultural expression within an African-American
literary tradition. . . . My primary argument is that black women’s literature
reflects its community—the cultural ways of knowing as well as ways of
framing that knowledge in language” (1). Holloway, influenced significantly
by Hurston’s approach to the study of African American culture, espouses a
perspective that is easily linked to Hurston’s philosophy of ordinary language,
given her focus on the orality in African diasporic women’s literature. She
focuses on a specific feminine metaphor—the goddess ancestor—in black
women’s texts, and argues for the distinctiveness of black women’s writing
vis-à-vis that of black men (25, 92). Specifically, she argues that a “woman-
centered principle” grounds “black women’s literature,” and that this principle
“emphasizes the cultural representation of language. What connects language
and creativity is that for women, biologically confronted with the possibility
of creation, motherhood embraced or denied is unique to her sense of self ”
(26). In her attention to the particularities of black women’s writing (from
West Africa as well as the United States), Holloway wants to avoid what she
sees as the strictures of a “scriptocentric historicism” of women’s literature.
Instead, she describes a “mooring” that ensures a critical relationship between
“the spoken texts of myth and the (re)membered consciousness within the
literate word” (25). Seeing orality as the core or soul of literacy, Holloway
argues that it is from this soul that black women writers’ consciousness
comes forth. And, importantly for her, the metaphors that “identify black
traditions of literary theory are those that reach outside of Western history
for their source” (24).
While I would agree with Holloway that African diasporic literary
traditions often reach beyond the boundaries of (white) Western thought in
order to found its poetics, I am not certain of what it means to insist that
the tropes that identify the “black traditions of literary theory” come from
beyond the boundaries of “Western history” and, presumably, its aesthetics.
New World African writers look back to the Continent, the “motherland,”
but also look within the new culture they were forced to create for the sources
of their aesthetics and their systems of meaning; they are thus both “in the
West,” and not of it, to adapt a Biblical phrase. The words of Christ in John
17:9–16, which resonate significantly in much African American vernacular
discourse, speak of Christ’s people as being in the world but not of it. This
is, in fact, a wonderful poetic anticipation of Heidegger’s secularized use of
the phrase “being-in-the-world,” in which being is defined in simultaneous
relation to temporality and spatiality. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
African Americans regularly used Christ’s phraseology as the basis of their
expressions of consciousness, ethics, and morality; quite often, it emerged
from within the West as a stringent spatio-temporal critique of Western
processes of racism and oppression. In an ironic foreshadowing, Christ, just
before being betrayed by Judas and denied by the Apostle Peter, prayed to
God for his followers even as he spoke of their existential temporalities as
related to space: that life on earth was limited, but life beyond the world
was eternal. It is in this eternal and at times liminal temporality that the
saved would actualize their being, and we see such a creed reflected in many
of the philosophical metaphors I examine in this study.
Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s attention to Western theoretical perspectives,
including those of Heidegger, does not at all sit well with Holloway
(Holloway 103–104). Baker’s aim in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984) is to go beyond if not, in fact, reverse
his earlier work in The Journey Back (1980). There, he writes, he “envisioned
the ‘speaking subject’ creating language (a code) to be deciphered by the
present-day commentator” (1). In Blues, by contrast, Baker no longer sees
a speaking black subject, but a black subject spoken and displaced by
language itself: the “code” speaks the subject, who suddenly finds him- or
herself “decentered” in Baker’s thought. He explains: “I was convinced that
I had found such specificity in a peculiar subjectivity, but the objectivity
of economics and the sound lessons of poststructuralism arose to reorient
my thinking” (1). His reorientation leads him to formulate a blues theory,
which he terms a “matrix” that stands as a “cultural invention”: “a ‘negative
symbol’ that generates (or obliges one to invent) its own referents” (9). Like
Holloway, however, I, too, remain unconvinced of the value of proposing
that the African American subject be necessarily decentered in a wholesale
application of Western theoretical constructs to the question of black being.
For reasons I propose below, I believe that poststructuralist theory should
be further challenged to accommodate African American ontological and
epistemological perspectives, which strain at and test its limits.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s 1988 book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism, has been of remarkable importance to
scholarship on figurative language and intertextuality in African American
literature, as Holloway’s work makes clear. For this reason, I engage
him extensively here. His theory of “Signification” undertook a valuable
intervention in the theorization of African American rhetorical language.
As he analyzes the orders of meaning that evolved under the auspices of
the European concept of signification, Gates is concerned in his study to
“define a carefully structured system of rhetoric, traditional Afro-American
figures of signification, and then to show how a curious figure becomes the
trope of literary revision itself ” (44).
In order to demonstrate his point, Gates reminds us that the
standard Western use of the term signification “denotes the meaning that
a term conveys, or is intended to convey” (46). The advent of Saussurean
linguistics in the early twentieth century changed all that because it shifted
the denotation of signification onto the linguistic and literary grounds of
criticism: “Since Saussure, at least, the three terms signification, signifier,
signified have been fundamental to our thinking about general linguistics

and, of late, about criticism specifically. These neologisms in the academic-
critical community are homonyms of terms in the black vernacular tradition
perhaps two centuries old” (46). Gates dates the African American usage
of the word signification, which “[supplanted] the received term’s associated
concept,” at about 1787, 200 years before the time of his own writing. If
this is so, then the slaves’ emptying of the prior term and supplementation
of new meaning is coterminous with the early days of the American
nation, as the country was coming to form itself as a nation-state and
as concepts of American citizenship, individualism, and national belonging
were taking shape. It is not lost on Gates that, as he notes in Figures in
Black (copyrighted in 1987, but not published until 1989), ideas of race that
were anchored in an emerging pseudoscience were also crystallizing during
this Enlightenment era. Gates sees the slaves’ “witty” disruption of middle-
and upper-class white signification as a “guerrilla action” that denotes a
“Signifyin(g) black difference” (Signifying Monkey 46–47), countering the
dehumanizing signification that was ascribed to black difference in white
Western philosophy and social discourse. And while he is quite aware of the
traps that lay awaiting those who naïvely postulate a concept of origins—
such as that which might be associated with tracing this sort of language
use back to “[some] Black genius or community of witty and sensitive
speakers” (46)—he insists upon the intentionality that founds his project.
That is, he believes that “some genius[es]” innovated the “homonymic pun”
of “signifyin(g)” to differentiate the black enslaved interlocutor from the
free white interlocutor, who was much more familiar with the conventional
English usage of the term. And though he easily terms such usage “punning,”
he clearly argues for this innovation as a “complex act of language” (47).
The enslaved’s “signifyin(g)” difference, articulated from the Revolutionary
era through the time of the Civil War and beyond through the semiotics of
the slaves’ descendants, disrupted Western conventions of language, forging
an epistemological deviance whose import is difficult to miss.
As Gates puts it, there are “scores” of “revised words” “which snobbishly
tend to be written about as ‘dialect’ words or ‘slang’ ” (47):
But to revise the term signification is to select a term that

represents the nature of the process of meaning-creation and its
representation. Few other selections could have been so dramatic,
or so meaningful. We are witnessing here a profound disruption
at the level of the signifier, precisely because of the relationship
of identity that obtains between the two apparently equivalent

terms. This disturbance, of course, has been effected at the level
of the conceptual, or the signified. How accidental, unconscious,
or unintentional (or any other code-word substitution for the
absence of reason) could such a brilliant challenge at the semantic
level be? To revise the received sign (quotient) literally accounted
for in the relation represented by signified/signifier at its most
apparently denotative level is to critique the nature of (white)
meaning itself, to challenge through a literal critique of the sign
the meaning of meaning. What did/do black people signify in
a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the
subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of
white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness. (47)
With a provocative statement that black people, who are represented

as the “subjugated, as the enslaved cipher” (47), themselves perform the act
of signification inversely, Gates makes a signal and suggestive argument.
These subjugated speakers, by simply placing nothing on “the x axis of
white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness,” did not
simply “colonize the white sign,” but proffered a “meta-discourse” (47). They
“defined their ontological status as one of profound difference vis-à-vis the
rest of society” (47). Taking the opportunity to refute certain aspects of
Saussure’s structuralism, which we have already encountered, Gates vigorously
demonstrates that this enslaved community of speakers not only emptied of
its meaning a term in wide use among free middle- and upper-class whites;
they deliberately chose the term that served as the cornerstone of European
and Euro-American theories of meaning. As Gates puts it, “Contrary to an
assertion that Saussure makes in his Course, the ‘masses’ did indeed ‘have
[a] voice in the matter’ and replaced the sign ‘chosen by language’ ” (47).
Let me tarry a moment here over Gates’s signal adaptation (48–49)
of Saussure’s axis of language, which is itself quite well known to literary
theorists. Gates’s “horizontal” x-axis, which he names as the axis of Standard
English and white signification, is actually in Saussure’s model the axis of
diachrony: it indicates the contiguity (nearness) of signs, linked together in
a chain of speech, and evolving over time. It is the syntagmatic axis whose
combinations comprise consecutive units of language, “supported by linearity”
(Saussure 123). Gates’s y-axis, onto which he maps the signifyin(g) difference
of black language, runs vertically in Saussure’s model. It is the paradigmatic/
synchronic axis that Saussure calls the “axis of successions  .  .  .  on which only
one thing can be considered at a time” (Saussure 80). This axis indicates
the state of language at any given moment. In the Course, Saussure’s focus
is on paradigmatic/synchronic linguistics (y-axis), rather than syntagmatic/
diachronic linguistics (x-axis); he was mainly concerned to examine and
theorize relatively isolated language states, even as he acknowledged and
repeatedly underscored the fact that language was in constant modes of
diachronic change and evolution.
Mapping Gates’s y-axis of the black vernacular onto Saussure’s y-axis
of paradigm/synchrony would cast Gates’s theory of the fluid “signifyin(g)”
difference of black expression into something of a contradiction, given that,
according to Saussure, the y-axis of paradigm/synchrony allows the linguist
to freeze language in time, and there study it. Gates, conversely and by
virtue of his claims regarding the inventiveness and fluidity of black speech
(which, in turn, provides the foundation of black literature), ignores the
contradiction. He insists upon the play—rather than the stasis—of the y-axis
of language, and values much of this play for its relation to rhetoric and
tropes. For Gates, the play of black speech gives rise to a black ontology:
its inscription in the speakerly text of African American literature allows
the black subject to write her- or himself into being. To this important
point I will return shortly.
But here, first, a clearer understanding of other, now conventional ways
in which Saussure’s axes have been adapted is crucial to grasping the import
of metaphor as it relates to such queries and conundrums, especially since
Gates’s work has been so influential. Neither of these axes was discussed
in relation to metaphor and metonymy until the linguist Roman Jakobson
did so in his signal essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of
Aphasic Disturbances” (1956). In his studies of aphasia, Jakobson came
to identify what he characterized as two oppositional aspects of language:
similarity and contiguity. Jakobson would follow Saussure in arguing that
these two aspects coincide so frequently in spoken language that they could
be seen as occurring simultaneously. Even so, the character of the two uses
of language allowed Jakobson to identify two distinct principles of speech,
which he chose to name under the rhetorical figures of metaphor and
metonymy. Jakobson thus opposed two terms that had never before been
set in opposition. And he did so with, it seems, less than precision. As the
editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism explain,
Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy in “Two

Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”
(1956) became for him—and for many others following him—a

key to language itself. Derived from studies of aphasia (inability
to speak), Jakobson detected two primordial principles of
language use: similarity and contiguity (i.e., resemblance and
nearness). . . . Jakobson chooses to call these metaphor and
metonymy, using the names of two rhetorical tropes that had
not previously been set in opposition.  .  .  .  Jacques Lacan, building
on Sigmund Freud’s opposition between “condensation” and
“displacement” in the rhetoric of dreams, sees in the relation
between metaphor and metonymy the general psychoanalytic
laws governing symptoms and desire.25
Jakobson’s opposition was taken to affirm and even replicate Freud’s

earlier distinction between condensation and displacement in dream-work.
In turn, Freud’s “condensation” came to be aligned with Jakobson’s idea of
metaphor; his “displacement” was taken to be emblematic of metonymy.
Jakobson’s influential argument goes as follows:
Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment,

more or less severe, of the faculty either for selection and
substitution or for combination and contexture. The former
affliction involves a deteriorization of metalinguistic operations,
while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the
hierarchy of linguistic units. The relation of similarity is
suppressed in the former, the relation of contiguity in the latter
type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder
and metonymy to the contiguity disorder. (“Two Aspects of
Language” 1265–66)
Though Jakobson did allow for the peculiarities of verbal style in what
he referred to as “normal verbal behavior,” and argued that the processes of
both metonymy and metaphor are continually operative in such behavior,
he also embraced, in resonance with Jacques Lacan’s work on Freud in
the 1950s, Freud’s structuralist characterization of the unconscious work of
language. Jakobson writes:
A competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric,

is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social.
Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive

question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences
used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement”
and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s
“identification and symbolism”). (1268)
No less an authoritative interpreter of Freudian thought than Lacan

reinforced the dichotomy that Jakobson introduced. While Lacan saw
metaphor as emblematic of “symptom,” metonymy itself became a signifier
of desire. Indeed, Lacan’s views on metaphor, which I discuss in the Ellison
chapter, were read by the theorist Jean Laplanche as analogous to Freud’s
theory of and formula for repression (where metaphor functions as the
return of the repressed and undertakes a transcendent movement of rising
not unlike that of the metaphysical). And although Lacan rebutted what he
saw as a misreading of his theory,26 the metaphysical die was nonetheless cast,
it seems, for metaphor. Even Paul Ricoeur permitted himself a provisional
statement that metaphor’s character is inherently metaphysical (The Rule of
Metaphor 288).
However, metaphor’s action cannot be read as purely “metaphysical,” for
if, as Jakobson would have it, metaphorical action is limited to identification
and symbolism while metonymy is attributed the power of displacement,
how can metaphor also be defined in terms of Freudian condensation? Of
“the work of condensation,” Freud writes:
The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares

the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a work of
condensation on a large scale has been carried out. Dreams are
brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth
of dream-thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill
half a page. The analysis setting out the dream thoughts underlying
it may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much space. This
relation varies with different dreams; but so far as my experience
goes its direction never varies. As a rule one underestimates the
amount of compression that has taken place, since one is inclined
to regard the dream-thoughts that have been brought to light as
the complete material, whereas if the work of interpretation is
carried further it may reveal still more thoughts concealed behind
the dream. I have already had occasion to point out that it is in
fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely
interpreted. Even if the solution seems satisfactory and without
gaps, the possibility always remains that the dream may have
yet another meaning. Strictly speaking, then, it is impossible
to determine the amount of condensation. (The Interpretation of
Dreams 924–25)
By Freud’s definition, the dream-thoughts, which are “a work of

condensation,” are “brief,” and “meagre,” yet escape full interpretation. If this
is so, then the sense of metaphor itself (as a process of condensation of any
number of fragmented dream elements and thus as a combinational force)
defies satisfactory comprehension, for in its action, some of the nuances
of meaning not only always slip away, but often deviate from the “literal”
meanings of words and referents.
In other words, while metaphor does serve to substitute one word-
image-sound for another, and thus its action may be seen as symbolic, its
action is also one of displacement. As the term “metaphor” itself implies
(“metaphor” in the Greek means “to transfer”), metaphors regularly transgress
categories of meaning by supplanting one word, phrase, or even a discourse
with another.
None of this is to treat fully Roman Jakobson’s seemingly arbitrary
dichotomy of metaphor and metonymy, which has been taken up admirably
in the work of Ricoeur, who points out that metonymy often functions as
a type of metaphor, and thus a strict dichotomy of the two is impossible.27
Further, it casts into question Jakobson’s structuralist conclusion that the
“principle of similarity [metaphor] underlies poetry,” while prose, “on the
contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaphor—
and for prose, metonymy—is the line of least resistance and consequently
the study of poetical tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor” (1269).
Jakobson’s dichotomy of metaphor and metonymy leaves more questions
unanswered than resolved. It, in fact, leaves open the possibility of collapsing
his axes, the y-axis of metaphor and the x-axis of metonymy, one on top of
the other, so that the linguistic action of either cannot be neatly determined
through a structuralist analysis.28
Even so, Jakobson’s dichotomy has had great influence over the
thinking of such poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists as Ihab
Hassan. Hassan’s “schematic” figure (Fig. 1) distinguishing modernism from
postmodernism (given in his seminal 1987 essay, “Toward a Concept of
Postmodernism”29) is emblematic of the ways in which, following Jakobson’s
example, metaphor and metonymy have been theorized and juxtaposed in
poststructuralist and postmodernist theory more generally. (I reproduce
Hassan’s model in Figure 1):
Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form (Conjunctive, closed) Antiform (Disjunctive, open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening
Distance Participation
Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction
Synthesis Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/Boundary Text/Intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Interpretation/Reading Against Interpretation/Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible (Readerly) Scriptible (Writerly)
Narrative/Grande Histoire Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire
Master Code Idiolect
Symptom Desire
Type Mutant
Genital/Phallic Polymorphous/Androgynous
Paranoia Schizophrenia
Origin/Cause Difference-Différance/Trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Irony
Determinacy Indeterminacy
Transcendence Immanence
Figure 1.
In this model, which is directly influenced by Hassan’s readings of both

Jakobson and Saussure, the left column represents the vertical y-axis, and the
right column stands for the horizontal x-axis. Hassan’s schema dichotomizes
not only paradigm and syntagm—the paradigmatic nature of the y-axis
and the syntagmatic nature of the x-axis—as Saussure and Jakobson
did; it also sketches binary events, movements, and modes of expression
such as presence/absence, synthesis/antithesis, root-depth/rhizome-surface,
signified/signifier, lisible (readerly)/scriptible (writerly), mastercode/idiolect,
transcendence/immanence, and, importantly, metaphor/metonymy. Hassan,
admitting a lack of stability in each axes’ purported characteristics, describes
his schema in this way:
The preceding table draws on ideas in many fields . . . aligned

with diverse movements, groups, and views. Yet the dichotomies
this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences
shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column
are not all equivalent, and inversions and exceptions, in both
modernism and postmodernism, abound. Still I would submit that
rubrics in the right column point to the postmodern tendency,
the tendency of indeterminacy, and so may bring us closer to its
historical and theoretical definition. (280–81)
In devising this table, Hassan adapts with only minimal critique

Jakobson’s opposition of metaphor and metonymy, and though he admits
that the characteristics that found his model are themselves “insecure,
equivocal,” he nonetheless feels certain that the right column represents
the openness of postmodern and poststructural indeterminacy, while the
left column represents the rigidity, stasis, and metaphysics of modern
structuralist thought. Even so, Hassan’s admission of the equivocal nature
of his categories (the possibility that the two axes might collapse one atop
the other) lends additional force to my observation that a strict opposition
of these two axes is difficult if not impossible to sustain.
Even with his own incisive and well-informed critical stance, Gates’s
study does not discuss or interrogate Jakobson’s opposition at all, nor does
Hassan’s schema, published the year before Gates’s Signifying Monkey, factor
into his analysis. Gates looks instead to what is actually Lacan’s adoption
of Jakobson’s theory, though Gates frames Lacan’s theory as coming to him
directly from Saussure (49). Gates’s analysis focuses mainly on homonyms
and a genealogy of African American texts that “Signify” upon one another,
even as they “Signify” upon European standards of denotative language that
would be represented on the very vertical axis that Gates uses to indicate
the contestatory difference of black language (50). For Gates, these texts
therefore constitute at once metanarrative as well as metadiscourse, thus
they instantiate a discourse on narrative and knowledge. And, in doing so,
I would add, they also instantiate a discourse on being.
It is this latter point that I intend to pursue further through the
chapter studies of the present book. Gates’s theory has been of considerable
influence, and is quite fine and path-breaking. However, his interpretation
of rhetorical language in African American literature and his mapping
of black vernacular expression onto the vertical y-axis—the rooted axis
of structural determinacy—not only confounds the distinction between
linguistic diachrony and synchrony as demonstrated by Saussure, Jakobson,
Lacan, and Hassan (who, quite purposely, maps rhetoric onto the x-axis
rather than on the y-axis, as Gates does). It also risks ontologizing black
textuality in such a way that African American writers (and, by extension,
those communities of black life that the writers sought to represent in all
their complexity) are relegated to the position of non-being without the
text—to adapt with a sense of irony Derrida’s well-known phrase that there
is nothing outside of the text, they are nothing without the text.30
Gates argues that African Americans insisted upon literacy and, more
specifically, textuality as the central means of showing themselves to be
worthy of the moniker of the “human” because this was the proof that
white Western epistemology demanded of them. By arguing that African
Americans strove to prove their very humanity by demonstrating that they
could not only write, but could author a literary text,—and that, through
such authorship, they “write themselves into existence”—Gates appears,
in the first instance, (un)wittingly31 to enclose African American poetics
within a literary typology (the paradigmatic dictates of the y-axis) that
is subservient to the white Western discourse on aesthetics and national
belonging that he so strongly interrogates. In a well-known passage from
Figures in Black, Gates writes:
I would hope that it is obvious that the creation of formal literature

could be no mean matter in the life of the slave, since the sheer
literacy of writing was the very commodity that separated animal
from human being, slave from citizen, object from subject. Reading,
and especially writing, in the life of the slave represented a process
larger than even “mean” physical manumission, since mastery of
the arts and letters was Enlightenment Europe’s sign of that
solid line of division between human being and thing. (24–25)
Gates continues this line of argumentation throughout the pages of

The Signifying Monkey, for it was an argument that he had made earlier
in his introduction to The Slave’s Narrative (1985), co-edited with Charles
T. Davis. For example, in The Signifying Monkey, Gates contends that
Janie Crawford of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) “writes
herself into being by naming, by speaking herself free” (207); Celie of Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) does likewise, he claims. As Gates puts it,
“Celie writes herself into being as a text, a text we are privileged to read
over her shoulder. . . . Celie is a text in the same way in which Langston
Hughes wrote (in The Big Sea) that Hurston was a book—‘a perfect book
of entertainment in herself.’ We read Celie reading her world and writing
it into being, in one subtle discursive act” (245).
Gates’s meaning in these instances is compelling: through an act of
literary self-creation, African American writers, from the eighteenth century
through the twentieth, have used textuality as a means of creating being.
They had, to adapt Audre Lorde’s much used phrase to my purposes here,
taken the master’s tools (Prospero’s symbolic books and language) not to
dismantle his house, but to build a perceptible temple of the black self, a
habitation of the black spirit that was recognizable and knowable, even in an
age when the black body (and, by extension, the black mind) was generally
deemed inscrutable.32 Being, in this instance, appears to refer not only to an
imagined existential spatiality, wherein the effect of a self-conscious black
presence is brought about through a concerted use of figurative rhetorical
language in a literary text; it also relates to the prevailing notions of race
that occupied the social thought of the writer’s time. That is, it intimates
that writers of African descent not only acknowledged the questions and
doubts whites had raised about their very existence as human beings, but
they bought into and validated them by responding to them. If, as Gates
writes in The Slave’s Narrative, the slave narrative not only serves as the
foundation of African American literature (and this point is certainly
debatable, given the centrality of oral poetry—the Spirituals—to the early
African American literary tradition), but also “represents the attempt of
blacks to write themselves into being” (xxiii), it must, at the same time, attest
to the anxiety of the black author—a certain existential angst—in the face
of white doubt and denigration. Such writing is not so much art as it is
argument.
On the other hand, as the novelist and philosopher Charles Johnson
points out in Being and Race (1988), all literature is argumentation: “each
literary form, style, or genre is a different, distinct mode of reasoning, of
shaping what is to body it forth intelligibly” (6). Those readers familiar with
Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in the Poetics and the Rhetoric will recall
immediately the ways in which Johnson’s precept regarding the “body[ing]
forth” of reasoning resonates with Aristotle’s principle of metaphor: that
metaphor serves as the vehicle for the bodying forth of reality, what
phenomenologists and existentialists refer to as lived experience.
In this way, metaphor, full of its inherent mimetic qualities and
essential to Gates’s theorizing, is shown to be an aspect of logic, and this
is particularly so, but not exclusively so, in its analogical or propositional
form: a is to b as c is to d. This denotation of metaphor is demonstrated by
reviewing metaphor’s relationship to rhetoric and discourse alike. As Paul
Ricoeur points out in The Rule of Metaphor, metaphor is both an aspect
of rhetoric and of speculative enunciation, since each of these modes of
expression—in order to be successful—must draw from a society’s storehouse
of common knowledge and culture for validation. Thus while Ricoeur agrees
with Aristotle that metaphor is an aspect of rhetoric (which Aristotle
defined as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means
of persuasion”33), he also sees rhetoric’s development as necessarily emerging
out of vernacular (“popular” and “common” are the adjectives Ricoeur uses)
culture, wit, and wisdom. It is worth citing Ricoeur at length on these points.
On rhetoric and philosophy, he writes:
With Aristotle we see rhetoric in its better days; it constitutes a

distinct sphere of philosophy, in that the order of the “persuasive”
as such remains the object of a specific technê. Yet it is solidly
bound to logic through the correlation between the concept of
persuasion and that of the probable. In this way a philosophical
rhetoric—that is, a rhetoric grounded in and watched over by
philosophy itself—is constituted. . . . Aristotle was careful to
define what he calls technê in a classical text of his Ethics. There
are as many technai as there are creative activities. A technê is
something more refined than a routine or an empirical practice
and in spite of its focus on production, it contains a speculative
element, namely a theoretical enquiry into the means applied to
production. It is a method; and this feature brings it closer to
theoretical knowledge than to routine. (28)
And on rhetoric and the vernacular, he continues:
Rhetoric does not develop in some empty space of pure thought,

but in the give and take of common opinion. So metaphors and
proverbs also draw from the storehouse of popular wisdom—at

least, those of them that are “established.” This qualification is
important, because it is this topology of discourse that gives the
rhetorical treatment of lexis and metaphor a background and an
aftertaste different from those of the Poetics. (30)
Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle qualifies rhetoric not as ornate oration

or political persuasion, but as a “distinct” technê, a method of inquiry that
is capable of producing discourse. The linkage, then, between a rhetorical
theory of metaphor (with its attendant and distinct technê) and dialectic
(as a central process of philosophical reason) assures us that rhetoric
is kept “under the sway of logic and, through logic, of philosophy as a
whole” (Rule of Metaphor 28). For Ricoeur, rhetoric is “a phenomenon of
the intersubjective and dialogical dimension of the public use of speech”
(29). As such, rhetoric is effective only in its measure with accepted
ideas among the populace, for this is how it gains its persuasive quality.
Nonetheless, the so-called “death” of rhetoric, which Ricoeur locates in
the “excess of formalism in the nineteenth century” (30)34, was knelled
by its collusion with the popular. To locate metaphor exclusively under
the auspices of rhetoric, whose negative fate was sealed by its relation
to the public sphere and its performative nature (supposedly indicating
its distance from philosophical, speculative thought), underscores a signal
problematic for revisionist theories of metaphor, such as those advanced
by Gates, Holloway, and even the present author.
So, keeping this problematic in mind, let us return briefly to the
claim Charles Johnson makes for seeing literature as argumentation,
considering more fully now the relationship between plot and its main
devices (the most ingenious of which, Aristotle points out, is metaphor) and
the mode of argumentation that Johnson maintains all plot must take up:
[W]hatever else it may be dramatically, each plot—how events

happen and why—is also an argument. . . . If plot is anything,
it is a vehicle of reason . . . If some writers find plot to be a
difficult problem to solve, I would wager it is because they also
find it difficult to engage in the ballet of argumentation, and also
because they are not familiar with the many forms that reason
or reasoning can assume. It is this basic, genuinely exploratory
element in creative writing that leads some phenomenologists
such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty to conclude that philosophy and
fiction—both disciplines of language—are about, at bottom, the
same business. Merleau-Ponty, of course, goes farther than that,
making it clear in Sense and Non-Sense [1948; Eng tr. 1964] that
our lives are inherently metaphysical insofar as each moment
of perception, each blink of the eye, involves the activity of
interpretation; perception is an act, and this observation puts the
lie to that ancient stupidity that says the processes of philosophy
and fiction are two different enterprises—they are sister disciplines,
I would say, and unless a critic realizes this, his position is simply
untenable. (32; italics in original)
To be tenable, then, according to Johnson, any reading of African

American texts must at once engage art and argument, poetics and critical
discourse. After a fashion, the critic must agree with Ralph Ellison, who
once proclaimed, in “The Art of Fiction,” a 1955 interview he granted
to the Paris Review, that he “[recognized] no dichotomy between art and
protest,”35 here referring to a reasoned aesthetic argument against a status
quo such as Jim Crow discrimination.
In Gates’s study, it would seem that Zora Neale Hurston and Alice
Walker alike engage not only in the poetics (and aesthetics) of black being,
but they also partake of and contribute to an ever evolving and engaged
philosophy of black being that is highly critical of the failings of its white
Western counterpart. Even so, Gates implies that Hurston and Walker both
undertake what he sees as the literary process of “writing oneself into being”
differently than does, for example, Ishmael Reed. While Hurston has given
us a “paradigmatic signifyin(g) text because it figures signifyin(g) as both
theme and as rhetorical strategy,” Reed, on the other hand, has rendered a
signifyin(g) text “for still another reason” (217). Gates explains:
Reed’s concerns, as exemplified in his narrative forms, seem

to be twofold: (1) the relation his own art bears to his black
literary precursors, including Hurston, Wright, Ellison, and
Baldwin; and (2) the process of willing into being a rhetorical
structure, a literary language replete with its own figures and
tropes, but one that allows the black writer to posit a structure
of feeling that simultaneously critiques both the metaphysical
presuppositions inherent in Western ideas and forms of writing
and the metaphorical system in which the blackness of the writer
and his experience have been valorized as a ‘natural’ absence. (218)
It seems that while Hurston and Walker have given us novels that
exemplify how the heroine of the “speakerly” text writes herself into what
Gates sees as determinate being, Reed has gifted us with exemplary texts
that will into being a rhetorical structure of feeling. Because his own
writing, and particularly Mumbo Jumbo (1972), is primarily concerned with
the novel as a form, Reed’s is a gesture apart, according to Gates. One
dares say that, in Gates’s view, while Hurston and Walker provide us with
texts that define the subject by writing that subject “into existence,” Reed
writes in contrast to the texts that make up the African American canon,
which, Gates argues, insists upon determinacy and conventions of closure
largely through its major tropes. Taking up an oppositional artistic stance,
and insisting upon an “aesthetic play,” Gates argues that Ishmael Reed has
produced work that “figures and glorifies indeterminacy” (227). Gates tells us
that Reed accomplishes this task through “Signifyin(g), by repeating received
tropes and narrative strategies with a difference. In Reed’s differences lie
an extended commentary on the history of the black novel” (217). Gates’s
critique of Reed’s third novel is lauded by Johnson as “provocative” and
“thorough” (Being and Race 66). Gates tells his reader that The Signifying
Monkey itself “at the very least began with (and at most was shaped by) [his]
explication of Reed’s difficult novel” (218), which seems to exemplify the
characteristics of Hassan’s x-axis of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
While it appears, in Gates’s argument, that writers such as Hurston and
Walker write themselves forcibly onto Gates’s y-axis of determinate black
being, succumbing to the West’s demand for proofs of black humanity, he
sees Reed’s refusal of such demands as a valuable stroke of indeterminacy.
It has become a scholarly commonplace to reference Gates’s work
obliquely by contending that thus and so author “wrote him or herself into
being.” The phrase has won such wide usage that it is now itself a perhaps
unconscious trope, a performance of critical discourse now largely taken for
truth. I cannot dismiss this conclusion out of hand, for I find that it bears
some trace of legitimacy: many writers of various backgrounds have spoken
of the ways in which the practice of reading and writing aided them in
understanding exactly what it was they thought, how they processed their
experiences, and, indeed, who they were in the moment of writing and
beyond. However, the perspective I advance in this study is one that is borne
out by my readings of central philosophical metaphors in African American
texts that serve as a representative sampling of works across the tradition: a
certain grasp of one’s sense of being—however permeable and evolving—is
required before one even enters into the act of writing for public (or even
an intended private) readership. From the reader’s perspective, the completed
act of writing (that is, the published text) discovers consciousness even
as the writer him- or herself has revealed it. Metaphorical concepts of
black being are never fully determinate because the conceptual action of
metaphor is not absolute. It constitutes, rather, an open tautology, in the
sense that Édouard Glissant gives that term in Poetics of Relation (1988).
In the following chapter, we shall see whether and how such a perspective
has been espoused by African Americanist philosophers who look to black
texts—and the question of black being therein—as the scaffolding of their
speculative enterprise.
2
African American Philosophy and the

Poetics of Black Being
African American literature has long articulated a philosophy of existence

and experience, a fact witnessed by the frequency with which African
American philosophers have turned to literary texts not in an aesthetic
interrogation of the nature of the literary object, but in order to craft a
philosophy that debates the knowledge delivered through prose (and, though
less often, through poetry and drama) as it works to clarify what we believe
we know for certain about life, the world, social values, and racialized being.
Though he is not what one might call a “practicing” philosopher, Charles
Johnson, whom we have already encountered, turns with assurance to fiction
in his 1988 book Being and Race. Other philosophers practicing in the
American academy have likewise consulted the annals of African American
literature as they debate the meaning and representation of black being. Of
these, I discuss, in turn and in brief, the work of Lucius Outlaw, Charles
W. Mills, and Lewis Gordon. Of the many African Americanist literary
theorists whose work adopts a philosophical perspective, I discuss two
whose voices resonate well with the present project. The work of Hortense
Spillers and Ronald A. T. Judy will, in crucial ways, bracket my discussion
of African American philosophies of being expressed in literary culture, and
their relation to (and reliance upon) the metaphorical.1
First, a return to Johnson. In Being and Race, Johnson defines
phenomenology as a “philosophy of experience” that is grounded in the
immanent rather than in the transcendent realm. For him, as we learned
in the previous chapter, phenomenology is perceptual experience, and
perception is an act. It is from this perspective that Johnson undertakes a
phenomenological reading of African American literature and its literary
history. That is, he sees African American literature as work that clarifies
African American experience, and conveys the sense (the meaning) of that
experience to a broad reading public that is inclusive of persons of various
backgrounds.
53
“Our faith in fiction,” Johnson begins, “comes from an ancient belief

that language and literary art—all speaking and showing—clarify our
experience” (3). For Johnson, the metaphorical aspect of this art is an
“inherently existential [strategy] that allow[s] writers to pluck similarities
from our experiences or to illuminate one object by reference to another
by saying A is B” (6). Nonetheless, Johnson, in a Platonic mode and like
many structuralist and poststructuralist theorists of the 1980s, remains rather
skeptical of the role of metaphor in literary art, wondering whether it is
a “mere illusion, a mind trick or trap that dangerously anthropomorphizes
the world” (6). Yet, he observes by way of his reading of fellow novelist
cum philosopher, William Gass, metaphor is “merely a means of fastening
words to one another, not words to things.” Even so, he lauds metaphor’s
capacity to provide, in Gass’s words, “ ‘a consciousness electrified by beauty.’ ”
Metaphor’s “delights,” he and Gass conclude, are “ ‘as wide as the mind is,
and musicked deep with feeling’ ” (36).
Gass’s notion of a metaphorical “ ‘consciousness electrified by beauty’ ”
can be taken to constitute “historical beings,” Johnson argues. That is, a
consciousness that emerges from literature’s aesthetics may be interpreted as
a being grounded in an immanent temporality. In this way, the literary text
may project a consciousness that engages with the reader in her own time,
and even as time evolves our interactions with this consciousness evolve as
well. One signal aspect of Johnson’s thought in this respect resonates well
with my own purpose: a reader may well encounter an historical being by
way of philosophical expressions of consciousness. It matters less, as Johnson
argues, that we engage a particular entity (whether country, region, or human
subject) than that we perceive the gathering of experience and contemplation
that is situated in consciousness-inflected lines of text. From our encounter
with this gathering of meaning and sensibilities, the text, through its power
of images—that is to say, through its metaphorical discourse—bodies forth
meanings and understandings that we can take with us. To argue, as the
present study does, that the black text works to convey black being through
metaphorical constructions is, of course, not to argue that a racialized,
proscribed flesh-and-blood being is conveyed to the reader through the
material reality of the literary text or that such being’s existence depends
fully on the production of text, what Karla Holloway calls a scriptocentric
perspective.2 It is to say, however, that illimitable black being, such as that
in favor of which Du Bois argues in “The Conservation of Races,” is, as
Johnson writes of the conveyance of historical entities, “so much in the
way of perceptual experience that it is over rich, open-ended regarding its
meaning, and thereby defies our [complete] understanding” (37). The sort
African American Philosophy 55
of critical perspective I espouse regarding the capacity of metaphors to

fulfill the task of creating meaning may render black being sublime, but it
also underscores how metaphor bodies forth to the reader a meaning that
can be grasped even if only partially when flesh-and-blood black being is
indeed encountered. It should go without saying that this being is not at
all monolithic, absolute, or static, but living, dynamic, and always in flux
and evolving; it is, again, illimitable.3
Johnson’s example of such phenomenology in writing is Richard
Wright’s Native Son (1940). For Johnson, Native Son is a phenomenological
novel not because Wright writes Bigger into textual existence, but because
it is rooted (following Wright’s own poetics, as I discuss in chapter 7) in
the black experience (13). In this novel, Wright has created, as Johnson so
aptly puts it,
a masterfully drawn Lebenswelt: we are made to see and experience

meaning—the world—from the distorted perspective of a petty
thief so mangled by oppression in its many forms that his only
possibility for creative action is murder. . . . [Yet] Native Son
remains more than anything else a phenomenological description
of the black urban experience. Wright forces us to ask, “What is
it like to be thoroughly manipulated by others?” He shifts from
historical details of black poverty in Chicago to a startling use
of poetry and metaphor—the white world, the racial Other, is
presented to Bigger’s ravaged consciousness as a natural force
like snow, or a blizzard, or a storm; he projects himself into
innumerable objects littering the black wasteland of his family—
for example, the rat killed in the opening scene—and sees his
guilt in the red-hot furnace where he has placed Mary Dalton’s
decapitated body. Page after page, we are forced to interpret
everyday phenomena from Bigger’s unsteady position in the world,
a position of powerlessness, of Pavlovian reactions to whites who
are godlike but “blind” to his inner life and humanity, a position
where black life is experienced as being predestined for tragedy.
(Italics in original 13)
If the whites Johnson mentions here are “godlike but ‘blind’ to

[Bigger’s] inner life and humanity,” if they do not “see” that humanity
with what Ralph Ellison called their “inner eyes,” that is, eyes fashioned
out of consciousness and thought, eyes in search of beings to embrace as
fellow humans, then for these whites Bigger’s inner life and humanity are
nonexistent. His inner life and humanity, and by extension, he himself,

constitute simply non-being. It is this negation against which Bigger rages.
And thus there is an acute irony to one of Bigger’s final articulations from
his jailhouse cell: “But what I killed for, I am!”
That this statement, rendered as Bigger is condemned to death, is
metaphorical, and that it is, further, an open tautology (because its meaning is
both transparent and opaque), has not gained much attention from Wright’s
critics as a conceptual metaphor that poses a philosophical problem. Metaphors
draw an equivalence between two entities: A is B. Bigger claims that he is that
for which he killed: a free individual, at liberty from oppression, finally able
to act and do (“they don’t let us do nothing,” Bigger had complained to one of
his buddies early in the novel) with a sense of his own self-determination. If
Bigger is not only the abrogated representative of these ideals (because he is
their negation), but is also their living black embodiment, then the imminence
of Bigger’s execution at the novel’s conclusion takes on the ironic symbolism
of an oblation. Like Fred Daniels, the anti-hero of Wright’s The Man Who
Lived Underground, which I discuss in chapter 7, Bigger’s execution makes
of him a Christ figure whose metaphorical, poetic, and heuristic language
carries the wealth of salvation, if only its vast import were grasped: if Bigger
is not free, then neither is America; if Bigger is executed for his crimes, then
his death—the negation of a negation—only leaves America with a false
sense of consciousness. Bigger’s last, desperate plea for understanding of his
being is intended by Wright to form a bridge between Bigger, as the tragic,
didactic (in the Aristotelian sense of didactic tragedy) example of black life
who is human nonetheless, and Wright’s readers, both black and white. Recall
Wright’s best known poem, “Between the World and Me” (1935). The poem
demands with great skill the empathy of the reader, who, following the voice
of the poet, is called to take the remains of a “sacrificed”—tarred, feathered,
and immolated—black being into his or her own soul. All of this Wright
accomplishes not through angry protest rhetoric, but through multiple and
complex metaphors that raise the scene of a lynching before the eyes of the
reader. With such compelling and eidetic metaphors, Wright instructs his
reader to consider the violent realities of black life—and death—in the mid-
1930s. Black death, by lawful execution or by an angry lynch mob, hangs
over and stunts America’s consciousness.
For a working-class African American readership, as Wright had
argued in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” fictional stories such as Bigger’s
were meant to inspire and shape consciousness: if they could see in Bigger
some aspect of themselves while divining the greater meaning of the story,
they could be provoked to act against the yoke of oppression that held them
firmly in their places. For white readers, Bigger’s last words form an open
and almost perversely captivating gateway to his humanity. Bigger does
not plead his case, he states it: he is the freedom for which he has killed.
If Bigger is not free, then neither is America. If Bigger is destined to die,
then America should anticipate no less tragic a fate.
Wright writes black being after a fashion that challenges and
deconstructs the status quo. As Johnson puts it, the status quo of Bigger’s
world is “Manichaean. To be is to be white. The Dalton’s world is pure Being,
a plenum, filled to overflowing with its own whiteness, while Bigger’s world
has a weedlike contingency—is, in fact, relative being” (14). Bigger’s insistence
upon his humanity, which comes in the form of a metaphorical equivalence
between his life and the life he has taken, goes far in underscoring the
revolutionary poetics of being Wright developed as his own. Johnson would
contend that phenomenological prose—that which concerns itself it with
what has been called “the black experience”—is charged with a poetics
capable of “fling[ing] the reader of fiction toward revelation and unsealed
vision” (33). That which reveals black being in pre-Civil Rights America is
revolutionary; that which unseals our vision makes blackness visible.
However, the idea of the text as the transparent vessel of blackness
has not gone unchallenged by critics and theorists, and well this should
be the case. One might be justified in arguing, with Du Bois’s concept
metaphor of the veil as an ontological example, that black life prior to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of
1965 required an “unveiling” before a white reading public largely unfamiliar
with African American culture, history, and thought. (One is tempted to
extend this date right up to the present. In the so-called “Age of Obama,”
when a man of African descent ascended to the American presidency,
the American Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice John
Roberts, nonetheless in 2013 stripped the Voting Rights Act of its most
salient elements.) Even so, the prospect of the text as a transparent bearer
of meaning has long been challenged, and the African American text has
neither enjoyed nor demanded an exception, in spite of some arguments to
the contrary during, for instance, the Black Aesthetic period (the 1960s). The
major turn of the African American literary field toward poststructuralism
and a new, critical historicism in African American thought is traced by
Ronald A. T. Judy in his 1993 book, (Dis)forming the American Canon.
(Dis)forming the American Canon provides a concise history of African
Americanist criticism and theory, and places particular stress on the decade
following the Black Aesthetic period. Beginning with a history of what Judy
calls “The Yale School,” a school of criticism and theory led, principally, by
John Blassingame, Robert Stepto, and Henry L. Gates, Jr., Judy writes that
“their readings are exemplary of three central ideas that issued out of the
Yale school of Afro-American literary theory”:
First, their demonstrations that Afro-American literature can

withstand critical scrutiny. Second, their demonstrations that
close readings of Afro-American texts yield their linguistic (and
cultural) wealth. And, they suggest that through sustained critical
reading it becomes possible to delineate an Afro-American literary
history as a field of substantial scholarship, to engage in a project
of canon formation. The Yale school begins that delineation of
its canon with the slave narratives, maintaining that the slave
narrative was the archetype for all subsequent Afro-American
literary forms. (18)
The Yale school thus “discovered in the slave narrative not only the
historical emergence of Afro-American literary history, but also the history
of Afro-American theorizing of experience” (19). Blassingame’s work in
particular is of signal importance to Judy, who sees Blassingame’s 1972 study
The Slave Community as the publication that set the slave narratives at the
center of “theoretical discussions on the historiography of the antebellum
South.” This point is central to Gates’s work, and Gates adds a second
point which is, according to Judy, “more subtly articulated and has to do with
the nature of historiography, with American literary theory’s relationship, in
particular, to the concept of history” (33). Judy sketches this second point
in its relation to Blassingame’s historicism.
Blassingame’s work staged an intervention in the American
historiographical tradition, a tradition that had argued assiduously that
because most slave narratives were either edited by whites or dictated to
white amanuenses, they did not qualify as genuine autobiographies. “Even
when the editorial interpolation is minimal or nonexistent, the narratives are
discountable, because they are so wholly a form of deliberative discourse—
abolitionist propaganda—that they are too subjective to provide an accurate
account of ‘historical reality’ ” ( Judy 33). Blassingame interrupted this sort
of discourse on the slave narrative by using the narratives themselves as
documentary evidence of their veracity and historicity. What Blassingame
eventually achieved was nothing less than a “revolution in historiography” to
the minds of Gates and his collaborator, Charles T. Davis (34). Blassingame’s
study demonstrated the specious nature of arguments maintaining that

the slave narratives were too subjective to be taken as historical artifacts
around which one could assemble a discourse of documentation. This was an
especially important point, given what is now understood as the widespread
subjective character of “mainstream” historiography. Instead, he centered the
African American slave narrative/autobiography as a text that permits us
access to the phenomenological perspective of the enslaved. For Blassingame,
the slave narrative/autobiography represents what Judy calls “the enabling
of the transcribing of experience, the writing of African American history,
which is found ‘in the black texts themselves,’ in the recurring topoi and
tropes which constitute the shared modes of figuration found in the slave
narratives” (35–36).
Such an intervention into the praxis, theory, and philosophy of
American history as Blassingame’s is thus also an intervention into the
philosophy of being itself. The philosophy of history is most often concerned
with the history of thought, and thought, in spite of modern philosophy’s
surpassing of Descartes’s cogito, is generally deemed the province of the
human. In The Philosophy of History (1830–31), Hegel puts the matter thus:
“The most general definition that can be given, is, that the Philosophy
of History means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it. Thought
is, indeed, essential to humanity. It is this that distinguishes us from the
brutes.”4
Thought, it seems, could find its realization only in the costume and
custom of writing. Judy decries this necessary linkage between thought and
writing because it requires the symbiosis of writing and the human that
essentially serves as the foundation of Gates’s theory: the proof of humanity
(“that which distinguishes us from the brutes,” as Hegel put it) could be
located only in writing. Thus writing took on an empirical and ontological
status, and the writing of human history could do no less than contemplate
and document the history of human thought. The collusion of thought
(reason) and writing (reason’s expression) would form the foundation of
the West’s idea of itself.
These considerations cast Blassingame’s work on the slave narrative
into even greater relief: Blassingame’s intervention supplies a historiography
and philosophy indelibly marked with figuration and metaphoricity. We have
noted the importance of metaphor to Western metaphysics, but here we are
granted absolute clarity on the role of metaphoricity in the African American
literary tradition, a tradition that, over the past thirty or so years, has been
taken up by contemporary African American philosophers as the scaffolding
and bricks upon which a black or Africana philosophy is to be erected. Since
Blassingame argued that human agency founds the slave narrative, as genre
and form, and, further, is located in the “linguistic structures of the slave
narratives” themselves, it became necessary for theorists to examine African
American literature for its qualities and functions, especially in terms of its
use of figurative discourse. However, Judy argues, the agency that literary
scholars (in particular) of the 1970s and 1980s identified in slave narratives
has been discussed in terms of what he refers to as the “truncating effect of
motto: canon formation” (37). Our theorizing of black agency (and perhaps
here I might draw a provisional equivalence between Judy’s usage of the
term “agency,” and my own usage of the term “being,” since in my inquiry
into the concept I am concerned as well with the centrality of action to
being), analyzed during the years of America’s culture wars, seems to have
been hampered in the battle of criticism.
The work of Robert Stepto in From Behind the Veil (1979) is of signal
importance in this regard, a work that falls short, according to Judy, because
of its entrapment within the processes of canon formation that Stepto
himself casts into question (38). Stepto presents the African American
slave narrative “as a rhetorical intervention into the narrative Romantic
historiography of American culture” (39). Here, Judy sees an opportunity
for critique: “Because that designation is very limited, exclusively African
American, the interpolation proves to be quickly and easily appropriated into
the very instituting processes Stepto seeks to problematize. The dilemma of
this particular critique is that in order to achieve a successful intervention
into American literary scholarship, it articulates the same concept of the
literal writing of culture informing Romanticism, historicism: the notion
that the historiography of cultural production traces the historical emergence
of a specific cultural identity” (38). Stepto’s model seems not to challenge
but to support the traditional historicism he purports to work against, Judy
argues, given that it insists upon tracing “certain distinctly Afro-American
cultural imperatives” back to definitive “roots” in the slave narratives (39).
Henry Louis Gates runs this same risk, Judy points out, but Judy
writes that Gates averts danger by taking an alternative pathway. In Judy’s
reading, Gates recognizes the shortcomings of Stepto’s theorizing, and
instead theorizes that African American literary historiography emerges
“concordantly with African American literature,” an aesthetic enterprise that
is shaped and guided by the perennial quest for self-conscious being and a
free identity, which Ralph Ellison saw as the key to all American literature,
not African American literature alone.
As I discuss at some length in chapter 1, Gates’s theory is best known
not by the motto of canon formation (though that was indeed a foremost
thrust of his work during the period in question), but by his insistence that
“the slave narrative represents blacks’ attempt to write themselves into being.”
As Gates and Charles T. Davis put it in their introduction to The Slave’s
Narrative (1985), “What a curious idea: through the mastery of formal
Western languages, the presupposition went, a black person could become
a human being by an act of self-creation through the mastery of language.
Accused of having no collective history by Hegel in 1813 [sic5], blacks
responded by publishing hundreds of individual histories” (xxiii).
The slave narrative does not necessarily represent their accomplishment
in attaining this goal, but rather their attempt to do so, in Gates’s words.
Gates understands, as he makes clear in Figures in Black, the distinction
between a metaphysics of Being and human being as flesh and blood reality.
But he also ponders the blurring of the line between these denotations:
that persons of African descent were required to prove their very humanity
by authoring literary works; that they, however provisionally, accepted such
assessments of their lack of humanity by giving in to the “demand” to write;
and that powerful conceptual metaphors promulgated in both scientific and
social institutions, in fact, constrained them to do so. Gates writes that the
black tradition’s own concern with winning the war had led it
not only to accept this arbitrary relationship [between literacy
and humanity] but to embrace it, judging its own literature by
a curious standard that derived from the social applications of
the metaphors of the great chain of being, the idea of progress
and the perfectibility of man, as well as the metaphor of capacity
derived initially from eighteenth-century comparative studies of
the anatomy of simian and human brains and then translated
into a metaphor for intelligence and the artistic potential of a
“race.” (Figures in Black xxiv)
Gates laments what he sees as blacks’ espousal of what is tantamount

to their own negation, and, as I note in chapter 1, it is a critical stance that
he has repeated in his various examinations of the origins of black culture
and its tradition of literature. Yet for all of his pert attention to trickster
figures (calling, at various moments in his work, a thinker of Frederick
Douglass’s immense stature a trickster, for instance6), here Gates does not
allow that African American writers of earlier periods might have, quite
simply, feigned submission to the literacy imperative in order to “psyche out,”
by way of deft linguistic play, their white judges. Nor does he concede that
there might have existed in them the deep-seated desire for self-expression
that strikes most who take on the mantle of artist (writer, poet, painter,
sculptor, etc.), such that they feel compelled to give form to those thoughts
that so possessed them. Equiano’s narrative, to which I turn in the following
chapter, makes clear at a number of points that he wrote not to prove his
humanity, but because he believed his was an exemplary human story that
carried a critical, even preordained, message to his reader.
Gates’s work has been instructive and even formative in yet another
fashion—his placing of the term “race” in quotation marks—a critical gesture
that has not escaped the notice of practicing African American philosophers,
even if their reference to it is by inference. In the 1985 collection “Race,”
Writing, and Difference, Gates argues that “[r]ace, as a meaningful criterion
within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction”:
When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish
race” or “the Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers and,
more generally, in metaphors. . . . Race has become a trope of
ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups,
or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than
not—also have fundamentally opposed economic interests. Race
is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary
in its application. (4–5)
Such metaphorization of race, one that is closely related to the concepts

of being Gates promulgates, is intellectually and ethically deficient for
Lucius Outlaw, whose 1996 study, Race and Philosophy, is one case in point
among philosophers grappling with the late-twentieth-century problem of
race in relation to concepts of being. Outlaw, who takes W. E. B. Du Bois
as an intellectual guide, argues that “raciation and ethnicization are facts
of human evolutionary theory” (5). They may be socially contingent, but
they are nonetheless “anthropologically necessary” to the organization of
human society. Outlaw is discomfited by the contention of many scholars,
among them Gates, that race is a social construction and this is so because
there are so many obvious lived realities of race and racism. Yet Du Bois
himself metaphorizes race, as I discuss in chapter 5, when he deems it
the “most ingenious invention for human progress” (“Conservation” 817).
Du Bois’s metaphorization of race, which not only lends race a mappable
social structure (in that it sets up two oppositional, logical poles whose
antinomous interactions serve to define and debate the meaning and nature
of race), also grants race—as a metaphorical term—a conceptual basis upon
which it might be analyzed and, ultimately, deconstructed, as Du Bois
does in “Conservation.” Du Bois deconstructs race by performing a deep

critical ontology of the concept and the Negro’s place in nineteenth-century
understandings of race. He does not simply dismiss race as a construction;
rather, he begins his essay by criticizing those of his contemporaries who do
so uncritically; he analyzes and strategizes around the concept of race even as
he plans and calls for its abolition. For it is only by delving deeply into the
history of race (as identity, concept, practice, limit, and construct) that one
is able to transcend race (to move beyond its limits, such that black being
shows itself to be illimitable), as Du Bois urges in the “Academy Creed” that
concludes “The Conservation of Races.” (He writes in the second paragraph
of the “Creed,” “We believe it the duty of the Americans of Negro descent,
as a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the Negro
people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become
a practical possibility.”7)
Du Bois’s insistence upon racial solidarity in the face of racial violence
and discrimination provides the foundation for an argument such as that
advanced by Tommie Shelby in We Who Are Dark (2005): that blackness,
while insufficient as a moniker that could indicate essential and biological
racial identity, may nonetheless be useful as the basis of a collective social
activism and defense. Stuart Hall has similarly acknowledged the formations
of such affiliation when he points out that blackness had been, in the 1970s,
the umbrella under which any number of oppressed groups of people from
diverse, non-white backgrounds in Great Britain could gather strength in
numbers, in coalition, and in political and social solidarity against egregious
forms of racism, capitalism, and oligarchy.8
Yet while Hall warns that such collectivities are as capable of nurturing
essentialism as national powers have been (“diaspora, too, has been the site
of some of the most closed narratives of identity known to human beings”9),
Outlaw sees Du Bois arguing that races are bound together by common
blood, that is, by biological descent, but that the variability of inheritable
traits make identifying a race based on its physical features alone next to
impossible. This is why, Outlaw argues, Du Bois turned to history and
sociology to instruct him on the nature of racial grouping; that is, Du
Bois, saw that the historical circumstances that a group’s members enjoyed
or, conversely, under which they labored, would serve to define them as a
group because it bound them together in solidarity. They would, together
as a group, defend the material and social gains they had made, or, again,
together as a group, draw upon the strength of their numbers and collective
effort to cast off oppression and insist upon a share of society’s wealth and
well-being.
Outlaw wants to establish a philosophical anthropology and social

ontology that would allow him to understand and appreciate the “senses
of belonging and of a shared destiny by which individuals are intimately
connected to other individuals in ways that make for the constitution of
particular kinds of social collectivities,” which he calls “social-natural kinds.”
Races and ethnicities (or, “ethnies,” as Outlaw calls them) are particular
“ ‘kinds’ of collectivities; raciation and ethnicization the processes by which
they are formed and maintained; raciality and ethnicity the interrelated sets
of historically contingent and conditioned, socially defined, always varying
and contestable physical and socio-cultural features relatively definitive of
a race or ethnie” (7).
This position leads Outlaw to argue against those who see race as a
construction, either simple or complex:
Approaches of this sort fail to appreciate more fully varieties of

kinds of reals and the full range of social realities. As a result,
they help to impoverish social ontologies and thereby to impair
the development of a social and political philosophy appropriate
to a society that is diverse ethnically, racially, and culturally. As I
have noted already, a major concern for me is the articulation of
just such a philosophy supported by a combined social ontology
and philosophical anthropology different in important ways from
those that have been at the heart of modern liberal individualism:
that is, revised to take seriously racial and ethnic groups in order
to be a resource for praxes that might help us to realize social
peace and harmony with justice. (8)
Thus, in Outlaw’s argument, to say that race is a metaphor or a

“biological misnomer” (“Race,” Writing, and Difference 4), and leave the
matter there, interferes with and impedes the development of a social and
political philosophy that can serve as the basis of a radical praxis intent upon
uprooting injustice, including and especially racial and economic injustice.
It also implies that to speak of race as metaphor is to ignore the historical
realities of race; it is, in a significant way, an undergirding of liberalism’s
insistence upon a race-free society, but a society that ignores race in theory
rather than in praxis. An important point to note here is that such a gesture
accords with the insistence upon a “color-free society” that is one of the main
tenets of mid-twentieth-century liberalism; further, it lends its rhetorical
structure (albeit indirectly) to the discourses on the post-racial that are so
compelling to the twenty-first-century American public today.
Outlaw ultimately upholds what he sees as Du Bois’s insistence upon

“conserving” races. He argues convincingly that race is a social reality that
cannot simply be erased, placed in quotation marks, or deemed a social
construct and thus done away with. It is a real problem of daily existence,
and this is particularly true the world over of those social groups raced
as something other than “white.” The twentieth and twenty-first centuries
have witnessed an “increasing frequency of conflicts tied to valorizations
of differences among peoples that we characterize as ‘races’ and/or ‘ethnic
groups,’ ” and the horrors that take shape in race wars or wide-scale efforts
at racial cleansing ought to alert us to the need to examine the questions
of race and ethnicity with the closest attention we can manage, Outlaw
writes. Citing the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and echoing Hortense
Spiller’s 1987 critique of the Moynihan Report, and its perspective on
“ethnicity” as “mythical time”10), Outlaw points out that modern liberalism
had expected that racial divisions and, eventually, class divisions would
melt away in a modern democracy. Such an expectation was “born in
the philosophical anthropologies and political philosophies of modern
European and American Enlightenments and nurtured in the centuries-old
liberal-democratic, capitalist, and even socialist-communist revolutionary
experiments with forming decidedly modern societies and nation-states.
These legacies continue to serve as reservoirs of hope for many who would
complete the realization of the promises of modernity,” Outlaw concludes.
“But it has not come to pass that physical and cultural differences among
groups of peoples in terms of which they continue to be identified and
to identify themselves, as races and ethnies have either ceased to exist
or ceased to be taken as highly important in the organization of society
[. . .]” (10).
Because such an overcoming has indeed not occurred, Outlaw intimates
that the insistence upon erasing race from the American social lexicon (as in
the work of Anthony Appiah), “may well come to have unintended effects
that are too much of a kind with racial and ethnic cleansing in terms of
their impacts on raciality and ethnicity as important means through which
we construct and validate ourselves” (11). Just as we cannot will race out of
social discourse, neither have we been successful in appealing to the reason
of the global community as we seek to hold the excesses of racism in check:
“Appeals to ‘reason’ have not been either an effective vaccine against the
ravaging viruses of racism and invidious ethnocentrism or an antidote to
the social ills they produce. In fact, both racism and invidious ethnocentrism
are generally highly rationalized ventures. As was noted long before now,
reason can be a whore who sleeps with anyone” (12).
Races must be seen as both biologically based and evolving, Outlaw

argues. That is to say that while we might, ultimately, be able to trace any
number of races to their origin (and possibly even a single origin, given
the advances in the human biosciences), races must be seen as the “natural”
(12), evolving groups that they are. Race groups are, at base, human groups,
and humans, as “social animals” (13), must be recognized as association
and affection seeking collectivities, groups “secured” by “loyalties [and]
attachments that are contingent and variable, yet are necessary for any person
to become fully human” (13).
This last phrasing is significant in light of the present study, because
it underscores that for philosophers—and at times, even for Africana
philosophers—individuals are not born human by virtue of being members
of the species known as “homo sapiens.” Rather, they are human by virtue of
individual behavior, social and cultural associations, and, importantly, social
and, in modern times, political recognition, whereby their standing as human
beings is recognized, granted, and assured by a society, community, and polis
that are themselves anchored in the broader political association that we
call the nation-state. The definition of the human that I use is somewhat
different, for it grants all homo sapiens the status of the human at birth,
not by virtue of their material proof (in writing or otherwise) that they
merit such standing. This definition of the human also flies in the face of
the posthuman stance adopted by many in the schools of postmodernism
and poststructuralism, who see the human, as a figure, so maligned by the
thought and speculation of the Enlightenment that the category of the
human must be set aside, cast into question, placed on a par with animals
and plants, “seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines,”11 and so on. In
other words, what I imagine theorists of the posthuman to be about is an
equivocation of categories of being, and thus a theory of identity that runs
afoul of Aristotle’s dictum against such blurring of ontological boundaries.
The philosopher Lewis Gordon might argue that the openness in
Outlaw’s perspective on racial groups permits a sort of existential freedom
that he locates at the founding of possibility itself. But before going on to
Gordon, I will turn to Charles W. Mills, whose 1998 book, Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race, appears to provide a sort of commentary
on that of Outlaw. Mills begins by making the case for a philosophical
treatment of race, an argument that shares its thrust with that of Outlaw’s
perspective. Mills seems intent, however, on distinguishing his approach
from that of Outlaw, at least in part. He writes that “[since] its emergence as
a major social category several hundred years ago, race has paradigmatically
been thought of as ‘natural,’ a biological fact about human beings, and the
foundation of putatively ineluctable hierarchies of intelligence and moral

character. The discrediting of old-fashioned racism of this sort has made
a truism in liberal intellectual circles of a claim that once would have
seemed quite revolutionary: that race does not really exist” (xiii). To pay
philosophical attention to race, then, would appear to lend credence and
authority to an “enterprise” that is not only “foredoomed” and “pointless”
even if “harmless,” but also one that “seem[s] to run the risk of becoming
an inverted black version of traditional white-supremacist theory. So almost
overnight race goes from being in the body to being in the head, and one
shows one’s liberal commitment to bringing about a color-blind society by
acting as if it already exists, not seeing race at all, and congratulating oneself
on one’s lack of vision” (xiii).
Mills argues for a perspective on race that sees it simultaneously as
both “real and unreal”: “that race can be ontological without being biological,
metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential,
shaping one’s being without being in one’s shape” (xiv). He intends to
articulate a version of critical race theory, wherein the “critical” aspect of the
work lies in the recognition that race is both a construction and something
that “exists (and moves people)” (xiv). Thus for him, the aim of critical race
theory should lie somewhere between Gates’s constructionism and Outlaw’s
“conservationist” perspective. It should
make plausible a social ontology that is neither essentialist, innate,

nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that. And  .  .  .  the most
illuminating framework for defending this claim is, literally, a
global one: the thesis that European expansionism in its various
forms—expropriation, slavery, colonialism, settlement—brings
race into existence as a global social reality, with the single most
important conceptual division historically being that between
‘whites’ and ‘nonwhites.’ Those termed white have generally had a
civil, moral, and juridical standing that has lifted them above the
other ‘races.’ They have been the expropriators; others have been
the expropriated. They have been the slave owners; others have
been the slaves. They have been the colonizers; others have been
the colonized. . . . So one gets a formal ontological partitioning
in the population of the planet, signified by ‘race.’ ” (xiv)
Mills’s argument here is echoed, in part, by Barnor Hesse, who insists

upon a perspective on race, racism, and the post-racial that is framed by
post-1945 history. Hesse writes that our understanding of race as a modern
force must come from an understanding of the vast and ultimately world-
transforming forces of colonialism and imperialism, without which we would
not have come to know the current denotation of the word “race.” European
expansionism gives birth to modern concepts of race, Hesse argues.12 Mills
agrees:
Indeed, Westerners created race in the first place, by demarcating

themselves from other ‘races,’ bringing into existence a world
with two poles, so it is doubly ironic that they should feign a
hands-washing ignorance of these realities. Once the sociality and
historicity of the term is recognized, the claim that philosophy,
along with other, less lofty varieties of intellectual labor, is
going to be influenced by race should seem less provocative and
controversial. This claim does not imply any kind of biological
determinism; rather, it entails a pervasive social construction,
a set of positions in a global structure, for which race will be
assigned a category that influences the socialization one receives,
the life-world in which one moves, the experiences one has, the
worldview one develops—in short, in an eminently recognizable
and philosophically respectable phrase, one’s being and consciousness.”
(Italics in original xv)
Mills underscores the ways in which white being and consciousness

have been privileged in white Western philosophical discourse and inquiry,
in spite of its claim to be color-blind and impervious to racism. Privileged
white being is simple to conceive if one allows oneself these obvious facts:
“insofar as these [white] persons are conceived of as having their personhood
uncontested, insofar as their moral prescriptions take for granted an already
achieved full citizenship and a history of freedom—insofar, that is, as race
is not an issue for them, then they are already tacitly positioned as white
persons, culturally and cognitively European, racially privileged members of
the West” (italics in original, xv).
From the perspective of Mills and, as he describes them, many
of his African American students, Western philosophy is tainted by its
transgression of its own moral preachments: philosophy claims to be race-
free, but essentially is a philosophy intended to reflect upon the lives and
experiences of free, propertied white men who regularly violate the human
rights of men and women of African descent as well as, quite often, those
of white women, even those of their own class. Mills puts the matter thus:
The impatience or indifference that I have sometimes detected

in black students seems to derive in part from their sense that
there is something strange in spending a whole course describing
the logic of different moral ideals for example, without ever
mentioning that all of them were systematically violated for blacks.
So it is not merely that the ideal was not always attained, but
that, more fundamentally, this was never actually the ideal in the
first place. A lot of moral philosophy will then seem to be based
on pretense, the claim that these were the principles that people
strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles were the racially
exclusivist ones. (Italics in original 4)
That is, people of African descent were erased from the scope of the
Western philosophical project, which declared the essence of humanity to
lie only within bodies housed in white skin. Blackness of skin made black
humanity invisible. Mills describes such invisibility as the “experience of
subpersonhood” (6).
The analysis of “subpersonhood” over and against “personhood”
becomes for Mills the objective glue that holds (or should hold) all black
philosophical enterprises together. It is useful to cite him at length here:
What is a (racial) subperson? (The term, of course, is a

translation of the useful German Untermensch.) What are its
specific differentiae? A subperson is not an inanimate object,
like a stone, which has (except perhaps for some green theorists)
zero moral status. Nor is it simply a nonhuman animal, which
(again, before recent movements to defend ‘animal rights’) would
have been regarded, depending on one’s Kantian or Benthamite
sympathies, as outside the moral community altogether, or at
best as a member with a significantly lower utility-consuming
coefficient. Rather, the peculiar status of a subperson is that it is
an entity which, because of phenotype, seems (from, of course,
the perspective of the categorizer) human in some respects but
not in others. It is a human (or, if this word already seems
normatively loaded, a humanoid) who, though adult, is not
fully a person. And the tensions and internal contradictions in
this concept capture the tensions and internal contradictions of
the black experience in a white-supremacist society. To be an
African-American was to be, in Aristotle’s conceptualization, a
living tool, property with a soul, whose moral status was tugged
in different directions by the dehumanizing requirements of
slavery on the one hand, and the (grudging and sporadic) white
recognition of the objective properties blacks possessed on the
other, generating an insidious array of cognitive and moral splits
in both black and white consciousness. . . . This, then, is a more
illuminating starting point than the assumption that in general
all humans have been recognized as persons (the ‘default mode,’
so to speak). In other words, one would be taking the historical
reality of a partitioned social ontology as the starting point rather
than the ideal abstraction of universal equality, qualified with an
embarrassed marginal asterisk or an endnote to say that there
were some exceptions. (6–7)
For this reason, that is, because the person of African descent
begins “free” life in the West with a completely different set of existential
dilemmas, all of them arising out of oppression, the basic tenets of Western
philosophy, if adopted out of hand without reshaping or reframing, will
have “little resonance” for her or him (7). Obviously, Du Bois, for instance,
found a number of resonances between his own thought and the ideas of
consciousness he read of in the work of William James, the ideals of religious
philosophy examined by Josiah Royce, and the ideals of philosophical
absolutism propounded by George Santayana. Yet he reworked these to fit
the particular situation of the Negro; that is to say that he did not reject
them out of hand (though many who see Du Bois as an elitist overly
influenced by the thought of white philosophers have argued that he should
have) in an effort to recreate the wheel, as it were. Similarly, Richard Wright
has written of his taking recourse to the ideas of James and the tenets of
European existentialism, if only to affirm the evolving philosophies of being
that he himself was spinning in his fiction and essays.13
The examples of Du Bois and Wright might be taken to underlie
the conception of what Mills terms the “Ellisonian sum.” Making his scope
one of black and white, Mills argues that there are two sorts of selves
(“sums”) that one can identify in the history of Western thought on human
being: a Cartesian self with which most Euro-American philosophers will
be familiar, and an Ellisonian self that he imagines will be unfamiliar to
many of this same group. The Cartesian sum is faced with the question out
of which emerges all of modern Western epistemology, Mills writes: “what
can I know?” (8):
The Cartesian plight, represented as an allegedly universal

predicament, and the foundationalist solution of knowledge of one’s
own existence thus become problematic, a kind of pivotal scene for
a whole way of doing philosophy and one that involves a whole
program of assumptions about the world and (taken-for-granted)
normative claims about what is philosophically important. (8)
The Ellisonian sum, which Mills sees as emblematic of black being

and black existence, takes shape in the face of a different epistemology, he
argues. The “subordinated” individual, such as that represented in Ellison’s
Invisible Man, faces a wholly different set of questions when confronted
with the query, “what can I know,” and “who/what am I?” in the context
of a globally-construed existence:
It could be said that only those most solidly attached to the

world have the luxury of doubting its reality, whereas those whose
attachment is more precarious, whose existence is dependent
on the good will or ill temper of others, are those compelled
to recognize that it exists. The first is a function of power, the
second of subjection. If your daily existence is largely defined by
oppression, by forced intercourse with the world, it is not going
to occur to you that doubt about your oppressors’ existence could
in any way be a serious or pressing philosophical problem; this
idea will simply seem frivolous, a perk of social privilege. (8)
The Ellisonian sum will thus be quite different from the Cartesian sum:
From the beginning it will be relational, not monadic; dialogic,

not monologic: one is a subperson precisely because others—
persons—have categorized one as such and have the power to
enforce their categorization. African-American philosophy is thus
inherently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by
property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and
contesting its status. So it will be a sum that is metaphysical not
in the Cartesian sense but in the sense of challenging a social
ontology; not the consequent of a proof, but the beginning of
an affirmation of one’s self-worth, one’s reality as a person, and
one’s militant insistence that others recognize it also. (Italics in
original 9)
When Mills writes that the black sum is “not the consequent of a
proof, but the beginning of an affirmation of one’s self-worth,” I take him
to make yet another critical allusion to the discourse that surrounds Gates’s
contention that the “black tradition’s own concern with winning the war
had led it not only to accept this arbitrary relationship [between literacy
and humanity] but to embrace it, judging its own literature by a curious
standard that derived from the social applications of the metaphors of the
great chain of being” (Figures in Black xxiv). Mills’s position is analogous
to my own when he argues that in the face of such opposition, the black
tradition regularly and forcefully undertook a critical ontology of race that
reaches its modern apotheosis in Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races”:
a critical ontology of race that critiques and deconstructs the genealogy
that constitutes its constructedness. This sort of ontology requires not only
thought, but action; not simply theory, but also praxis. Du Bois makes this
clear in “Conservation,” and a similar approach undergirds, I argue, the
ontological metaphorics of The Souls of Black Folk.
Mills correctly reads the Ellisonian metaphor of invisibility—the
Ellisonian sum—through its forebear in the Du Boisian metaphors of the
veil and double consciousness, ontological metaphors that draw their strength
from Du Bois’s deep understanding of race’s power of metaphoricity, which,
pace Outlaw, I define in a way that acknowledges but ultimately differs
from that of Gates. It is not the case that all or even most metaphors are
weak or fanciful expressions of social realities; rather, such metaphors as
those proffered by Du Bois, Ellison, and other writers I discuss capture and
convey concepts, submit arguments, forge new epistemologies, and undertake,
in deeply sedimented and highly complex expression, critical ontologies.
This sort of metaphorical thought—which lies at the heart of the black
philosophical tradition because it lies at the foundation of the black literary
tradition—insists at every turn upon action of some sort in response to the
knowledge conveyed via the conceptual metaphor in question. As Mills puts
it, African American or black philosophy “develops out of the resistance to
oppression.” Thus it is “a practical and politically oriented philosophy that,
long before Marx was born, sought to interpret the world correctly so as
to better change it. . . . In a broad sense, virtually all African-American
philosophy is ‘political,’ insofar as the insistence on one’s black humanity
in a racist world is itself a political act” (17).
Lewis Gordon agrees that black philosophy emerges from the “question
of blackness” (5), and he, more pointedly than the other philosophers I have
discussed this far, analyzes literature not as the proof of black humanity,
but as a praxis intended to bring about freedom from oppression—freedom
of the mind as well as the body. In Existentia Africana (2000), Gordon

characterizes Africana thought as thinking that
raises ironic self-reflective, metatheoretical questions.  .  .  .  Because

of the emancipatory aims of Africana thought, . . . the activity
of writing ascends here to the level of praxis. . . . Writing is
one among many activities with creative universal potential, and
it is the theorist’s work not only to articulate this in the body
of literature left behind by prior theorists, but also to draw out
creative dimensions for subsequent generations, the effect of
which, in each stage, is the complex symbiosis of epistemological,
historical, and ontological possibilities. (3)
Again the ideas of agency and action take precedence in African

American philosophy, but to underscore writing as a praxis intended to
ensure freedom from oppression is to interrogate and challenge yet again
the proposition that African Americans write themselves into existence—
provide a proof of their humanity—through the composition of the text.
Gordon makes clear that the oral tradition that extends from David Walker
and Maria Stewart all the way through Angela Davis and Martin Luther
King, Jr. (and beyond) involves a use of language that is purposefully crafted
after a fashion that demonstrates its liberatory possibilities. Thus for Gordon
it is the purposeful and creative use of language, through both aesthetic and
conceptual means, that contributes to what C. L. R. James elsewhere refers
to as “creative universality” (qtd. Gordon 3). And such “creative universality”
is so central to African American (and Africana) philosophy “because it
always raises possibility, constitutes freedom” (Gordon 3).
Freedom, embodied agency, and liberation are all problems of the
human condition addressed by Africana existential philosophy, which
Gordon calls a branch of Africana philosophy. The human condition gives
rise to three recurring questions: “What am I/are we?” “What shall I/we
do?” and “What shall I/we become?” The first question is one of identity;
the second question is one of moral action; and the third question is one
of purpose. These are all ontological interrogations that seek a certain sort
of truth, and they are matters of teleological significance, Gordon tells us.
Such questions are not reserved for persons who consider themselves to be
modern beings, nor are they limited to persons who live relatively free from
oppression. They extend, as Gordon points out and as I argue in chapter 6
when examining Du Bois’s use of the Sorrow Songs in The Souls of Black
Folk, even to those in bondage.
For those who might doubt the capacity of slaves for existential
thought, Gordon, following the example of Equiano, Harper, Du Bois, and
other forebears, supplies a ready response:
I asked them if slaves did not wonder about freedom; suffer

anguish; notice paradoxes of responsibility; have concerns of
agency; tremors of broken sociality, or a burning desire for
liberation. Do we not find struggles with these matters in the
traditional West African proverbs and folktales that the slaves
brought with them to the New World? And more, even if we
do not turn to the historical experiences of slaves of African
descent and the body of cultural resources indigenous to the
African continent, there are also the various dialogical encounters
between twentieth-century Africana theorists and European and
Euro-American theorists. (7)
The perspective of the slave or the oppressed “free” person is, even
so, a perspective, one situated in the world and in relation to the world.
Situatedness, or “situation,” should be understood here as “the lived context
of concern.” With regard to the argument under development in this study,
Gordon’s words serve us quite well:
Implicit in the existential demand for recognizing the situation

or lived context of Africana peoples’ being-in-the-world is the
question of value raised by the people who live that situation.
A slave’s situation can only be understood, for instance, through
recognizing the fact that a slave experiences it; it is to regard
the slave as a perspective in the world. (10)
Crafting a Poetics of Black Being:

Du Bois’s Philosophical Example
When W. E. B. Du Bois guides his reader into the inner recesses of the life
of the slave and the slave’s descendants, and when he poses the question,
in the opening paragraph of “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” “How does it
feel to be a problem?” he grants that the Negro’s feelings in relation to that
problem must be seen not as simple emotions, but as a noetic processes:
as sites of intellection, such that structures of feeling are enabled to tell
us what we know, to establish a black epistemology that is capable of
answering ontological and existential questions. And in announcing—by way

of conceptual metaphor as a constituent element of narrative description and
argumentation—the existence of the color-line as a social and legal boundary
that artificially demarcates non-being and being (since it separates black from
white, subpersons, in Mills’s terminology, from persons) while qualifying its
rules, Du Bois challenges how we conceptualize the categories of racialized
being that the color-line ostensibly makes intelligible. Du Bois conceived the
metaphor of the color-line not only in response to the oppressive situation
of his own day, but also in response to a long history of anti-black violence
and discrimination. He therefore sets up an alternative ontology and an
alternative epistemology that confront the American racial, political, and
economic context. Such a creative strategy of responsive action resonates in
Johnson’s, Outlaw’s, Gordon’s, and Mills’s thinking, which in each instance
points out that a different frame of reference and perspective on the world
such as that held by the oppressed subject necessarily calls for a different
philosophy and a different way of articulating, categorizing, and judging
knowledge. Du Bois calls forth and validates the long historicity of black
folk, arguing that a history of enslavement and oppression does not leave the
African outside of history, as Hegel claims. Rather it is still, indeed, a history.
By drawing on the archive of black historicity left to him by such
early and diverse figures as Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass,
and Alexander Crummell, by examining and theorizing the local and global
experiences of blackness that obtained in his own day, and by insisting on
the study of the Negro problems, as he had from the time he assumed the
stewardship of the Atlanta University studies in 1897, Du Bois not only
counters a false European and Euro-American universalism that equated
whiteness with absolute being; he also develops a method of study and
activism that presupposes black being, agency, consciousness, and freedom (in
truth if not in fact under American slavery and Jim Crow), and in this way,
as Gordon points out, he transforms the “epistemological expectations of
inquiry” (93). Du Bois practices what Gordon calls an “epistemic openness,”
which recognizes that there is always more to know about a subject of
inquiry, in this case, the American Negro.
Du Bois draws upon the epistemological possibilities of metaphor
in devising the concept metaphors of the veil, the color-line, and double
consciousness as metaphors supple enough not only to articulate the
human condition of the American Negro (her situatedness in time and
space) but also to respond to the particularities of her situation through
concerted action shaped by her own perspective. Du Bois’s use of conceptual
metaphors makes clear that the historical question of black being and the
role of language therein must even unto the present day be re-examined
from a critical and creative perspective. Thus his work serves quite well as
the prismatic fulcrum from which emerges, in a transhistorical fashion, the
present inquiry into the poetics of black being.
Whither Blackness? Du Bois, Black Culture, and the

Contemporaneity of Black Being
In light of Du Bois’s work (rather than in its shadow14), the responsibility

of the contemporary black creative intellectual (as Hortense Spillers has so
aptly named her) compels her to respond to the specifics of the present time
of “crisis” (in the humanities, in the University, in American social values,
and in the global economy) and to those past moments of communal, social,
institutional and national memory that constitute the present as well as the
future. For each past moment of being at some point in our concept of
time was once both present and future, and text allows us to reach back to
those past moments to draw them forward into our own contemporaneity,
even as we project our thoughts, actions, and intentions toward the future,
toward the world to come.
The concept of contemporaneity and its relation to being has
received wide philosophical treatment from Spillers and a number of other
thinkers, and while my brief survey of its emphasis here cannot aspire to
be comprehensive, the concept nonetheless demands some consideration
in light of its relation to ideas of being, thought, and the lived context
of concern. Søren Kierkegaard’s view of contemporaneity, for instance, is
intended to reject the linearity of Hegel’s concept of time and history. Rather
than Absolute Knowledge (Hegel) as the culmination of history and thought
and the realization of consciousness through philosophical and, according to
Mark C. Taylor, Christological mediation, Kierkegaard insists upon Absolute
Paradox, such that consciousness never conceives of itself as a whole. Taylor
puts it thus: “In the final analysis this essential difference in perspective
explains why Hegel’s pilgrim can come to feel at home in the world, while
Kierkegaard’s sojourner is forever an unsettled, rootless wanderer” (107).
In another example of thinking on contemporaneity, the sociologist Karl
Mannheim conceived of time as a “cumulation of discrete moments,”
and according to David Kettler and Volker Meja, “contemporaneity is
one of the major suppositions” of his work (17). (Mannheim’s concept
of contemporaneity may aid in providing an apt and concise explanation
for the existence of twenty-first-century anti-African American racism
in what has been called the “post-racial”—but not “post-racist”—age of

Obama.) Mannheim developed what Julius Stone describes as a concept
of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous: he held that certain
contemporary social conditions have arisen from habits, attitudes, or social
situations of bygone eras, and yet they coexist with habits, attitudes, and
institutions that have arisen from present conditions. From a much more
benign perspective, Gulnara Bakieva puts the matter thus:
Contemporaneity is the present, which includes the past and

the future. As a moment of the space-time continuum in a
concentrated state, contemporaneity expresses both discreteness
and endlessness. That is because history consists of a multitude
of concrete historical and local contemporaneities.
Contemporaneity is “here and now,” while the past is
“already” and the future is “later.” History and human life go on
between the “already” and the “later.” Time is irreversible, and it
runs from the past to the future. However, the past, present and
future can be synchronized, thanks to social memory. . . . The
being created by contemporaneity is the continuation of the past
and the basis of [the] future. (v)
Each writer under examination in this study turns to social memory

even as s/he engages and addresses the problems of his/her present day
and plans for the future. Such is, as Balkieva notes, the mode of being
in the world that is essential to modern humankind. In this light, the
force of Jacques Derrida’s “always already” emerges even more powerfully
with respect to my work here: the past may never be left behind, for it,
like the future, is always with us, ever and anon. Like Spillers’s clarion
call, Derrida’s impassioned exordium in Specters of Marx (1994), at once
stirring, compelling, and haunting, though aimed more broadly, calls us to
a contemporaneous consideration of black being’s past, present, and future:
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance,

and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about
certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to
us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice
where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us
understand where it is no longer present, and where it will
never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights.
It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and
with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether

revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that
does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others
who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there,
presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.
No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle
of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which
disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are
not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars,
political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist,
sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of oppressions
of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.
Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present,
without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility
and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of
those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living,
what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where
tomorrow?” “whither?” (Specters of Marx xviii, italics in original)15
It seems to me that Spillers usefully takes up the critical project of

“whither” the direction of the question of black being, and “whither” the
bent of African American theory and thought, as when she insists upon
social memory and sociopolitical action via what she calls a “return to
the idea of black culture.”16 Spillers’s writing has long urged theorists and
intellectuals to test the boundaries of disciplinary thinking even as one looks
more intently into the recesses of one’s own thoughts and practices. And
so Spillers calls for transgression and displacement while inviting one to
come home, after a fashion, an invitation to delve within that often takes,
in mythological proportions, the shape of exilic wandering (in the sense that
Édouard Glissant gives this notion17) and noetic descent. Such descent, if
our philosophers are to be believed, is the only avenue by which we can
reach a moment of clarity, overcoming, as it were, the particular opacity of
our own conditions in order to attain to a critically revised sense of an open
totality, a polyvalent universal: one that is creatively expansive, alternatively
envisioned, and noetically rich. The synergy between gestures of descent and
ascent in the end may serve as an analogy to the contemporaneity of time
Derrida references: a delving deep into one’s own intellectual habitation in
order not only to place oneself meaningfully in the present of the universe,
but also to commune with those others from times past and anticipate
those others in times future who complement one’s own being, who reflect
one’s humanity in their own. I read Hortense Spillers’s 1994 riposte to

Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual”18 (a piece that could now
demand a post-date of its own, for two decades have now passed since its
first appearance in boundary 2) in this sense, for it anticipates, in a number
of ways, Spillers’s more recent work in “The Idea of Black Culture” (2006).
In my estimation, Spillers’s thought in both pieces speaks ultimately to the
broader importance that our consideration of metaphor and the poetics of
being bears for the itinerary of African American literary theory, as I hope
my brief discussion will show.
In “Crisis,” Spillers offers both a rejoinder to Cruse’s path-breaking
book and an assessment of the work required of black intellectuals during the
mid-1990s. The essay is striking for its address to black creative intellectuals,
and by this moniker I take Spillers to speak to (even as she speaks for
and with) a broad swatch of black academics working in the post-Civil
Rights climate of that decade, as the first wave of powerful, outspoken
African American thinkers and cultural workers (Holloway, Gates, Outlaw,
Baker, and many others) to have gained access to the so-called “mainstream”
academy after the tidal wave of protest activism that marked the late 1960s.
Such a “calling out” of creative African American writers and thinkers as
Spillers puts forward had not been sounded since the deaths of Richard
Wright (in 1960), W. E. B. Du Bois (in 1963), and James Baldwin (in 1987).
Not without its own significance is the fact that Spillers’s essay appeared
in the months following Ralph Ellison’s death in April 1994. It thus was
her own critical moment of writing, her own creative habitation that she
interrogated as she pondered the stretch of intellectual time that separated
her temporality from that of Cruse.
Spillers was not alone in identifying 1994 as a moment of crisis in
black American thought and activism, and this in spite of the accolades that
the mainstream academy and public had showered on such literary lights as
Toni Morrison and Rita Dove. Morrison was recipient of the Nobel Prize
in literature in 1993; in that same year, Dove was named Poet Laureate
of the United States. What is more, 1993 witnessed the publication of
what has proved to be one of the most significant theoretical works of the
decade: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Equally distinguished is Morrison’s 1992 work of criticism, Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (whose first chapter is titled,
compellingly, “Black Matters,” preparing the way, it would seem, for Cornel
West’s influential Race Matters the following year in 1993). While Morrison
looks at figurations of blackness in modern white American texts, Gilroy
takes up a much needed theoretical and historicist perspective on African
American cultural and intellectual expression in the age of modernity,

a charge that he plunges into through the prism of Du Bois’s concept
metaphor of double consciousness. And I have already spoken at length of
the contributions of Ronald A. T. Judy’s work in (Dis)forming the American
Canon, also published in 1993, to the critical discourse of the moment. In
each case and to varying but significant degrees, these scholars’ attention
was drawn to the conceptual metaphorics at work in African American
cultural production. Their voices, raised in unison with Spillers’s, engaged
with a great sense of urgency the work of the African American intellectual
in Spillers’s own moment of contemporaneity.
The convening of the “Race Matters” conference at Princeton University
by Wahneema Lubiano and others in 1994 seemed likewise to rise to the
task at hand. An influential collection of critical essays, The House that Race
Built, published in 1997, resulted from the papers and discussions that took
place in Princeton in 1994. The Princeton conference drew its inspiration
from and followed in the considerable wake of West’s Race Matters. West
had, in his widely read book, insisted upon just such an expansive dialogue
on race in America as would take place at Princeton the following year.
And although Spillers does not appear among the roster of contributors
to The House that Race Built (which includes pieces by West, Lubiano, and
Morrison, among others) her work is undoubtedly in dialogue with them,
offering a perspective that might best be described as that of the literary
critic cum philosopher who turns her incisive gaze toward the responsibility
of the “organic” black intellectual, even as she ponders the possibility that
such a Gramscian notion could still be realized in the moment of late
capitalism.
Foregrounding what she sees as the necessary task of her day, Spillers
identifies Cruse’s book as the first work since Du Bois’s autobiographies to
address specifically the role of the black intellectual in late-twentieth-century
American society. For Spillers, W. E. B. Du Bois’s autobiographies were
themselves a demonstration of the project that the black creative

intellectual might engage when he or she defines his/her auto-
bios-graphe in the perspective of historical time and agency.
Between Du Bois and Cruse, with the possible exceptions of
Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who had both focused on
the fictional writer’s commitment and vocation, we had to wait
awhile, as though poised, it seemed, for an apposite interpretive
gesture at the close of an era of cataclysmic events between
Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka) (1954) and the 1964 Civil
Rights legislation—the two punctualities that frame one of the

most fateful decades of African-American cultural and historical
apprenticeship in the United States. (“The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual: A Post-Date” 428).19
As she looks back to the time of Cruse’s writing, Spillers is intent upon
naming the dilemma of the contemporary African American intellectual
by drawing into relation the writer’s “auto-bios-graphe,” which I take to
refer to the expression of the self (“auto”) and of one’s existence (“bios”)
through writing (“graphe”), with historicity and embodied agency. She notes
extensively the qualities that serve to differentiate her historical moment
from those of Cruse and Du Bois. In the main, they have to do with such
matters as the outsized African American prison population, America’s drug
culture, economic and educational inequities, the domestic and international
appetite for violence, and rabid racism. “To call attention to these vital
details is to indulge the litany of responses that is by now customary for
the black creative intellectual,” Spillers writes (431). Even so, it is a highly
textured backdrop that Spillers insists requires an analytical and impassioned
response. It requires the establishment of a “total perspective against which
the work of the intellectual unfolds” (Italics in original 431).
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, in light of the student
uprisings and feminist agitations of the 1970s, Spillers contends that those
black intellectuals who came “of age” during the 1980s have, at times, folded
in the face of that decade’s greatest challenges: urban blight and white
flight as public schools were forced to desegregate; a declining American
market; the breakdown of African American “communities”; and the white
“backlash” against the gains of civil rights legislations, among other factors.
Within this “maelstrom of forces,” Spillers writes, “the black, upwardly
mobile, well-educated subject has not only ‘fled’ the old neighborhood (in
some cases, the old neighborhood isn’t even there anymore!) but, just as
importantly, has been dispersed across the social terrain to unwonted sites of
work and calling” (433). In Spillers’ view, what the creative black intellectual
of the mid 1990s should realize is exactly where this leaves him or her, and
what work she or he has to do. As Spillers puts it, the black intellectual
should neither long for a lost mythological “community” whose collective,
holistic identity could provide a curative for the loss of “home”; nor should
she allow such overwhelming circumstances to leave her paralyzed “by guilt
over one’s relative success and profound delusion about one’s capacity to lead
the masses (of which, one supposes, it is certain she is not one!) out of their
Babylon” (433). Rather, the black creative intellectual should contemplate the
ground on which she stands, a site hallowed by the halls of the American
academy, only recently opened broadly (though not fully) to those of darker
hue. The “mainstream academy and its various ideological commitments”
define the situatedness—the lived context of concern—of the black creative
intellectual, the writer and thinker; indeed, those “progressive movements”
that catapulted her to the heights of the ivory tower are under attack from
well-funded conservative elements that are pushing back against progressive
gains. Under this weight and under considerable siege, the black creative
intellectual needs to consider what work is to be done now, Spillers argues.
Spillers brings her critique into the twenty-first century in “The Idea
of Black Culture,” a piece that I see in a continuum, a line of thought that
extends from her 1994 intervention in the “Crisis” of black intellectualism.
She names the problem of the twenty-first century in black critical studies,
a crucial naming because critical black social discourse, as was proved at the
emergence of what has come to be called the politics of postmodernism,20
often directs the turning of theory. Spillers is intent upon analyzing black
culture as a “conceptual object” and as a “practical devise [sic] toward the
achievement of social transformation” (8). One would not be remiss in
considering language and especially conceptual metaphorical language to
be a foremost constituent of such a “conceptual object,” given Spillers’s
working definition of “culture,” which she shapes through readings of
Herbert Marcuse and, in a gesture that parallels my own, Du Bois. What
seems apparent at this point is that Spillers is concerned to address the
idea of black culture as one that is capable of cultural “revolution.” And
indeed, the tracing of traces, faint and bold, of black culture might itself be
considered a revolution in theory, if I may be pardoned for purloining the
title of Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1974, trans. 1984) in
my phrasing. For Spillers, the very “idea of black culture” itself posits as a
project whose aim is, in part, to undertake critical reflection on instances
of “emergent social formation in discourse,” and here, in my reading, both
conceptual language and epistemology are flagged as practices that possess
the capacity and potential of interventional praxes. It says that the experience
of black being, expressed in various forms of culture (song, religion, dance,
language, etc) carries within it the latent, but potent, promise of creative
intellectual work. Again, then, in 2006 as in 1994, Spillers’s attention to the
work of black creative intellectuals comes clear; and here as she had some
twelve years earlier, one finds Spillers tracing the history of black creative
thought from the fervor of the 1960s to the upheavals of subsequent times.
Fred Moten’s conclusion to “The Case of Blackness” (2008) provides an
interesting rejoinder to my thoughts and Spillers’s words. He writes that the
“lived experience of blackness” (and he is here reading the critical questions

of objectivity and subjectivity in the “early and late” Fanon) emerges as a
“duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain performance of the
labor of the negative, to avoid his economy of objectification and standing
against, to run away from the snares of recognition” (“The Case of Blackness”
211). Moten reads the case of blackness in Fanon as one that opens the
possibility of the recuperation of the human, even as it “[troubles]” such
“rehabilitation.” Blackness for him can and should impose a duty to “[refuse]
the labor of the negative” (211). In a gesture that appears, at this point,
to deviate from that of Gates and Judy,21 a detour that in part reflects my
own, Moten insists upon the positive and critical life force that might be
exemplified in blackness, a life force that possesses the potential for change
that is both social and cultural. This sort of ontology, which I have called a
“critical ontology” (in Foucault’s sense of this term), correlates in some ways
with what Nahum Chandler has named a “para-ontology”: it names the
“transformative pressure blackness puts on philosophical concepts, categories,
and methods” (Moten 215ff3). This sort of critical action accords with
Spillers’s idea of the revolutionary potential of black culture (if, according
to her reading, black culture refuses the falseness of Western materialism and
continues its long tradition of resistance and critique). Such is also central
to the meaning(fulness) I want to grasp and hold on to as the living “thing”
of my project, that is, the recuperation of black being, drawing it out of
the fire of objectification and negation in which it has been immolated by
some quarters of African Americanist thought. (The immolating gestures
of such thought might be termed “post-black,” but this is a question for
another time.) Black being, relieved of certain falsities alive in “post-
racialist” discourse, must nonetheless maintain a stringent exposition of
global oppression, global capitalization and imperialism, nationalist racism,
uncritical post-racialist discourses, racial “tolerance,” post-modernist “mixed-
race” thought of the sort that seems to lack a rigorous critique of the concept
of race as it distances itself from it, and so on.22
In this light, Spillers’s insistence on the value of black culture—that
black culture can and should be considered as a conceptual field that is ripe
for inquiry and that it can enable radical and even revolutionary thought
and praxis—is of great importance to the sort of analysis of conceptual
metaphors I undertake in this study, since language lies at the heart of
our understanding of culture. Spillers casts the question of the idea of
black culture as a “second level” stress that must follow an inquiry into the
notion of culture more broadly defined. That is, as she writes, “before we
can venture an idea about the ‘idea of black culture,’ we must reestablish
an outlook on the ‘idea of culture’ ” (10). To do so, she first turns to the
work of Raymond Williams, who defines culture in terms of three “ ‘broad
active categories of usage’ ” (11). First, culture is the “ ‘independent and
abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual
and aesthetic development.’ ” Second, culture indicates a “ ‘particular way
of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group.’ ” And, finally, culture is
that which “ ‘describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially
artistic activity’ ” (11–12). Yet for all this, culture is “visible only in its effects,
and its contents show forth a repertoire of implements, from the fantastic/
imaginal to the actual/material that splinter in pluralness and considerable
variation. From this vantage, there are, perhaps, only [black] cultures” (12).
Many points arise for our consideration at this juncture. The
simultaneous visibility and invisibility of (black) culture, for instance, and
its striking relation to conceptual metaphors of the theoretical visibility
and invisibility of black people are propounded in the work of Charles
Mills. Blackness here is akin to the “accident” of fleshly appearance which
makes it unequal to Aristotle’s category of “substance” or “essence,” even as
it has been taken to be, since at least the Enlightenment, the very avatar
of essentialized racial being. Spillers worries that a distinct notion of black
culture has disappeared, having been absorbed into the state apparatuses
that make cultural revolution improbable if not impossible.
This is a quite interesting assessment to make, since one could
argue that the liberalism of the Enlightenment first differentiated whites
from blacks, then demanded the “disappearance” of racial difference and
particularly blackness, initially by writing black people out of the official
documents of national belonging and recognition, then by making blackness
the unnamable and infrahuman definition of whiteness, Americanness, and
Europeanness themselves. Just as European and Euro-American thought
“disappeared” blackness during the revolutionary era of nationalism and
nascent capitalism, the postmodern era of late capitalism has yet again taken
up a raceless ideal, postulating the “post-racial” black subject as that desired
being whose difference is “absorbed” into the state apparatus of whiteness,
while the “post-racialism” of white subjects has remained untheorized,
un-desired, and outside of the popular and political imaginaries.
Spillers values culture in general, and black culture specifically, for
its “corrective potential” (14), since it takes shape not only in its relation
to what Marcuse called the “ ‘higher dimension of human autonomy and
fulfillment,’ ” but also in its centrality to what he called civilization, which
refers to “ ‘the realm of necessity, or socially necessary work and behavior’ ”
(14). What this means for today’s “cultural worker,” for women and men
who travail in what Du Bois called the “kingdom of culture,” is that there
is a critical intersection between “the imperatives of reading and the goad
to action—in short, the defining dilemma of Du Bois’s life and meditation”
(15). This is, or at least should be, the end goal of the black cultural project,
Spillers argues, again drawing Du Bois into discourse with Herbert Marcuse,
whom he preceded in thought by a number of decades.
For Marcuse, the goal of the revolutionary cultural worker and the
labor of humanitas consist in “ ‘modes of thought, imagination, expression
essentially nonoperational and transcendent, transcending the established
universe of behavior not toward a realm of ghosts and illusions, but toward
historical possibilities’ ” (16). At the core of Marcuse’s idea of humanitas,
Spillers writes, is what he calls the “ ‘cognitive content’ ” of “the cultural
oeuvres,” which, when “set over and against operational modes of thought
and behavior [favored by “the prevailing civilization in advanced industrial
countries,” that is, by the hegemon], would constitute and complement
transformative aims analogous to the protocols of human reconstruction
that Du Bois sketches throughout the body of The Souls of Black Folk”
(16). While Marcuse argues that the so-called “high culture” of a society
evolves into ideology that supports and makes possible the longevity of the
hegemon, even as it neglects its responsibility of humanization and takes
up, instead, the processes of civilization (which has the potential to colonize
and oppress), the cultures of the working people and the oppressed, which,
ironically, permit the reproduction of higher culture and civilization, may
well serve as a site of respite that promises or makes possible revolution.
It is this site that Du Bois enters and into which he invites us when
he analyzes the inner recesses of black life within what he metaphorically
conceptualizes as the veil. This metaphorical, conceptual site, as Spillers
argues, is the “space of the political” (20), a space of potentiality, potency, and
action that black cultural workers of the twenty-first century must reclaim
and cultivate as their own.
Thus, when Du Bois devises the metaphor of the veil to mark the
threshold of this space, he devises no simple figuration of language, no
languid ornament of speech to adorn and beautify a treasure of words.
The metaphor of the veil, like the metaphors of the color-line and double
consciousness, draws upon the history of black critical discourses whose
traces and effects still resonated in Du Bois’s day, drawing him into
a communal interchange with such exemplary figures as Equiano and
Harper. What is more, Du Bois’s conceptual figurations, his folding of the
onto-theological tropes favored by Equiano in his crusade for liberty and
his re-memory of Harper’s slave subject, whose life expressions Du Bois
was instrumental in archiving, were formative modernist constructions of

philosophical metaphorical discourse whose influence on the thought and
poetics of such later writers as Wright and Ellison are palpable. This sort of
metaphorical discourse reveals black being and ensures its viability, even as it
analyzes, critiques, and resists the forced invisibility of the black subject. Such
writing writes black being while refusing, as Moten cautions, the labor of
the negative. The ethics of this poetics of being is an ethics of action, which
emerges importantly (though not exclusively) from sites of consciousness
and self-reflexion that one finds in text. The habitation of the veil is black
being’s inhabitation of the text, which names a poetics that remains vital in
and ripe for the reading of African American literature. In Part II, I begin
my series of theoretical readings by way of this poetics, commencing with
Olaudah Equiano’s eighteenth-century Interesting Narrative.
II
Reading the Poetics of Black Being

Before and After Du Bois
3
Being and Becoming

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
There are two remarkable and strikingly contrasting pieces—one visual

and one inscribed, a duality of imagery and writing—that serve as equally
significant paratexts to the 1789 classic, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, a memoir that is widely considered
to be a founding text of the African American literary tradition. Equiano
stands at the wellspring of this tradition not simply because his narrative
represents a finely wrought modern subjectivity in a way that makes clear its
relation to the formation of modern nation-states, but also for the powerful
metaphorics with which he negotiates the competing discourses of church
and state. From the opening pages of his text, Equiano informs the reader
that his own being is forcibly formed in the crucible of such tensions, and
that it is out of this abyss that his own sense of modern being must make
itself known.
Indeed, Equiano uses what I have called metaphors of being in order
to conceptualize his own existence with respect to the historical era during
which he lived and, equally important, the agency he sought to foster and
maintain. In this chapter, I consider Equiano’s Narrative as the conceptual
object he intended it to be. As I point out in chapter 2, the catalyst behind
my approach may be located in Hortense Spillers’s clarion call to black
creative intellectuals.
In “The Idea of Black Culture,” Spillers urges black intellectuals to
reinvigorate their creative and critical practices with renewed attention to the
vital details of black existence documented in what she calls the “auto-bios-
graphe” of the black writer. I intend to analyze Equiano’s Narrative as the
sort of “conceptual object” and “practical devise [sic] toward the achievement
89
of social transformation” that Spillers deems the necessary focus of a useful

and impactful critical discourse. Equiano’s Narrative is located at that site
where the traces of black culture have, over the past four decades, become
more clearly legible to the theorist and historian. Thus it is with Equiano
that I begin this study’s analysis of the experience of black being as it is
expressed through conceptual metaphors in African American literature.
As we shall see, the sort of metaphorical expression Equiano favors
may be best described as onto-theological. At once secular and sacred in
nature, Equiano’s metaphors draw upon Biblical tropology even as he quite
astutely expresses his sense of being-in-the-world as a modern man whose
blackness enforces a perceptible distinction in his discourse. Here I am
concerned, to borrow once again Nahum Chandler’s instructive phrasing,
to name the “transformative pressure” Equiano’s metaphors of black being
bring to bear upon modern “philosophical concepts, categories, and methods”
Being and Becoming 91
(qtd. Moten 205ff3). Ingeniously, Equiano’s use of the onto-theological in

his metaphors of being emerges not through words alone, but also through
visual culture. As Spillers might likewise say, such metaphorical expression as
is exemplified in Equiano’s work establishes the highly textured background
so necessary to the contemporary black intellectual’s work. It provides the
context for Lewis Gordon’s invaluable maxim that a “slave’s situation can
only be understood, for instance, through recognizing the fact that a slave
experiences it; it is to regard the slave as a perspective in the world” (10).
And certainly, as I have argued, the metaphorics that are so central to Du
Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk fully appreciate texts such as Equiano’s as sites
of intellection capable of inquiring into ontological and existential questions.
The ontological and existential questions between the secular and
the sacred that characterize not only Equiano’s era, but also his narrative
are palpable even in his autobiography’s prefatory material. For instance,
Equiano makes his initial communication through his portrait, which serves
as the frontispiece of his Narrative. He sits erect, his body turned slightly.
He looks at us directly, but without, it seems, arrogance or hostility. His
attire is that of an English gentleman, rather than an African: he sports a
high-collar jacket, ruffled shirt, and fitted waistcoat. And his reading material
bespeaks the status of one not only lettered, that is, literate, but also one
who is a Christian. In his hand, he holds a Bible, open, fittingly, to the
Book of Acts, which chronicles the adventures of the Apostles after Christ’s
death, just as Equiano’s own book chronicles his exploits after the trauma
of the Middle Passage.
In a compelling letter that follows this portrait and serves as both
introduction to the text and as apology for faults the reader might find with
his work, Equiano addresses the Lords and Commons of the Parliament
of Great Britain:
[The] chief design [of this Narrative] is to excite in your august

assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the
Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the
horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender
connexions that were naturally dear to my heart; but these,
through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard
as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have
thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and
of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the
glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts
and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature. I am
sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a

work so wholly devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of
an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming
an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen, I
trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will be acquitted
of boldness and presumption. (italics in original, xxi)
The differences between the two pieces are both obvious and telling.
While in the visual image, Equiano represents himself as a cultured African
who, but for the color of his skin, closely resembles an Englishman, in his
missive he describes himself as an “unlettered African” working simply to
relieve the “suffering” of “his countrymen.” Interesting also is Equiano’s
phrasing in his epistolary appeal to Parliament. He states that he was torn
from his home and family by the horrors of the slave trade, and concludes
that he “ought” to regard these “horrors” as “more than compensated” by
his newfound knowledge of England and her culture (both her national
character and her religious practice). Yet he does not state forthrightly
and in an unequivocal manner that such culture is adequate compensation.
Indeed, he allows that he “ought” to beg pardon for producing a work
“so wholly devoid of literary merit,” but he does not actually do so; he
has no doubt—he “trusts”—that he “will be acquitted of boldness and
presumption.”
Equiano’s phrasing in this letter is significant because it depends for its
import and intent upon sedimented, metaphorical meanings at play in the
English language, even as it reveals concepts of the moral and the ethical
that are seminal not only to his own thought, but also to the thought
of his time. Eighteenth-century usage of the verb “ought,” for example,
combined the preterite-present tense of the verb “owe,” referring often to
monetary indebtedness, with a sense of moral obligation. In using this verb,
Equiano plumbs the depths of language—strategically, it seems to me, so
as not to alienate his readers even as he challenges them—in an effort to
refer simultaneously to the constraints of personal debt, and, by extension,
human bondage—at the same time that he references the morality generally
attributed to humanistic freedom by eighteenth-century philosophers such
as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The sedimented meanings
at work in the verb “owe”—along with Equiano’s broader, sophisticated use
throughout the Narrative of metaphorical language drawn largely from the
Bible—allow him to contend with prevailing social and political precepts
that he cites openly in his letter to Parliament: morality, religion, liberalism,
freedom, humanism, and knowledge. These meanings sedimented in the verb

“ought” are essentially dead metaphor that give the appearance of direct
language, but that, nonetheless, impact the figurative sense of the language
Equiano uses through their projection forward into his contemporary
situation, one of bondage (indebtedness) and, eventually, freedom.
Theories of language that prevailed during Equiano’s day called for
direct and simple language of the sort that he only ostensibly employs in
his letter, a language that eschewed gratuitous metaphorical flourishes even
as it manifested complex layers of signification. Eighteenth-century views
on figurative speech drew largely upon the sixteenth-century perspectives
of the philosopher and rhetorician Peter Ramus. The “Ramist revolution,”
as it came to be called, required metaphorical constructions to function as
arguments, as aspects of logic that shied away from esoteric signification. As
Terence Hawkes1 points out, the Ramist perspective demanded a shift from
the “oral modes of drama” that obtained in Elizabethan literature, to the
“literate mode of the printed book.” Such could be seen as analogous to the
shift from “an ancient world” to the “recognizably modern one” (30) Equiano
inhabited and, to a good extent, exemplified. (Equiano’s use of portraiture,
of course, stood as an equally modern mode of expression, a point to which
I return shortly in this section.) Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), in
contrast, Hawkes reminds us, stopped just short of defining metaphorical
flourishes as “an abuse of language”; metaphorical expression could exhibit
“ ‘a great excellence in style,’ ” Dr. Johnson wrote, but it was, nonetheless, an
ornamental aftereffect in the process of composition. It was, then, considered
an excess of meaning, an embellishment of thought (32).
Rather than exhibit superfluous flourish, eighteenth-century modern
expression was to be concise; since it was thought to serve as the outward
appearance or costume of thought, it was generally required to be sober,
modest, rational—as certainly befit language intended to represent the
thought of the Age of Enlightenment—and, one cannot help but think,
morally good. Meaning was not to be clouded by virtue of its performance in
speech; it was not to be conveyed through individual speech acts, but through
universally sanctioned repositories of knowledge, such as the dictionary and,
ironically, the Bible. Certainly the Age of Reason was characterized in good
measure by the rise of science, among other disciplines, and scholars generally
agree that the rise of the nation-state during this era displaced the Church
(Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike) as the foremost institutional
organizing force in society. Yet the Church had not fully ceded its role as
a pre-eminent guiding force at this point in Western history, and was still
viewed by many as an institution whose doctrines put forward universally

valid truths. In light of the contending forces at work between the church
and the state, metaphors employed in eighteenth-century British literary and
social discourse were required to deal in what was considered generally and
universally acceptable to one, the other, or both institutions.
Terence Hawkes points out that such metaphors as these would “need
no audience to ‘complete’ them, to respond to or join in with any thought-
process that springs” (33) from the center of a culture that formed itself
around ideals of national unity and Christian morality. Equiano exemplifies
many aspects of this convention of metaphor in of his Narrative, so much so
that a number of his reviewers commented on the sobriety of his prose even
as they remarked the “interesting” picaresque nature of his life story and its
narrative of spiritual conversion.2 David Punter, in his 2007 book Metaphor,
goes so far as to claim that eighteenth-century reception of Equiano’s text
was rooted not in Equiano’s own crafted and purposeful metaphorical prose,
but in the text itself as “a kind of metaphor” that accorded with currents in
contemporary eighteenth-century social discourse, such as Christianity and
freedom. He begins by wondering:
One might ask why the word ‘interesting’ needs to be in [the title
of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative]: is it, perhaps, because otherwise
the life of an ex-slave might indeed be deemed uninteresting?
Is it indeed because the readership might have misgivings about
the ability of an African to write a narrative, to give an account
of himself, in any way that might be interesting to a white
reader? The whole structure of Equiano’s book is itself a kind
of metaphor, because in it, he both recounts his life as a slave
and gives some account of the circumstances under which he
obtained his freedom, and of what followed from that; but it is
simultaneously, in a way which may remind us of the four levels
of classical Biblical interpretation, an account of his discovery of
God, of his adoption of Christianity. We might then call this a
narrative of redemption, which assumes a mythic or metaphorical
structure taken over precisely from the culture of those masters
whom Equiano is trying to evade. . . .3
Of course, the phrase “interesting narrative” appears in a number of

titles that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on
both sides of the Atlantic.4 In adopting it, Equiano follows a tropological
convention of memoir and autobiography that has less to do with his racial
identity (that is, whether a book written by a black man could be of interest
to white readers, as Punter suggests), than with his intention to attract an
intelligent and sympathetic audience to his text by way of a titular phrase
well known to a transatlantic readership. It seems equally untenable that
Equiano’s entire text should be read as a metaphor because, in Punter’s
words, it “both recounts his life as a slave and gives some account of the
circumstances under which he obtained his freedom.” Equiano certainly
accomplishes both of these goals in his autobiography, yet, complex though
they may be, neither of these narrative strategies translates into metaphor
at the level of discourse. And while I agree that Equiano’s use of Biblical
discourse, which I expound at length in the second section of this chapter,
gets him closest to the hermeneutics of scriptural narration, I argue that
Equiano’s use of metaphor goes well beyond the narrative of redemption
Punter underscores here.
This is so because although Equiano upholds the conventions of
eighteenth-century narrative by adopting a plot structure that approximates
secular myth and epic as well as the narrative strategies of Biblical texts—a
point I take to be of inestimable importance to understanding Equiano’s
Narrative, as I discuss at length in the final section of this chapter—he
also breaks these conventions when he essentially metaphorizes himself,
not simply his text. As Equiano makes clear in his letter to Parliament,
he clings to the hope that positive recognition of the meaning at play
in his Narrative would, in his words, serve to “actuate” him, both as an
individual—a subject in the modern world—and as a transfigured symbolic
representation of Africans everywhere in the Old and New Worlds, for it is
toward their freedom that he hopes to be an instrument. Equiano’s faith in
the power of writing to right social and moral wrongs impels him toward
the public sphere via the medium of metaphor. Equiano writes that he
believes his text to be “wholly devoid of literary merit” (xxi), yet this sort
of modesty is itself a well-noted eighteenth-century convention. Equiano is
concerned, through writing and specifically through sophisticated, complex
metaphorical constructions that are both discursive and imagistic, with the
disclosing of a subjectivity that is not self-doubting but self-assured, and
that contends at once with the national and the spiritual in an effort to
emerge as the embodiment of freedom.
From this perspective, I am interested in describing how Equiano
accomplishes the disclosure of his being by devising a metaphorical discourse
that interrogates the limits of his national identity, even as he takes
advantage of a metaphorical, onto-theological language of the spiritual and

the personal. Much has been made of Equiano’s insistence upon literacy, his
well-known trope of the talking book, and his activities as a slave overseer.
Scholars have engaged in sustained debates over Equiano’s origins and the
possibilities for national belonging available to him during his era. What I
am concerned to examine in greater detail is how Equiano profits from the
intricacies of metaphorical language in his quest to give expression to his
being, to make his being known to his readership. His language shows that
he has inherited ways of thinking about and revealing or conveying being
from two chief sources: Biblical discourse and a philosophical discourse on
national belonging. In both Biblical language and nationalist theory (that
is, philosophies and discourses on the nation-state that were taking shape
during the era in which Equiano wrote), Equiano finds metaphors of being.
In both the spiritual and the secular, he reveals the seeds of a polysemy
that is driven by tropological constructions that served, to a great degree,
as the motivity behind what it meant to be a modern subject in the late
eighteenth century.
I grant that these notions of modernity are not always our own.
However, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century thought of many
philosophers of the nation-state and national identity who were Equiano’s
contemporaries, and against whose theories of subjectivity and racial
oppression Equiano wrote, was substantiated, often contrary to their own
explicitly stated intentions, by a language that could be read as that of a
secular Christianity (this is especially so in the work of Immanuel Kant and
Georg W. F. Hegel), or, at the very least, a secular morality (e.g., the essays
of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele). Thus, the collocation of spiritual
and nationalist metaphors at work in Equiano’s text is not as oddly “pre-
modern” as it might first appear. Spiritual metaphorical discourse is not
senseless, as is sometimes assumed, and it is worthwhile to analyze this
discourse in relation to philosophical metaphors of the nation because the
sacred discourse Equiano champions lays claims to meaningfulness, to an
ontological revelation of being and truth, and, importantly, to an ethics of
moral humanistic action. My intention is to clarify the relation between the
metaphorical discourse Equiano employs, and the referential dimension of
his text, which serves to project his sense of being into the world about him.
Equiano works to secure for himself a home in that world by encouraging
his readers to undertake radical moral action that will ensure the abolition
of slavery even as they, through an ethical, phenomenological practice of
reading, “actuate” his being.
The Rhetoric of the Image: Being and Becoming in

Equiano’s Use of Portraiture
With these considerations in mind, I wish to return for a moment to

my earlier discussion of Equiano’s use of imagery and visual symbols in
his portrait, in which one finds very much alive the sort of spiritual and
nationalist discourses I discuss above. Equiano gives one the impression that
he consciously uses the symbols of his portrait to convey his being toward the
future even as he is absent from our own time. But what exactly constitutes
an image, and what is the image’s relationship to figurative language? W. J.
T. Mitchell seems to speak directly to an analysis of Equiano’s portrait when
he compellingly argues that images “are not just a particular kind of sign,
but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character
endowed with legendary status, a history that parallels and participates in
the stories we tell ourselves about our own evolution from creatures ‘made
in the image’ of a creator, to creatures who make themselves and their world
in their own image” (Iconology 9). Taking these thoughts into account, if
Equiano’s image is a sign, then it functions by way of an inscription and
conceptualization that could be described as spiritual. Further, by defining
an image as a sign, Mitchell imparts to it the function of sound, as though
the image were analogous to language and Equiano were speaking to us
through it. Equiano’s image would, then, employ a language, a rhetoric, as
Roland Barthes maintains images do. The nature of the meaning it conveys
could thus rightly be called linguistic, and its intention could be construed
as that of a writer who, as Mitchell puts it with a Biblical trope of his own,
makes himself and his “world in [his] own image.” In other words, we may
rightly read Equiano’s image as a radical revisioning of and engagement
with the world about him after a fashion that approximates the existential
as well as the theological.
Equiano’s portrait was initially rendered as a painting, completed
by the miniaturist William Denton and subsequently reproduced in the
engraving by Daniel Orme that is used as the frontispiece of the Narrative.
Biographer Vincent Carretta writes that Equiano intentionally “chose [these
two] artists to create and reproduce his likeness” (Equiano the African 280),
and in so doing he thus creates his own image purposefully. A purposeful,
intentional image, Barthes has argued, “immediately yields a first message
whose substance is linguistic.” It disseminates signifieds in a manner that
is not easily mistaken because the signifieds of the intentional imagistic
message “are formed a priori by certain attributes” of its subject (“Rhetoric
of the Image” 33). If we consider further that the word image is linked
etymologically to the root of the Latin word imitari, meaning “to imitate,”
or, in its Greek sense, mimesis or representation, then today’s reader of
the Narrative is faced not only with the question of the intentionality of
Equiano’s portrait, but also with the intentionality of representation at work
in this image. Barthes argues that “the image is in a certain manner the
limit of meaning,” and yet it still “permits the consideration of a veritable
ontology of the process of signification” (32, italics in original). In other
words, Barthes insists that the image not only casts into relief its own system
of meaning making, but also implies here, by using a term such as “ontology,”
or the study of being, in relation to “signification” and “image,” that the
process of meaning making in which the image facilitates an articulation of
subjectivity, in the dual sense of “voicing” subjectivity (that is, an articulating
“I” speaks subjectivity through the image), and projecting subjectivity toward
a radically revisioned world through the intersection of two or more realms
of experience, such as history and memory.
Barthes’ definition of the image as a structure of language that permits
an ontology of signification calls us to return to the likeness that Equiano
provides us, and to look more closely at the elements that most importantly
constitute its language and meaning: Equiano’s European clothing, his
appearance and bearing (that is, his body), his direct gaze into the eye of
the painter and the reader, and the Bible he holds open for our perusal
in a gesture that suggests an offering. The most significant aspects of this
image are the body and the Bible, both of which may be read as textual and
symbolic. Because Equiano’s portrait also contains textual matter, we may
rightly call it an image-text without contending that the Biblical writing
simply intrudes upon the portrait or is, in some way, superfluous. On the
contrary, the Biblical text seems to enhance the portrait in a number of
ways by referring to a specific Biblical passage that will provide the reader
with supplemental meaning. Like the letter it accompanies, the portrait
does the work of prefatory material at the same time that it serves as
paratextual material. I will say in brief before returning to this point later
(and recalling the discussion of Charles W. Mills’s work that I undertake in
chapter 2) that Equiano’s portrait, and specifically the image of his body, is
in dialogic relation with the discourses of national identity most prevalent
in his day. Further, it comments in a mediated fashion on Equiano’s belief
in the capacity of Biblical language to reveal truth and being, and prefaces
Equiano’s textual use of such language.
If we say that the portrait imparts a message whose substance is
linguistic, then we should also consider the nature of its imagistic language,
that is, whether its language is literal or figurative. Thus, we should be

mindful of the iconicity or symbolism of the portrait. For our purposes, I
will define an icon as a symbolic representation, and I will define a symbol
as a figure that represents something other than what it is. Descending
etymologically from the Greek symballein, symbol literally means “thrown
together.” A symbol collects and provisionally stabilizes social and linguistic
meanings that are often themselves metaphorical and polysemic. Equiano
uses his portrait to display for his reader a collection of visual symbols
intended to convey a sensible image of himself; and the reader in turn uses
the icons and symbols Equiano supplies in the portrait to form associations
in his or her mind that ultimately gain expression in language. Equiano’s
body, his clothing, his gaze, and the Biblical text all take on iconic and
symbolic functions, in that their meaning and value are derived from their
context. And not simply the context provided by the details of the portrait,
but also the context determined by the society in which Equiano lived and
wrote. These aspects of the portrait might be read literally since they are
each defined through the lexicon of Great Britain, that is, Great Britain’s
official dictionary. Yet the shift from a literal reading of these elements to a
figurative one is necessitated by the intentional selection and arrangement of
them. What stands out are the direct nature of Equiano’s gaze, the propriety
of his dress (which marks him as a member of the newly forming middle
class and as a Westerner), the color of his skin (which, conversely, marks
him as an outsider and a member of an enslaved class of people), and the
text to which the Bible he offers us is open, Acts 4:12.
Recalling that one among the many aspects of metaphor is its
movement from the literal to the figurative, these iconic and symbolic
details of the portrait emerge as metaphorical elements that exist in a
semiotic relationship with one another. Once we move past the “literal”
attributes of the portrait (the red coat, the open book, etc.), we are then
drawn to the metaphoric expression of the portrait via its symbols and
the paradoxes these symbols seek implicitly to engage. For example, the
color of Equiano’s skin stands directly at odds with the manner of his
dress. As I discuss in greater detail in the following section of this chapter,
blackness was not generally taken to symbolize the civilization and culture
that Equiano’s clothing suggests. Neither does his blackness immediately
indicate belonging to the Christian faith, as his offering of the Bible (as if
it were he who was proselytizing) affirms. Yet Equiano’s portrait seeks to
appose these internal schisms of meaning through what can reasonably be
called a logical disruption of conventional thought and a transposition of
epistemological categories. Because symbolic representation can put forward
contradictory elements that interfere with orthodox thought, the portrait

possesses the power to elaborate what it represents and to extend beyond
its own borders in the denotation of Equiano’s subjectivity.
The portrait’s rhetoric certainly supplements the written chronicle of
Equiano’s life, and therefore serves as a corollary of his expression of his
being by setting forth an ontological program that is paired with a narrative
of Equiano’s written eyewitness accounts of historical events (for instance,
the Transatlantic Slave Trade, battles of the Seven Years War, and a historic
expedition to the North Pole), as well as personal events that constitute his
individual experience. Pictorial modernity was imagined by Equiano and
a number of other eighteenth-century African writers not in terms and
themes of bodily fragments (as Linda Nochlin has so aptly shown with
regard to the pictorial representations created by a number of eighteenth-
century European artists5), but in terms of bodily wholeness, or at least
the allusion thereto. The wholeness evoked by the portrait underscores the
importance of constructing historical being through the pictorial medium.
At the forefront of Equiano’s intentionality as regards his portrait is the
perseverance of his image for the benefit of future generations of readers.
Thus, Equiano’s past—memorialized in his autobiography through text
and image—engages the future (our present) with vigor. Actuation (his
“becoming” an Englishman, as he puts it, as well as an “instrument” of
freedom for his enslaved African “brethren”), vision (Equiano’s gaze), and
the appearance of his body constitute the central metaphors of the portrait’s
visual rhetoric. To my mind, Equiano’s portrait serves as paratextual matter,
in that it is not superfluous, but serves as a portal that permits a more
profound understanding of the metaphorics of his text.
Becoming and Belonging: National Desire and Spiritual Being in

Equiano’s Time
As with his portrait, the imagery of the personal is always interjected into
the historical in the text of Equiano’s Narrative, and he repeatedly engages
our present by asking us to think with him as he draws upon the Bible in an
effort to bestow a sense of order and meaning on the often chaotic journeys
of his life. The Bible is the greatest literary influence on Equiano, and
its metaphorical language regularly serves to answer the many ontological
“whys” engendered by Equiano’s life circumstances: Why is he a slave? Why
is his life repeatedly spared while others perish?
In their engagement with such existential questions and in an extension
of the imagistic, figurative language of his image, the metaphors Equiano
draws from the Bible serve as the vehicles of the major ontological and
epistemological thrust of the Narrative: Equiano uses them both to express
and explain his reason for being, the significance of his individual existence,
and the meaningfulness of his life in relation to the world. Indeed, the Bible
seems to figure for Equiano as a national text with which modern subjects,
and certainly his readers, were expected to identify and whose metaphors
they would easily grasp. As Northrup Frye has argued convincingly, the
Bible “set up an imaginative framework . . . within which Western literature
had operated down to the eighteenth century and is to a certain extent still
operating” (Great Code xi). It is, perhaps, the first great book of forgetting,
wherein secular existence is methodically placed under erasure and replaced
with the ideal of divine spiritual being.
However, traditional historicism grants little significance to Biblical
language and writing, and instead grants secular nationalist discourse a
much higher level of criticism. Homi Bhabha reminds us that traditional
historicism generally grounds and gives force to the idea of national identity
as an “empirical sociological category” (The Location of Culture 140), a holistic
entity. Even so, the very idea of “nationness” also produces an ambivalence
of being that becomes quite evident as one seeks to perform the act of
“writing the nation,” an act that is itself, Bhabha concludes, an “apparatus
of symbolic power” that “produces a slippage of categories, like sexuality,
class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference’ ” (140). He invokes
Frederic Jameson’s argument that the very inscription of the individual story
in writing outside of the “first world,” meaning the West, is, by necessity, a
species of national allegory in what Jameson calls “third world literature.”
Such an allegory entails a “laborious telling of the collectivity itself ” even
as it strives to tell the story of the individual (qtd. in Bhabha 140).
While Jameson’s theory of the individual story as national allegory
is seductive, for reasons that will become apparent over the course of our
discussion here, this theory does not fully hold in Equiano’s case. The
national allegory is shifted or dislodged, largely because Equiano cannot
begin his tale with a proper account of his origins, an artifice necessary to
imagining national belonging. The violence of his displacement from Africa
and his subsequent enslavement and loss of memory of his early childhood
have the effect of barring him from any real appreciation of a fixed homeland
in which to ground his own sense of ontological origins. It quickly becomes
evident to the reader that Equiano’s sense of belonging (which is regularly
at work in autobiography—the writing and situating of a life) finds itself
caught up in a continual process of transformation, or becoming. As we read
the text, there is something in its composition that calls us to lend attention
to evolving ideas of desire and “longing,” an unspoken metaphor (Equiano

does not directly employ it) within a word that his writing does evoke
consistently: “belonging.” “Long” and “belong” are, respectively, analogues
of distance (desire and absence) and identification (selfhood and presence),
and the metaphor consists in the process of meaning at work between these
two words. In the Narrative, the tension between these poles of being gives
rise to figural articulations of nation, race, and anagogy that work in tandem
with the displacement Equiano experiences and the social death through
which he perseveres. Subsequent to the violence of Equiano’s enslavement,
and his experiences of exile and errantry, the conception he works toward in
his narrative is one of enlightened moral action, induced by a persistent—but
unfulfilled—longing for “home” and mitigated by his desire for actuation
through text.
We will take a further step in our understanding of the intersection of
moral action—(what Equiano refers to in his letter to Parliament as being
“actuated” by the reading of his text and adherence to the “instruction”
(208) provided in his Narrative) and what I take to indicate a process of
transformation, or “becoming,” (an evolution of being that emerges from a
longing for home, and a desire for “belonging”) if we ask what, on the side of
metaphors of actuation, can be considered as the counterpart to what, on the
side of metaphors of home or belonging, is given as being in the eighteenth
century life of an emancipated slave. We have already taken a step toward
grasping a sense of the problem by questioning the correlation between
personal and national narratives. The analysis that follows takes shape in the
face of a vocabulary of reference, or origins, that is at work in the projection of
concepts of nationhood in eighteenth-century prose, poetry, and philosophy.
To be sure, authors of texts that propound such concepts—Hume, Kant,
and others—intended to reflect their belief in an absolute, of which the
nation-state was, Hegel argued early in the nineteenth century, the avatar
and the Idea. Here I draw our attention to the concepts of morality, being,
and the nation-state as each is articulated by way of metaphorical mediations
in the work of European thinkers who were Equiano’s contemporaries and
who themselves commented on the possibilities of national belonging in
relation to the limits of racial identity. A reflection upon these concepts as
given within the world of philosophical text allows us to take a brief look
at the concepts of being with which Equiano would contend and to which
he would respond through image and text.
I have oriented my discussion in this section to reflect a passage
of thought from broader European philosophical discourse that is highly
dependent upon metaphors of the body and spirit, to the English public
sphere. I will show how philosophical discourse and the discourse of the
public sphere equally share in this dependence on metaphors of the body
as concepts of national and racial identity are worked out in an age during
which Western societies were rocked by the American, French, and Haitian
revolutions. Enlightenment era thought such as that which I sample below
is nonetheless characterized by a deep faith in human reason. It was also
well agreed upon across national lines, such that thinkers like Kant, Hume,
and Rousseau not only influenced one another, but were in fundamental
agreement as to what were the pressing philosophical and social concerns of
their day, in spite of their national differences. Amidst the era’s revolutions
in science and knowledge, Westerners and non-Westerners alike often expe-
rienced profound changes in social, political, and economic life even as they
faced problems of moral uncertainty and feelings of alienation and social
fragmentation. The fundamental metaphysical divisions that marked the
philosophical thought of the era—reason vs. emotion, subjectivity (know-
ing subject) vs. objectivity (objects known in the world), freedom (moral
autonomy) vs. nature (governed by natural laws), and mind (rational) vs.
body (sensuous)—also stood as social challenges that demanded resolution.
The pressing task was to ensure a unity of reason that did away with such
schisms as these while safeguarding intellectual and social harmony. In short,
a new relationship between mind and body had to be established, yet in
all cases this relationship was predicated upon theories of racial difference
and national identity.
Equiano entered this debate after a fashion that could in no way
be considered insignificant. While Immanuel Kant and other speculative
thinkers insisted, at least on the surface of things, upon a racialized secular
philosophy of moral society in their attempts to achieve a rational and
harmonious unity, Equiano—as a participant in the public sphere—worked
to overcome the mind/body dualism by upholding the benefits of national
identity even as he worked to elide racial difference by underscoring the
importance of spiritual wisdom and earthly good works. His is a fascinat-
ing and complex approach: throughout the Narrative, Equiano argues that
intellectual enlightenment, which, he states, has come to him through his
introduction to English social principles, must be coupled with Christian
works of faith in order to achieve actuation, and primary among these works
must be, he makes clear, the abolition of slavery. The long and short of it is
that he offers his account of his own life as an exemplar of this fundamental
truth, and further challenges and engages his readers by calling upon them
to “actuate” his being by acting upon the “jewels of instruction” he gives

them in his text. Equiano uses onto-theological metaphors to provide a
meaningful alternative to the racism and secularism of the Enlightenment,
which deployed metaphorical discourses to insist upon lofty states of con-
sciousness and morality even as they permitted and at times promoted the
heinous immoralities of racism, xenophobia, and slavery.
To demonstrate my argument, I begin by turning to a few exemplary
philosophical European texts that employ metaphor in an effort to make
apparent the collective national subject as it was theorized in Equiano’s time.
I will present three in succession, followed by a discussion of the “sites” at
which this subject becomes legible or recognizable. First, a selection from
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Geneva Manuscript (1756):
Instantly, in the place of the private person of each contracting

party [that is, each individual entering into the “social contract”],
this act of association produces a moral and collective body,
composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly,
and to which the common self gives formal unity, life, and will.
This public person, formed thus by the union of all the others,
generally assumes the name body politic, which its members
call State when it is passive, Sovereign when active, Power when
comparing it to similar bodies. As for the members themselves,
they take the name People collectively, and individually are called
Citizens as members of the City or participants in the sovereign
authority, and Subjects as subject to the laws of the State. But these
terms, rarely used with complete precision, are often mistaken
for one another, and it is enough to know how to distinguish
them when the meaning of discourse so requires.6
The second text, from Immanuel Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals

(1785), likewise presents a logic of metaphors in relation to national identity,
but Kant constructs the individual’s place in society primarily in terms of
the familial, rather than in relation to state power and the “social contract,”
as does Rousseau:
The human beings who make up a nation can, as natives of

the country, be represented as analogous to descendants from a
common ancestry (congeniti) even if this is not in fact the case.
But in an intellectual sense or for the purposes of right, they
can be thought of as the offspring of a common mother (the
republic), constituting, as it were, a single family (gens, natio),

whose members (the citizens) are all equal by birth. These
citizens will not intermix with any neighboring people who
live in a state of nature, but will consider them ignoble, even
though such savages for their own part may regard themselves
as superior on account of the lawless freedom they have chosen.
The latter likewise constitute national groups, but they do not
constitute states.7
And finally, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who uses general
metaphors of ontogenetic resemblance, writes in the 1754 version of “Of
National Characters”:
Where a number of men are united into one political body, the
occasions of their intercourse must be so frequent, for defence
[sic], commerce, and government, that, together with the same
speech or language, they must acquire a resemblance in their
national manners, and have a common or national character, as
well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual.8
The three texts I have chosen make use of metaphors—most of them

bio-political metaphors, as in the “body politic,” the “common self,” the
“common mother,” or a “state of nature”—in order to describe the attributes
of the nation-state, an “Idea,” as Hegel calls it, that demands, in Rousseau’s
words, “unity, life, and will.” Hence the discourse of the nation-state breathes
life into the very idea of the national entity by way of ontological metaphors.
It is in this way that nationalist discourse is able to imbue the idea of
the nation with human characteristics while simultaneously insisting that
the nation-state supersedes the wants and demands of the individual. Thus
Rousseau may speak of the union of private persons as the “body politic.”
Kant may write that the members of the nation “can be thought of,” or
imagined, as “the offspring of a common mother (the republic).” And Hume
may argue that the national character takes shape through frequent social
intercourse, whereby citizens “acquire a resemblance in their manners.” These
sorts of ontological metaphors, with their sedimented and highly textured
meanings, are examples of the widely grasped and conventional tropes of
which Hawkes speaks in his periodization of metaphorical discourse.
Analysis of these tropes reveals that the discourse of the nation-state—
inherently metaphorical—is intended to produce a reality of its own. It seeks
to produce the effect of a collective consciousness, and it does so by way
of metaphors of being that were widely understood and accepted, and thus
required no undue intellectual effort on the part of the reader to complete
them. Such a reality is highly dependent upon a physical discourse, one
that treats nationalistic concepts through metaphors of bodies and selves.
Thus the people become the body politic, the republic becomes the mother,
and the citizens eventually come to resemble one another through repeated
dynamic encounters characterized as borrowing and mimeticism, and by
way of these processes, one comes to “belong,” one “becomes” a member
of the nation-state. Rousseau’s recognition of the fluidity of the terms he
uses and the need for contextual readings underscores how such discourse
seeks to refigure reality by establishing some sort of simulacrum in order to
make reality more navigable, more manageable, and, ironically, more “real.”
Nationalistic discourse such as that which we see here makes observations
regarding the order of things; indeed, it devises its own processes, its own
order, its own logic, and thus we are able to read this discourse comfortably
within the framework of philosophical thought. The discourse of the nation-
state—which is made manifest in what we call nationalism—responds to
reality with ontological metaphors, and such metaphors ostensibly serve as
the motored configurations of harmonious modern social being.
Further attention to the status of personhood in the writings of
European philosophers who were Equiano’s contemporaries easily convinces
one that the philosophes, while deeply engaged in notions of personal and
moral freedom within the boundaries of the nation-state, remained in a
state of tension as regards the subject of racial slavery and its relation to the
body politic. The denunciations of slavery by John Locke and the Baron de
Montesquieu, for example, rarely went beyond the obvious in their analyses
of the institution. The writings of Locke in particular adopt a double-sided
stance on the issue: he condemns slavery on moral grounds, but not on
economic, material grounds. Indeed, some philosophers held a personal stake
in the financial interests of slavery. Peter Gay reminds us that “Locke’s part
in the establishment of the Carolina colonies, and his investments in the
slave-trading monopoly, the Royal African Company, shows plainly enough
that actual slavery did not trouble his conscience.”9 It is by now well known
that Richard Steele, a founder of The Tatler and The Spectator, maintained a
plantation in the West Indies. Trading in slaves and depending upon their
labor and servitude for a life of comfort came to be commonplace among
a number of presumably liberal writers and thinkers of the era, not least of
whom is the celebrated American nationalist, revolutionist, and democratic
philosopher, Thomas Jefferson.
By extension, then, racism and xenophobia are widely noted in their

writings. Hume’s well-known footnote, which was appended to the 1754
version of “Of National Characters,” is echoed by Kant in Observations
on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), and provides an apt
example. Hume expounds the concept of “nation” and national belonging
in terms of the ethos of the national citizen. These collective and common
characteristics arise from “moral causes . . . which are fitted to work on the
mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners
habitual to us” (244). Accordingly, he argues, these characteristics are based
upon mimesis, and it is in this way that the body politic comes to life:
men convene to build commerce and prosperity, imitating their so-called
superiors in order to spread ideas that would advance the national collective.
As is the case in a number of Enlightenment-era writings on nationalism,
the idea of race emerges as inextricably bound to the possibility of national
belonging. And since, for Hume, the nation-state is predicated on an ability
to mimic national norms, the power of xenophobia and racial exclusion
largely forms the basis of national belonging. Blacks, Hume asserts in his
note, are capable of only the meanest mimesis, and thus were precluded
from membership:
I am apt to suspect the negroes [sic], and in general all other species
of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally
inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other
complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in
action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them,
no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference
could not happen in so many countries and ages if nature had
not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not
to mention our colonies, there are Negroe [sic] slaves dispersed
all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of
ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst
us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed
they talk of one negroe [sic] as a man of parts and learning; but
tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a
parrot, who speaks a few words plainly. (252n1)
Hume’s sentiments were influential on the thought of Immanuel

Kant, who had long been an admirer of Hume’s philosophical works. In
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant paraphrases
Hume’s sentiments so completely as he himself works to sort out the

characteristics of various national groups that I need cite him only in brief:
“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the
trifling . . . So fundamental is the difference between these two races of
man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in
color.”10 He even goes so far as to say that the Negro’s color rendered any
idea s/he articulated “stupid,” though he might otherwise have thought the
utterance worthwhile had the voice been that of a white man. Here I will
cite him at length:
In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is
found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery?
A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker,
just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who
outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face.
Of course, Father Labat11 reports that a Negro carpenter, whom
he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered:
“You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions
toward your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive
you mad.” And it might be that there were something in this
which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow
was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he
said was stupid. (Observations 113)
Lost on Kant is the irony of his statement: given the horrific nature
of slavery and the depths of whites’ involvement in the slave trade, he fails
to consider the depraved nature of the Europeans who set themselves up
as “strict masters” over the Africans. His sardonic comments are intended,
no doubt, to inject a bit of unfortunate racist humor into an essay that is
full of similar misfortunes regarding “national” groups such as Arabs and
the Chinese. Considering that such animosity as Kant’s greeted the simple
deductions of a black carpenter, we cannot doubt that the words of “a
stranger” such as Equiano were met with skepticism if not out right disdain
and disbelief, as is evidenced in a number of the letters Equiano appended
to later editions of his text.12 What is more striking is the certainty with
which Kant and Hume deemed blacks to be incapable of both elevated
thought and national belonging and, further, to be a threat to the cultural
cohesion of the nation.
In light of this vein of philosophic thought, English writers in
particular often warned their readers against the contagion of foreign
elements—people as well as goods—entering the nation. For instance,

the narrator of Richard Steele’s “Brunetta and Phillis,” a satirical sketch
resembling a comedy of manners and appearing in the June 1, 1711 issue
of The Spectator, provides his reader with a construction of the limits of
English social standards, specifically those concerning contact between
English citizens of the metropole and those living abroad in Britain’s New
World colonies. The story’s most remarkable feature is a narrative voice that
directs without seeming to do so. That the reader will willingly follow along
and grasp his metaphorical intent Steele naturally assumes. He begins by
telling the reader that Phillis and Brunetta were first childhood playmates
and later adolescent rivals. Central to the story’s message is that both girls
were born in Cheapside, London, a prosperous neighborhood where a good
number of merchants and shop owners lived and kept trade. The wealth
of this class, which rose to prominence from the ashes of feudalism, likely
made them fine targets for Steele. He himself was not of the aristocracy,
though he secured financial comfort through a profitable first marriage to
a woman whose property included the aforementioned Barbados plantation
and its slave chattel. Steele, a one-time gazetteer to Queen Anne, had deeply
immersed himself in Whig politics, and once a shift in the political winds
came, took to composing moralizing pieces having to do with innocence and
virtue. The moralistic thrust of “Brunetta and Phillis” comes in the piece’s
closing paragraphs, and vital to its point is that each woman, exquisitely
beautiful but lacking in class and social grace, had married a West Indian
planter and then moved to Barbados, a colony largely populated with African
slaves. There, their rivalry grew in measure with the vulgar slave wealth to
which they had become privy through marriage. Their competition finally
consumed them:
It would be endless to enumerate the many Occasions on which

these irreconcileable [sic] Beauties laboured to excell each other;
but in Process of Time it happened, that a Ship put into the
Island consigned to a Friend of Phillis, who had Directions to
give her the Refusal of all Goods for Apparel before Brunetta
could be alarmed of their Arrival. He did so, and Phillis was
dressed in few Days in a Brocade more gorgeous and costly than
had ever before appeared in that Latitude. Brunetta languished
at the Sight, and could by no Means come up to the Bravery
of her Antagonist. She communicated her Anguish of Mind to
a faithful Friend, who by an Interest in the Wife of Phillis’s
Merchant, procured a Remnant of the same Silk for Brunetta.
Phillis took Pains to appear in all publick Places where she

was sure to meet Brunetta; Brunetta was now prepared for the
Insult, and came to a publick Ball in a plain black Silk Mantua,
attended by a beautiful Negro Girl in a Petticoat of the same
Brocade with which Phillis was attired. This drew the Attention
of the whole Company, upon which the unhappy Phillis swooned
away, and was immediately conveyed to her House. As soon as
she came to herself she fled from her Husband’s House, went
on board a Ship in the Road, and is now landed in inconsolable
Despair at Plymouth.13
The dialectic of body and apparel that is at issue in Equiano’s portrait is

likewise at work in the story of Brunetta and Phillis. The hermeneutic woven
into this passage builds upon the relationship Steele had developed with
his readership, which had come to anticipate his satirical brand of morality.
The author pretends to be merely the narrator of a story he describes as
“maelancholy,” and there appears to be but one interpretation to be had here:
the notions of honor and virtue at play in the competition of Brunetta and
Phillis find their culmination in a lesson on communication through one’s
physical self-presentation in society. In brief, Steele speaks to the stylization
of the female body, black as well as white. Brunetta conquers her rival not
simply by donning a beautiful understated gown of elegance and high quality
(wholly contrary to the tawdriness Steele describes as common to inhabit-
ants of the West Indies, indicated by the inappropriateness of wearing a dress
made of brocade—a heavy, rich fabric usually woven of silk, with an ornate
raised pattern in gold or silver—in the heat of the Caribbean), but also by
dressing her servant girl in a remnant of the brocade fabric from which
Phillis’s gown was made. The “company’s” witnessing of this spectacle actu-
ally seals Phillis’s undoing, and precipitates her hysteria—through which she,
in the eyes of her public, actually regains some ground, as hysteria indicated
to the eighteenth-century reader an attestation of feminine emotionalism
and, thus, virtue. However, while the reader may hold Phillis in sympathy,
Brunetta cleverly emerges as the victor by means of her manipulation of the
body of her slave. Not only does the anonymous Negro girl wear the same
brocade as Phillis; she wears it as a petticoat—an undergarment, yes, but
one that figured prominently in eighteenth-century fashion. Petticoats were
often worn visibly through an inverted V cut into the overgown. Brunetta
raises herself, as mistress, above Phillis by demonstrating her financial abil-
ity to attire so richly her slave. In the scene portrayed by the painter above
(Figure 1), the fabric is used not as a petticoat, but as a fully visible skirt,
making the insult that much more impactful. Phillis’s shame comes by way
of an alchemy of fashion and style. In the eyes of the spectators, she is
reduced to a level beneath that of the slave. Steele intends us to read her
retreat to Plymouth (in “inconsolable Despair”) as a condemnation of her
vulgarity. And the humor of the piece consists in the insult of dressing a
Negro attendant in a manner approximating the habit of an English lady.
While Steele’s vignette is concerned with the manners of those who
migrated to the Caribbean, Alexander Pope gives voice to his own anxieties
regarding commodification and foreign contagion in Windsor Forest (1713).
Pope, an associate of Steele and Joseph Addison who contributed pastoral
poetry and prose to The Spectator, drew Equiano’s attention largely through
his translation of Homer’s Iliad, published in 1720. Pope’s translation of
Homer made the classical era poet accessible to eighteenth-century English

readers, and was widely respected.14 The significance of Pope’s translation
was certainly not lost upon Equiano, who cites it a number of times in
his Narrative. Pope presented Homer’s Iliad in a manner that underscored
the virtues of dignity and morality. Likewise, Pope’s topographical poem
Windsor Forest, completed in the aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713),
celebrates the moral peace that came with the granting of the Spanish
Asiento to England.15 Pope’s preoccupation lies with outside forces that
touch England’s shore, and his concern over commercial and social exchange
with the outside world comes through in these lines:
The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind
Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde,
And Seas but join the Regions they divide;
Earth’s distant Ends our Glory shall behold,
And the new World launch forth to seek the Old.
Then Ships of uncouth Form shall stem the Tyde,
And Feather’d People crowd my wealthy Side,
And naked Youth and Painted Chiefs admire
Our Speech, our Colour, and our strange Attire!
Oh stretch thy reign, fair Peace! from Shore to Shore,
Till Conquest cease, and Slav’ry be no more.16
In these lines, the freedom mentioned by Pope evokes an anxiety

that is reflected in metaphors such as “ships of uncouth form,” “stem the
tyde,” “feather’d people,” “painted chiefs,” and even “peace,” which becomes
a metaphor by virtue of the sentence in which Pope situates the word. The
seas—analogized to the Thames—no longer separate nations or regions, but
serve instead as relational spaces between the colony and the metropole.
Pope’s preoccupation with the immigration of outsiders and the importation
of foreign goods into England mirrors that of Joseph Addison in “The Royal
Exchange,”17 but exhibits quite a bit more anxiety. Addison was fascinated
by the variety of people and goods he encountered at the Exchange. He
thanked merchants for all the wealth to which his eyes were privy. Of
them he writes, “there are no more useful members in a commonwealth
than merchants. They knit mankind together in mutual intercourse of good
offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, add wealth to
the rich, and magnificence to the great.”18 Pope’s verse and Addison’s prose
alike depict a curious lack of violence in the amassing of empire. While both
writings evidence the complexities that attend strategies to reconcile a moral
economy with a financial one, of the two, Pope alone evinces such anxiety
regarding commodification. His unease regarding the mixed benefits of the
Asiento reveals concerns about foreigners who would thereafter have greater
access to England. Pope expects that these outsiders—non-Europeans—will
admire English “speech,” “colour,” and “attire.” The savageness of the non-
native is juxtaposed against the refined wealth of the English upper-class.
The morality inherent in the cessation of war is at odds with the contagion
that peaceful trade brings. And while Pope prays for the abolition of the slave
trade, it is indeed this trade that has generated the great wealth he extols.
Of the writers I discuss here, Steele seems most cognizant of the violence
capitalism and imperialism impart to the human psyche. Not surprisingly,
however, he lends more attention to the vulnerabilities of English national
selfhood than to that of the colonized and the enslaved.
The juxtaposition of metropole and colony, master and slave, brings us
back round to the question with which I began this section, regarding the
intersection of becoming and belonging, of moral action and the desire for
home or nation. In assembling a reading of texts drawn from philosophy,
prose, and poetry, I have sought to address the ideological atmosphere
of the public to which Equiano addressed himself. My conclusions take
shape by force of the examples I have chosen, but these examples are fairly
representative of the thought of Equiano’s age. We might say as regards
the first three texts by Rousseau, Kant, and Hume, that the prescriptions
for reading inscribed within them orient the reader to the author in terms
that recall the relation of master and slave: the author is one who knows,
the reader is one who comes to know through the act of reading. No
matter the fervent attention to freedom each writer evinces in the corpus
of his writings, the reader is not left free through the act of engaging the
text, but finds her- or himself bound to the metaphors of collectivity and
national identity each text uses to define its purposes. Each sets itself up
as a “normative” system, and only Rousseau, in a closing gesture, allows for
the contingencies of context.
The next two examples, drawn from the philosophical writings of
Hume and Kant, work to limn the contingencies that function within the
metaphorical systems of their texts. In speaking of national characters and
the possibility of national belonging, each is compelled to speak once more
in figurative terms of the body and, specifically, in terms of those bodies
that are not normative. Neither trusts the reader with interpretations; each
provides rules of reading that determine the set of answers to questions that
arise in relation to the text. Thus we find that through their metaphorical
discourse on the national body, we are led to discover those bodies that do
not matter, that are rendered abject.
The final examples, drawn from prose and poetry by Steele, Pope,
and Addison, may be taken to underscore the strategy of persuasion. They
seem, collectively, to effect a shift from the rhetoric of philosophy; the
reader is now in a position of authority because she or he is called upon
for interpretation. Yet these texts also assume a mediate position, for they
demand reading practices that are neither purely rhetorical nor purely
hermeneutical. Each calls for a specific sort of moral action alive in the
discourse of the philosophers we have seen, and each gives evidence of a
desire for the purity of the national collective that may only be achieved
if one views the metaphorical nation as an actuated whole purged of racial
contagion and impurity. The economies at work in Steele, Pope, and Addison
may be the lever that, ironically, pries this whole open, for it is imperial
desire—for slaves, for lands, for goods—that leaves the nation-state open to
the contagion each of these writers fears. In this field of discourse, Equiano’s
narrative stands midway within a paradox, somewhere between the national
being outlined by the philosophers and the national desire expounded by
the writers.
Occupying a mediate space of discourse relieves Equiano of the weight
of stasis we encounter in all but the writing of Rousseau. For the reader,
Equiano’s narrative consists in moving from a static notion of pastness to a
dynamic, refigured image of the past that permits the possibility of actuation.
Narrative in general serves as a phenomenological telos characterized by
what Paul Ricoeur, following Edmund Husserl, calls “transcendence within
immanence.”19 That is, it permits the writer a site within which to propound
the development of a narrative voice that is, of course, bound to its structure
(its genre, its plot, in short, the imaginative world constituted within the
text), even as it imagines a reader to whom the text and the writer are
directed and a text and author toward which the reader is inexorably drawn.
In this way, the metaphorical meanings at work in the Narrative have the
potential to overflow the boundaries of the page and blur temporal lines.
While autobiographical narratives provide a phenomenological “home” for
the writer—in that his or her thoughts, and the images and experiences
related to such thought, abide with and are disclosed by way of the text—by
engaging in the act of writing, Equiano projects himself and his past toward
the future by assuming an act of reading. It is only through this second
phenomenological act—that of the active assumption of and engagement

with an imagined act of purposeful rather than passive reading—that both
the Narrative and its author are actuated or assume the possibility of
actuation beyond the limits of text. Equiano keeps alive a fragile hope that
in the margins of secular reason, there may exist a realm of transcendent
spiritual possibilities that can refashion and reorient the world of his readers.
His text serves as a medium through which such possibilities might be
achieved.
The acts of writing and reading that bring about the intersection of
the worlds of both Equiano and his reader create what Toni Morrison has
named (with her own apology for so provocative and decontextualized a
term) a “third world.” The “third world” Morrison describes functions in
ways similar to the phenomenological telos described by Ricoeur: it is
both “snug and open,” with the potential to reveal the “interiority of
the ‘othered.’ ”20 For Equiano, this sort of intersection discloses a site of
intellection, yes, but it also functions as a catalyst toward actuation and
action, where the void psychoanalytic theory names desire is recast as work.
That Equiano never sacrifices himself to a detached or seemingly omniscient
narrator in his text means that he is the central occupant of the Narrative; it
is he, himself, who will encounter the reader when their two worlds collide.
What strikes us is that through this encounter, he submits himself to the
reader and the reader’s world, and there he is refigured. It is he who is, as
he states, “actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the
relief of his suffering countrymen” (xxi). Grasping faith and never losing
hope, Equiano intends to write his way home.
Hope in Narrative: Equiano’s Biblical Turn
We have now to discuss more fully how Equiano’s hope for “actuation”—a
tropological articulation appearing as simple, concrete language—comes to
enrich the mediation of his text, such that the interweaving of history,
memory, and imagination results in a metaphorics of being and becoming.
I have alluded to this in discussing the relation—which I have cast into
tension, in Equiano’s case—of autobiography to national allegory. As I
advance my reading of Equiano, I will borrow a key modality from Paul
Ricoeur’s argument in Time and Narrative: that the writing of history does
not exclude inscriptions of a historical knowledge of being (an ontology
of historical subjectivity). As Ricoeur insists, the writing of history is not
something we add to history itself. History, rather, borrows the modes of
literature: it “imitates in its own writing the types of emplotment handed

down by our literary tradition” (Time and Narrative 185). Literature enables
us to “read” ourselves in history, as critical elements of and actors in the
unfolding of history, such that certain modes of relating historical events are
rendered recognizably ontological through genres such as tragedy, comedy,
and so forth. Writing in its many forms—e.g., autobiography, artistic
expression, historiography—thus holds great implications for how writers
view themselves as historical beings seeking to relate their experiences to
the members of national bodies who regularly receive their work. Just as
the writing of history produces the effect of writing a life, autobiography
can enact the project of seeing the past. Autobiography, then, puts into play
one of the most striking historical effects Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, ascribes
to metaphor, that of “seeing as.”
The historical, metaphorical effect of autobiography—where the writing
of one’s life story is understood to realize or “actuate” a mimetic project of
historiography—should be read as such in studies of the reception and
criticism of secular literature in England, in particular, which began in the
eighteenth century as an aesthetic practice that bolstered nationalistic and
patriotic pride. Such a measure was in order after the Glorious Revolution,
which had set differing political factions at odds with one another. As
Terry Eagleton reminds us and as we have seen in earlier examples,
eighteenth-century “[English] literature did more than ‘embody’ certain
social values. . . . [I]t was a vital instrument for their deeper entrenchment
and wider dissemination.”21 Eagleton’s words imply a phenomenology at
work in the discipline of English literature. Mastering the English language
in the eighteenth century meant exposure to broad ranges of British life:
literature, religion, philosophy, history, the arts, and the sciences. As we
have seen in our discussion of Hume, Kant, and Rousseau, mastery of the
language, including its poetic and rhetorical forms, what Walter Benjamin
refers to, in broader terms, as mimeticism,22 emerges as absolutely necessary
to any notion of unified national belonging.
Equiano’s Narrative leads us toward this conclusion, but along the
way takes a turn away from the secular national subject central to the
philosophical discourse I have discussed, and toward a spiritual subject
whose being emerges as “whole” and “actuated” through the coincidence
of Christian good works and Christian faith or belief. We read of his
immersion in the English Bible, which he treasures among his collection
of books. We see in his writing a practice of intertextualism that draws
from the writers of the Old Testament, from Homer and Milton, and from
historians and abolitionists contemporary to his time, such as Anthony
Benezet. His practice gives evidence of the phenomenology of reading
that he portrays as central to his psychical development. In a much noted

metaphor, Equiano longs to “talk to the books” that he had seen the naval
officer Pascal and the young American Richard Baker reading. “Talking
to the books,” interacting with them (specifically, his Bible) and willfully
enacting a collision of his own “real” sphere of being and the textual sphere
of Biblical scripture will, Equiano seems certain, permit him access to
history; it will allow him to “learn how all things,” including he, himself,
“had a beginning” (39).
In this second section of the chapter, I will show how Equiano
participates—in a contestatory, critical, and counter-cultural fashion—in
eighteenth-century Western discourse on being (and the origins of human
being) by eschewing or revising a number of the West’s central bio-political
metaphors. These sorts of metaphors include those exemplified in writings
by Kant and Rousseau; yet Equiano, in an even more striking intellectual
and rhetorical move, specifically rejects metaphors that evince ideas of racial
essentialism and national absolutism that appear in the work of these same
leading Western philosophers. Of course, Equiano does construct metaphors
that give voice to his anxieties about living as a black man in a white world,
such as when he writes of his childhood disappointment when the darkness
of his skin will not wash away, as if it were the soiled result of a full day
at play with his little white companion, Mary. Some scholars have read this
metaphor, as well as the metaphor of the talking book, as evidence that
Equiano was ashamed of his blackness. But while Equiano’s contemporary,
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, uses the trope of the talking book to convey his
certainty that the book would not talk back to him because he is black and
despised,23 Equiano uses this metaphor to convey his awareness not only
of the limits of his social and political knowledge (and thus he determines
to gain greater enlightenment and understanding through textuality); this
metaphor also, more importantly, conveys Equiano’s understanding of the
ways in which his own humanity was cast into oblivion in European
epistemological metaphorics.
Instead of developing bio-political metaphors of national absolutism or
racial essentialism, which would, from the perspective of Kant and others,
resolve the dualism they saw plaguing eighteenth-century society, Equiano
develops metaphors of the spirit as a way of working toward the achievement
of historicized and actuated human being, and thus his is a discourse on
critical humanism that runs against the grain of a deficient white Western
humanism that casts black being as non-being. Equiano’s gesture here is
quite nuanced: if, in his portrait, he makes us aware of the schisms in
his existence by way of visual symbols and metaphors—a black body in
European dress, holding a Bible open to a passage that exhorts just works as
the manifestation of Christian faith—in his Narrative, he works to negotiate

these schisms through a relational, metaphorical, and spiritual discourse.
His discourse underscores the central importance of understanding and
enlightenment as a way of navigating the fragmented aspects of his existence,
and as key to achieving historical, actuated being.
In his narration, Equiano’s path toward enlightenment is not straight
and linear, but unfolds in progressive stages, some of which are marked by
incongruities and ambivalences. Equiano’s initial turn to the Bible as the
record of the historical origin of things becomes an object of desire for him
in an almost fetishistic way. The literary effect of the holy book regularly
draws his attention, so much so that he often puts himself in danger to
keep his Bible, in particular among his other books, with him. His anxious
desire for the sacred text of the West—and for the possibilities that the
Bible’s religion and spiritual discourse present for the critical expression of
Equiano’s own discourse on the human, a discourse that takes shape beyond
(but not in ignorance of ) binding narratives of nationalism and race—
becomes evident, for example, when Equiano narrates how Pascal, angry at
false rumors of Equiano’s planned escape, determines to sell him without
giving in to Equiano’s “offer” to retrieve his books (central among them his
Bible) from his quarters:
The ship was up about half an hour, when my master ordered the
barge to be manned; and all in an instant, without having before
given me the least reason to suspect any thing of the matter,
he forced me into the barge, saying, I was going to leave him,
but he would take care I should not. I was so struck with the
unexpectedness of this proceeding, that for some time I could
not make a reply, only I made an offer to go for my books and
chest of clothes, but he swore I should not move out of his sight;
and if I did he would cut my throat, at the same time taking
out his hangar. (64)
Eighteenth-century usage of “offer” includes a tropological or secondary

sense in which the speaker employs “offer” to convey an intention. Judging
from Pascal’s angry, and, indeed, immoral response, Equiano’s “offer” was
not a request. It was an articulation of purpose and, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, a presumption of his “right” to collect his books
and clothing. He quickly formulates a retort, further incensing Pascal:
“[P]lucking up courage, I told him I was free, and he could not by law
serve me so.”24
Equiano’s desire for his Bible and the other texts he felt he possessed25
might be read in terms of the knowledge and the affirmation of human
being he was certain they held. In this, there appears to be an ontological
analogue—another metaphorical operation—at work, a point to which I
shall return. Yet the erudition of origins Equiano attributes here to the
books he constantly read seems symptomatic of the void in his own memory
and history, which he determines to rewrite by keeping a journal of his
travels and by writing the story of his life. Equiano commences his narrative
by providing us with a history of his homeland, from which, by his own
account, he was kidnapped in about 1756. It was sometime during the
following two years, in 1757 or early during 1758, that he regularly witnessed
Pascal and Dick Baker in the midst of reading. From these visions, and the
subsequent refusal of the books to “answer [him]” when he “talked” to them
(39), his longing for textual engagement and what he repeatedly refers to
as “understanding” is born. Nonetheless, his “great curiosity to talk to the
books” and to thus “learn how all things had a beginning” (39)—including
he himself—appear strange when juxtaposed against the litany of detail we
encounter in the first chapters of the narrative.
For example, in the early portion of the text, Equiano, through what
he calls the “imperfect sketch” of his memory (14), provides his reader
with a fairly detailed portrait of his village, Essaka. He is, of course, as he
tells us in his notes to the text, indebted to the Quaker writer Anthony
Benezet for those images of West African village life that elude his memory,
but he does not rely upon Benezet for the narration of the particulars
of his childhood experiences. Equiano was not born a peasant child, but
was the favored son in a prominent family. He clearly recalls his training
in agriculture and warfare as well as his mother’s determination to “form
[his] mind” (17). It is reasonable to conclude that the formation Equiano’s
mother provided him included teachings in Ibo cosmology and theology.
Yet, after his baptism in 1759, which took place before certain religious
epiphanies that actually sealed Equiano’s conversion to Christianity later in
life, he tells of being “wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules of my
country written almost exactly [in the Bible]; a circumstance which I believe
tended to impress our manners and customs more deeply on my memory”
(63). Equiano appears to need reading—and, in particular, reading in the
sacred text of those people with whom he regularly came into contact—in
order to secure the images of self and origins afloat on his memory. And
he makes a point of repeatedly engaging Biblical scriptures in order not
simply to provide literary effects of consciousness, but to permit a disclosure
of his being, a disclosure that surpasses the raciology of his day as well
as its attendant nationalist absolutism. Because Equiano’s memory of his

childhood origins is blurred, as an adult he reconstitutes his sense of origins
through metaphorical borrowings. In this way, he reconstructs an image of
himself—a bodily image as well as a spiritual, ekphrastic representation—
that allows him to mark a humanistic entry point into the world, one that
exceeds the limits of race and nation alike.
This gesture constitutes, it seems, a sort of textual “mirror stage.”
Of course, according to Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage does not provide
subjectivity, but moves the child beyond a sense of fragmentation and toward
a sense of bodily totality, wholeness. The mirror stage, in Equiano’s case, is
supplied by ekphrastic text and memory, and from these he pieces together
early memories that provide him a foundation upon which to construct a
sense of the origins of his human being, and thus a sense of historical being.
Text, and specifically sacred text, provides him the security of knowledge of
his origins in a way that discourses of national belonging cannot.
Sacred text, however, was often employed as an aspect of a mimetic
process of identification that regularly served as the root of eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century nationalist discourse. Hegel, for instance, sought to
merge the church and the nation-state through his brand of metaphysical
philosophy. While Kant’s hypothetical imperative, “So act as to treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in another, always as an end, and never as only
a means,” seems an essential translation of Christ’s admonition to “do unto
others as you would have them do unto you,” Kant nonetheless, on the surface
at least, insisted upon a separation of church and state. Hegel, conversely, felt
this to be implausible. Ricoeur reminds us that “Hegel no doubt did try to
make philosophy a secularized form of theology. . . . The fact is that from
the end of the first third of the nineteenth century on, everywhere [sic]
substituted the word ‘man’—or humanity, or the human spirit, or human
culture—for Hegel’s spirit, . . . we do not really know whether it is man or
God” (203). Northrup Frye concurs, adding that if Karl Marx’s spiritual father
was Hegel, Hegel’s spiritual father was Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century
founder of the German Reformation (Great Code xx).
Though he did not seek to hide it under secular prose, as did many
modern thinkers of his age, Equiano also looked to the sacred to justify
and examine his own human existence and to bolster his sense of historical
origins and belonging to a community of free human beings. The paradox
in this is that the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, is a book about
exile. It may provide, as Hegel perhaps intends, the root of the nation-
state, but it also repeatedly tells stories of rootlessness and wandering—of
exceeding and transgressing the limits and constraints of the nation-state—
not unlike the exilic journeying in which Equiano engages. On this point,
Édouard Glissant, citing, among other texts, the Old Testament and the
ever-important Iliad, convincingly argues:
[T]he great founding books of communities, the Old Testament,

the Iliad, the Odyssey . . . the Aeneid, or the African epics, were
all books about exile and often errantry. This epic literature is
amazingly prophetic. It tells of community, but, through relating
the community’s apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed,
it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root)
and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books
concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of
the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim.  .  .  . These are
books about the collective consciousness, but they also introduce
the unrest and suspense that allow the individual to discover
himself there, whenever he himself becomes the issue. (Poetics
of Relation 15)
Equiano appears to press this point home with his reader by citing
not simply the Bible, but also by quoting at length from Milton’s epic poem
of celestial exile, Paradise Lost (1667) and by alluding repeatedly to Pope’s
translation of the Iliad, even as he asserts his certainty in a specifically African
cosmology. At the same time, though, he also asserts his belief (by virtue
of his readings in the Bible) that the history of the African Eboes before
the transatlantic slave trade bears a “strong analogy” to that of the Jews
before their dispersal, “particularly the patriarchs, while they were yet in that
pastoral state which is described in Genesis—an analogy which alone would
induce me to think that the one people had sprung from the other” (14).
Here Equiano writes of a “pastoral state” that lies beyond the fast-forming
cities of modernity, which served not only as the centers (metropoles) of
empire, but also as the centers of nationalistic life. That Equiano draws an
analogy between his people and the Jews means not only that he sees them
both as diasporic people and exilic wanderers whose existence took shape
beyond and in spite of the reach of nation and empire, but that he deems
himself and his people to be “people of the book” (a very important matter
for Christians in recognizing other people as belonging to God), and it is
there that their allegiance lies. I would contend, however, that Equiano’s
metaphorical recourse to the Bible signifies even further: It allows him not
only to express his sense of the human, but further to argue for a humanism
that is free of both racism and nationalism. I will return to this point later.
Equiano’s recourse to the Bible is also significant for discussions

regarding the aptness of Christianity as a substitute religion for Equiano:
because he saw many resemblances between the words of the Bible and the
words he likely heard during his religious training in Africa,26 Christianity
and its tenets became more palatable to him, and he felt a certain comfort
in looking to its texts not simply for examples of figurations he might adapt
to his own ontological discourse, but also for a textual model for revealing
and narrating his sense of being. As a significant aspect of his reading
practice consisted in engagement with the Bible, and because the Bible is
itself an archetype of Western literature, we may use Equiano’s account of
his development as a reader of sacred scripture to further our understanding
of him as a writer of secular prose who uses language laden with spiritual
metaphors to convey his sense of being.
In fact, the Biblical discourse at play in Equiano’s Narrative seems
to raise the existential efficacy of his text, in that the unfolding of his
autobiography comes in tandem with his application of the Biblical sources
he reads to the life writing he practices. One aspect of reading Equiano
as a writer of prose, then, consists in identifying a sequence of spiritual
phases that signal a dialectical progression of thought and metaphorical
representation in his Narrative, not simply, as I have outlined, from reading to
writing to being read, but also from servitude, to freedom and an apocalyptic
discourse that insists upon “understanding,” to, finally, an insistence upon
action and actuation in his conception of historical being. He significantly
relates this latter to his hope of “becoming” an instrument of enlightenment
and emancipation.
Phases of Being: Biblical Metaphorics in Equiano’s Narrative of Becoming
Equiano situates what I will call his “phases of being” in metaphorical lan-
guage drawn variously from both the Old and New Testaments. For instance,
he regularly takes advantage of the New Testament writers’ sometimes tacit
reference to the scriptures of the Old Testament, and thus he conceives of
the Bible as a narrative unity that is to be navigated fluidly, in spite of its
origin as a set of disparate and at times fragmented texts,27 just as he fluidly
navigates representations of his experiences drawn from disparate episodes of
his history. We should note that the main characteristic of Equiano’s use of
the Bible lies not in his replication of the Bible’s sequence of phases—from
creation in the Book of Genesis to the apocalypse in the Book of Revela-
tion—but in his extraction of specific forms of speech from these phases
for use in his own narrative. His text does not end, for example, with an
allusion to or citation from the apocalyptic theme of Revelation, as we might
expect, but with a reference to the Book of Micah, which oscillates between
a condemnation of the present sins of the people and an exposition of God’s
purpose in blessing them. Most importantly, Micah speaks of the return
of Israel from exile; such a matter was not lost on Equiano, who regularly
described himself as a stranger whose travels suggest a prolonged quest for
home that was never relieved from wandering. Further, the passage Equiano
quotes from Micah underscores the importance of actuation and action on
the part of the reader and hearer of the word: “He hath shewed thee, O
man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8; Narra-
tive 205). As Equiano portrays his process of “becoming,” he overtly plays
upon the journey metaphor that is necessary to the travelogue, germane to
the epic, and persistent throughout the Bible. He also plays subtly upon
the notion that the Word must be the ethical person’s traveling companion,
and this he demonstrates by presenting us with a narrative that does not
emerge ex nihilo, but from a specific historical context that requires—by the
text’s conclusion—responsive action: the reader and hearer of the word must
also become a doer of the word. The Narrative directs us along the way to
action; certainly not lost in this is the metaphor, in the Gospels, of Christ
as “the way.” And, as Christ states simply, the way to heaven is not only
through him; it is him ( John 14:6 reads “I am the way, the truth, and the
life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”). Christ’s words seem to
provide an analogy for the actuation Equiano seeks through writing. His
own actuated being is the simultaneously immanent and transcendent telos
Equiano sets forth, at the Narrative’s beginning as well as its end, as that
way by which the reader must pass.
I see six main phases at work in the sequence of Biblical metaphors
Equiano employs in the Narrative as he works toward this concept of
actuated being: exile; freedom and liminality; abjection; faith; conversion
and salvation; and finally, actuation. Each phase seems to build and expand
upon that which precedes it; there are instances of antimony in the sequence,
as in the juxtaposition of the abject and the establishment of faith, just as
there are a number of instances in which the phases overlap. Yet in the
main, Equiano uses a sequence of onto-theological metaphorics to convey
a sense of unity in the disparate nature of his spiritual evolution, similar to
the unity he takes for certain in the disparate books of Bible. I will discuss
each in turn.
EXILE
The characteristics of the exile metaphor are noted early in the Narrative,
as early as the paratextual material—the letters I discussed earlier in this
chapter—Equiano appends to the work. His initial reference to exile through
allusion to the Bible appears in chapter 2, as he tells of having been captured,
then sold and resold by various traders and families as he is transported to
the West Coast of Africa:
I now began to think I was to be adopted into the family, and

was beginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget by
degrees my misfortunes, when all at once the delusion vanished;
for, without the least previous knowledge, one morning early, while
my dear master and companion was still asleep, I was awakened
out of my reverie to fresh sorrow, and hurried away even among
the uncircumcised. (24)
The passage from Ezekiel 32:32, to which Equiano’s exilic metaphor

here bears a strong resemblance, describes the uncircumcised as those whose
hearts were closed to God. While throughout the Bible, reference to the
uncircumcised could indicate Gentiles, it could also designate those who did
not bear this ritual mark of God’s covenant with Abraham. Ezekiel posits
the uncircumcised as foreign captors in the guise of Egypt who, the prophet
Ezekiel insists, will be overcome after having instigated the fall of Judah and
bringing about the exile of the Israelites in Babylon. Ezekiel 32:32 reads:
For I have caused my terror in the land of the living: and

[Pharoah] shall be laid in the midst of the uncircumcised with
them that are slain with the sword, even Pharoah and all his
multitude, saith the Lord God.
Equiano’s evocation of this passage appears obliquely to assign blame

for his own exile not only to those European foreigners who fomented war,
dispossession, displacement, and the taking of captives, but also to another
obvious party of guilt, those African “brethren” who were his initial captors
and from whom were drawn the great majority of the New World’s slaves.
The prophet Ezekiel prophesied against the revered lands of Judah and
Jerusalem as well as the sinful Babylon and Egypt. Judah and Jerusalem were
part of God’s legacy to the Jews, and thus Ezekiel’s chastising of them is of
some importance, largely because it indicates that the captor as well as the
captive bears some guilt, some responsibility for the situation of oppression
and for rectifying that situation.
In referencing these passages early in his Narrative, Equiano
commences his autobiographical account not with birth so much as misbirth,
with exile rather than a rooted sense of home, and this is the fragmented
genesis from which his Narrative grows and takes shape. Thus the chief
point he makes early in the Narrative is not about beginning but belonging,
that is, his longing to belong to a community of human beings. The first
chapter’s narrative moments in which Benezet’s history aids Equiano in
the reconstruction of his pre-exilic world (rather than the resurrection of
a holistic memory), such that he is enabled to demonstrate to the reader
the fraught foundations of his sense of being, are significant. Such detours
to outside sources and the attendant restructuring of his world by way of
textuality (“I saw the customs of my people written there [in the Bible]”)
allow Equiano recourse to a sense of being and spirituality. In short, through
a metaphoric process of integration—the analogy Equiano draws between
the patriarchs of the Bible and the elders of his village—Equiano carefully
crafts a provisional unity of being that paradoxically conditions the remainder
of his story. This paradox is quite visible in what I have here designated as
the freedom phase, which commences in chapter 7 with allusions to images
of the liminal.
FREEDOM AND THE LIMINAL
Chapters 3 through 6 of the Narrative elaborate the exile phase by giv-

ing accounts of Equiano’s adventures at sea and his myriad descriptions of
slavery’s horrors. Though his baptism is narrated in chapter 4, that scene is
not described with words of religious exaltation, but rather is presented in
a matter of fact tone that makes it clear to the reader that Equiano’s full
conversion is yet to come. In giving an account of his freedom in chapter
7, however, Equiano pointedly alludes to three Biblical passages in order
to convey, again through onto-theological metaphor, his fast belief in the
miraculous powers of God as an emancipatory and protective force, and he
does so in ways that are fully absent from the baptism scene.
When, for instance, Equiano presents Mr. King with forty pounds
sterling and then, with the aid of his captain, convinces the good Quaker
to accept the sum and set him at liberty, he elaborates his freedom story
in this way:
These words of my master were like a voice from heaven to me;

in an instant, all my trepidation was turned into unutterable
bliss; and I most reverently bowed myself with gratitude, unable
to express my feelings, but by the overflowing of my eyes, and
a heart replete with thanks to God; while my true and worthy
friend the captain congratulated us both with a peculiar degree
of heartfelt pleasure. As soon as the first transports of my joy
were over, and I had expressed my thanks to these my worthy
friends in the best manner I was able, I rose with a heart full of
affection and reverence, and left the room in order to obey my
master’s joyful mandate of going to the Register Office [where his
manumission would be drawn up]. As I was leaving the house,
I called to mind the words of the Psalmist, in the 126th Psalm,
and like him, “I glorified God in my heart, in whom I trusted.”
These words had been impressed on my mind from the very day
I was forced from Deptford to the present hour, and I now saw
them, as I thought, fulfilled and verified. My imagination was all
rapture as I flew to the Register Office: and in this respect, like
the apostle Peter (whose deliverance from prison was so sudden
and extraordinary, that he thought he was in a vision), I could
scarcely believe I was awake.28 (108)
The metaphors of plenitude and excess Equiano utters in response to

his emancipation (“my imagination was all rapture,” “the . . . transports of
my joy,” “the overflowing of my eyes,” “unutterable bliss”) are also metaphors
of the liminal. His analogizing (yet another metaphorical turn) of his
experience with that of Peter, one of Christ’s first apostles who is generally
regarded as the founder of the Christian Church, means that he now sees
himself as one miraculously, providentially saved from a life of enslavement.29
In Equiano’s emancipatory dream-state, the Lord saves those in captivity
and demonstrates that from their sorrows they shall reap great joys and
prosperity. Though Equiano does not actually quote Psalms 126, which is
referenced in the passage I excerpt above, it would have certainly suited
well his intentions in this passage. For Psalms 126, which is attributed to
David, reads, in part: “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion,
we were like them that dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord
hath done great things for them.”
The use of the verb “turn” in this scripture refers to a reversal of
the exiled condition of enslaved Zion, and indicates that for Equiano, the
attainment of freedom from slavery not only relieves him from his sense
of exile and moves him one step closer to the belonging he desires; it
also underscores the centrality of Equiano’s faith to his pursuit of human
freedom, and indeed, the dream-state that is essential to this passage’s
imagery is likewise crucial to Equiano’s representation of the evolution of his
consciousness. Equiano uses these sorts of passages to convey to the reader
the sublimity of his sentiments: that he fully understands the concept of
freedom even though the power of verbal expression momentarily fails him
when freedom comes. Kantian elements of the sublime are in effect here:
Equiano’s feelings of reverence and awe, his profound sense of respect, and
the failure of language in the face of overpowering emotion are all aspects
of what Kant describes in his Critique of Judgment as constituents of the
sublime, through which, Kant argues, the individual tests the limits of reason,
freedom, and meaning. While Kant contends that awareness of the sublime
can teach one the benefits of sensuous experience (that supersensible moral
freedom is something we can think, even if we cannot comprehend it fully),
Equiano’s sentiments in this passage point to a higher moral significance,
one that at once encompasses and surpasses the racial and national identities
so firmly entrenched in and definitive of Kant’s own philosophy.
Equiano’s emancipation scene demonstrates the centrality of
de-racialized being, in that it is not concerned with the limits of “blackness”
as such in the eighteenth century, nor is it simply concerned with meeting
prerequisites that permit membership in the nation-state. Rather, he narrates
scenes of self-conscious awareness and human being in one of the most
important moments of his life. His intertextual strategies make use of a series
of Biblical dialectics in the metaphorical passages he cites: from sowing to
reaping, weeping to rejoicing, dreaming to waking, sleep to consciousness.
Each of these dyads turns out to be a subset of the major metaphorical
dialectic at play in the freedom/liminal phase: from symbolic death and
exile in slavery to being and belonging in human and moral freedom. The
transformational context of Equiano’s message—his sense of not simply
“becoming” an Englishman, but also, and more importantly, revealing the
very fibers of his sense of being—is clear: faith in God brings about a
change in one’s situation, even a change as revolutionary as transfiguration,
whereby Equiano intimates that his manumission is analogous to being
taken up into the Rapture. The persistent association of such metaphorical
dialectics of metamorphosis and becoming in the text indicates to what
extent Equiano saw his manumission as being caught up with the notion
of divine salvation—a passage through the way and being of Christ. It
underscores as well Equiano’s continuing emphasis upon liminal dream-
states, which provide an opening for not simply an advance in understanding,

but also an advance toward self-actualization.
We see the next significant metaphorical gesture in Equiano’s figuration
of the liminal most clearly in the textual space that marks the separation
of the two volumes that constitute the first edition of the Narrative, falling
between chapters 6 and 7 (but coming after chapter 7 in the ninth edition,
to which I refer). It begins with citations of two Biblical books that make
much of the intermediate nature of dreams—The Acts of the Apostles
and the Book of Job. An early manuscript of the former gives the title
simply as “Acts,” written in Greek by the apostle Luke, who, through this
writing, provides an important history of early Christianity. Rendered from
the Greek práxeis, or praxis, and referring to the doings, transactions, and
achievements of the followers of Christ, Acts begins with an account of the
disembowelment of Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Christ and was thus
punished by death as the Twelve prayed in an upper room. It concludes
with the Apostle Paul’s arrest and subsequent preaching at Rome.
Significantly, the Book of Acts also depicts Paul’s imprisonment aboard
a ship that later shipwrecked on the island of Melita. As we have seen, in
various chapters of the Narrative, Equiano is quick to draw an analogy
between Paul’s situation and his own. He, like Paul, had undergone a
revolutionary spiritual conversion; just as the youthful Equiano had proven
immune to the dangers of snakes (Narrative 13), Paul “felt no harm” in the
wake of a venomous snake bite (Acts 28:5). Moreover, Paul’s self-possession
in the face of the storm, and his certainty that all the men (they numbered
“two hundred threescore and sixteen souls”) must remain with the ship
(27:31, 37), is likewise echoed in Equiano’s text. In the aftermath of a
great storm, which he narrates in chapter 8, Equiano ultimately succeeds
in dissuading his irresponsible captain (a different captain than he who had
helped Equiano gain his freedom) from battening down the hatches; had the
captain done so, he would have assured the death of the slaves held captive
below deck. Equiano instead advises the crew to leave the hatches unlocked
and stay with the ship, taking it upon himself to patch the broken area of the
vessel and, by concerted efforts with three Negroes and a Dutch creole sailor
(the ethnicity and racial identity of these men are significant for Equiano
in underscoring the morality of people of color), he “brought all safe to the
shore; so that out of thirty-two people, we lost none” (123). In so speaking,
Equiano cannily echoes Luke’s account of Paul’s shipwreck, which Equiano
cites directly in the liminal space separating the two volumes, a space in
which Equiano describes a journey across the liminality of the sea: “And
so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land” (Acts 27:44; Equiano
118). He also provides a visual illustration of a shipwreck in the Caribbean
Isles by reproducing the 1767 painting, “Bahama Banks,” which depicts
Equiano’s ship, the Nancy, caught in a hurricane. The Nancy would wreck
on the notorious Bahama Banks, and Equiano’s account of this shipwreck
stands as yet another instance of ekphrasis in his Narrative, offering a verbal
representation (or textual picture) of this visual representation.
As Equiano makes clear, the premonition of the shipwreck had come
to him three separate times by way of dreams; in each instance, his dream
was the same and was “fulfilled in every part.” He “could not help looking
upon [himself ] as the principal instrument in effecting [the] deliverance”
of his shipmates (123). Thus along with the metaphorical analogy between
his shipwreck and Paul’s is the interpretation of his dream, a hermeneutic
principle in the gaining of wisdom and understanding. The most salient
aspect of the verses Equiano cites includes the dream-like appearance before
Paul of an angel who tells him that the shipwreck must occur, but that all the
men must remain together in the ship, and that all of them would be saved.
Equiano’s citations from Job in the space that marks the separation of
the two volumes of the first edition of his Narrative continue this strand
of liminal dream-work. He uses Job’s story of trials and tribulations to aid
him in making meaning of his own obstacles in life. Job’s story follows a
dialectical cycle in which Job and his companions, in the shadow of Job’s
affliction, debate the ways of wisdom. Job’s loss of faith—something Equiano
uses to foreshadow his own sense of abjection in the phase that follows his
attention to the liminal—may be read as a scriptural opportunity that allows
man to voice his frustrations and fears in the face of life’s uncertainties.
These sufferings are frequently interpreted by Equiano as divine gifts that
eventually lead to greater enlightenment and wisdom.
The scriptural restoration of Job’s wisdom represents an element of
hope for Equiano, but Job does not gain it independently. Wisdom in the
Bible does not always take shape in the actions of those who follow the
road well-traveled, but often emerges from dream-states in which God or
his angels visit man and relate prophecies. Wisdom—that is, understanding
or knowledge paired with intellect rather than simple “factual” knowledge—
emerges through interpretation from those spaces “in between,” from liminal
spaces and silences. Job, to whom Equiano refers in the aftermath of his
references to the Book of Acts, must be convinced by his friends of the
inappropriateness of his anger; the reasoned and wise voices in the verses
Equiano cites are those of Job’s friends Eliphaz and Elihu, not of Job himself.
In the first scripture, Eliphaz, who, along with Elihu, has come to be with
Job in his grief, admonishes Job for railing against God, and tells him of
insights that came to him in a dream. These amount to an admonition to
trust in God’s greatness, and to cease believing that “mortal man” may be
“more just than God” ( Job 4:17). Later in Job’s story, Elihu takes up the
thread of what comes to be an extended parable, stressing to Job that God
often places man under duress so that he will be “enlightened with the light
of the living” ( Job 33: 30).
Equiano’s cultivation of the metaphor of the liminal as directly
applicable to his cultivation of wisdom and reason, of the dream-state as a
site of revelation and of preparation for ethical or enlightened action,30 is
taken up once more in chapter 10, whose central preoccupation is an account
of the author’s conversion. At this point, Equiano has become disillusioned
with England due to the racism he experiences there. In his quest for a
place that he could truly call home—a home that he imagined as a national
community of true believers—he scrutinizes the doctrines of the Quakers,
the Roman Catholics, and even the Jews (151), whose fabled history he had
early on in the Narrative analogized to that of his own people, the Eboes.
The lack he senses in all of these peoples’ observance of the Gospel leads
him, surprisingly, to plan a move to Turkey. The Turks were, he reasoned,
“in a safer way of salvation than my neighbors” (151). (Critics who often
argue that Equiano desired whiteness above all else because he ultimately
desired an English national identity and decided to settle in England rarely
at the same time consider Equiano’s pointed critique of English racism,
nor do they imagine how we might have construed Equiano’s actions had
he indeed settled in Turkey among the Islamist Kurds, Arabs, and Turks.)
His provisional rejection of England was warranted by him in what
he perceived to be a deliberate deception by Granville Sharp, the famed
abolitionist with whom he had become acquainted. Even in the ninth edition
of his text, Equiano does not lighten his criticism of Sharp, in spite of
Sharp’s cooperation with him in litigating the case of the slave ship Zong in
1783. In 1774, Equiano had engaged the attorney on behalf of a beleaguered
friend, a free black cook named John Annis. Equiano had hopes that Sharp
would secure Annis’s release, for Annis had been captured and detained
after refusing to go back to work for his employer, who lived in St. Kitts.
Equiano’s hopes were soon dashed; by his account, Sharp “proved unfaithful;
he took my money, lost me many months employ, and did not the least good
in the cause; and when the poor man [Annis] arrived at St. Kitt’s [sic], he
was, according to custom, staked to the ground with four pins through a
cord, two on his wrists and two on his ancles [sic], was cut and flogged most
unmercifully.” He remained in this state “till kind death released him out
of the hands of his tyrants” (153). During Annis’s imprisonment, Equiano
had felt tortured as well: he describes himself as being at once under the
“convictions of sin” (153) and consumed by the thought of dying as a sinner.
The admixture of his emotions and his trauma, as well as his feelings against
Sharp and his grief over Annis’s death, combined to convince him to leave
England, for which he had, up to this point in the narrative, proclaimed
an abiding love.
It may seem curious that Equiano experiences a crisis of faith in
England at the very moment he explores the liminal as a source of wisdom
and understanding. Yet in the midst of his angst, we can discern a tactical
move at work in his recitation, in the midst of the angst he describes in
chapter 10, of Ecclesiastes 1:9, which reads, “The thing that hath been, it
is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing under the sun” (Equiano 153). Here Equiano
quotes a Biblical chiasmus. From the Greek chiasma, or cross, and often
symbolized by the uppercase letter “X,” a chiasmus indicates an inverted
state or condition, though usually one of symmetry and balance. Equiano’s
use of this particular chiasmus underscores his belief in divine predestination.
Its certitude gives him comfort at a disturbing time of his life, a time when
his sense of upheaval and homelessness seems most acute. Yet the Biblical
chiasmus from Ecclesiastes—even with its sense of surety—is not so far from
the liminal as it might first appear. It allows Equiano to attain a perspective
upon the pastness of his history as well as the seeds of time, which assure
individual and collective futures through growth and development. Thus,
through his citation of a belief in the philosophic import of this passage, he
gains an understanding of his present through an assumed cohesion of his
past, which projects itself toward an unknown that is to come. Ecclesiastes,
a book viewed by Biblical scholars as intriguingly confounding, may be said
to be the Biblical text most concerned with the propounding of wisdom.
And, as one would have it, the nature of Biblical wisdom is generally not
the rendering of concrete knowledge, but of a fluid ability to deal with life’s
vicissitudes and contingencies. In this second aspect of the liminal phase,
Equiano devalues the concrete nature of “knowing” in favor of the more
fluid concept of “understanding.”
ABJECTION
The liminal phase of Equiano’s Narrative is not immediately followed by

an emergence into a full state of being, as we might expect. Conversely, it
prefaces a state of abjection into which Equiano feels himself to be plunged

by virtue of the very wisdom the liminal has brought him. The abjection
phase Equiano enters and narrates with such poignancy is the briefest in the
sequence of phases. Coming in chapter 10 near the apotheosis of Equiano’s
sense and feeling of liminality, his feeling of degradation and utter humility
sets in upon him in the wake of his friend John Annis’s torturous death.
While Annis was “staked to the ground with four pins through a cord”
(153), Equiano was plagued by thoughts that his “state was worse than any
man’s,” and he despondently prayed for his own death:
I often wished for death, though, at the same time, convinced

I was altogether unprepared for that awful summons: suffering
much by villains in the late cause [of Annis’s imprisonment and
torture], and being much concerned about the state of my soul,
these things (but particularly the latter) brought me very low; so
that I became a burden to myself, and viewed all things around
me as emptiness and vanity, which could give no satisfaction to
a troubled conscience. [The] only comfort I then experienced
was in reading the Holy Scriptures, where I saw that . . . what
was appointed for me I must submit to. Thus I continued to
travel in much heaviness, and frequently murmured against the
Almighty, particularly in his providential dealings; and, awful to
think! I began to blaspheme, and wished often to be any thing
but a human being. (153)
Equiano makes clear that the dream states that provided him with a
sense of enlightenment and wisdom also allowed him to recognize the state
of depravity in which he lived. As Equiano tells it, it seems necessary that he
fall to the depths of abjection before he can meaningfully and purposefully
emerge from this state, secure his faith, and act upon that faith through
good works. It is equally important to him that he express clearly to his
reader what is at stake in his full conversion, namely his being.
Equiano’s narration of his abject experience in relation to his sense
of being is intensified by the only reference to the Book of Revelation that
appears in the text. Revelation 6:16 appears at the final stage in his descent
into a hellish existence, but also aptly paves the way for his account of his
transcendence:
In these severe conflicts the Lord answered me by awful “visions

of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings
upon the bed,” Job xxxiii. 15. He was pleased, in much mercy, to
give me to see, and in some measure understand, the great and
awful scene of the Judgment-day, that “no unclean person, no
unholy thing, can enter into the kingdom of God,” Eph[esians],
v. 5. I would then, if it had been possible, have changed my
nature with the meanest worm on the earth, and was ready to
say to the mountains and rocks, “fall on me,” Rev[elation]. vi.
16. I then, in the greatest agony, requested the divine Creator,
that he would grant me a small space of time to repent of my
follies and vile iniquities, which I felt were grievous. The Lord,
in his manifold mercies, was pleased to grant my request, and
being yet in a state of time, the sense of God’s mercies was
so great on my mind when I awoke, that my strength entirely
failed me for many minutes, and I was exceedingly weak. This
was the first spiritual mercy I ever was sensible of, and being
on praying ground, as soon as I recovered a little strength, and
got out of bed and dressed myself I invoked heaven from my
inmost soul, and fervently begged that God would never again
permit me to blaspheme his most holy name. The Lord, who is
long-suffering, and full of compassion to such poor rebels as we
are, condescended to hear and answer. (153–54)
This is yet another metaphorical effect that is of signal importance in

telling the reader of the centrality of his conversion to Christianity. Wisdom
and understanding, communicated to Equiano through liminal dream states,
lead to a painful self-conscious awareness that is absolutely essential to his
sense of being. It also serves as a transition toward hope: Equiano’s hopeful
affirmation that the phase of abjection is not simply to be superseded, but
serves to confirm the believer in his or her faith and prepares her or him
to act meaningfully.
Equiano’s triumphant hope is signaled in his rather esoteric reference
to the Biblical metaphor, the “searcher of hearts”:
I felt that I was altogether unholy, and saw clearly what a bad
use I had made of the faculties I was endowed with: they were
given me to glorify God with; I thought, therefore, I had better
want them here, and enter into life eternal, than abuse them and
be cast into hell fire. I prayed to be directed, if there were any
holier persons than those with whom I was acquainted, that the
Lord would point them out to me. I appealed to the searcher
of hearts, whether I did not wish to love him more, and serve
him better. (154)
Equiano draws the metaphor, the “searcher of hearts” from Paul’s

epistle to the Romans, 8:27, which reads: “And he that searcheth the hearts
knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit; because he [the Spirit] maketh
intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” The eighth chapter
of Romans speaks to the self-reflective and self-conscious hope of the
Christian and the power of the Spirit, or Comforter, the central occupant
of the New Testament sites of the liminal. The Holy Spirit is the Bible’s
“third person” who dwells in the interstice between heaven and earth, an
agile, peripatetic inhabitant of both realms. It is this mobile Spirit that
induces man to heteroglossia and glossolalia; that serves as the other self of
Christ ( John 14:16, 17); and that lives and works with and within men as
the active agent of God. Thus, it is to this spirit that Equiano alludes in his
quest to cast off the weight of abjection as he works to grasp more fully his
faith, which requires, as he puts it, all the intellectual faculties with which
he had been endowed. And it is faith, born out of desperate abjection, that
emerges as the fulcrum of Equiano’s spiritual rebirth.
FAITH
Equiano’s faithful appeal to the Spirit serves as the central efficacy of his
conversion narrative. It permits him to rise above the limits of abjection
and move toward a fuller grasping of his faith. It also serves to intensify his
vision of actuation, which has, as we have discussed, two levels: the level of
actuation by hope in the word of God, and the level of actuation through
the reception of his own text by a world of readers, which is a different
sort of hope. The latter level is that of both a secondary identity symbol-
ized by the reconstruction of his memory of Africa through his reading of
the Bible (an act that appears as a salvific gesture of transcending oblivion,
that is, escaping a complete loss of being), and the ultimate sense of being
Equiano fashions by turning to his own book in the present of his day, the
text he imbues with his own sense of being and which he hopes will be
actualized in communication with a reader who will, through faith and good
works, join the Christian abolitionist movement and work to the benefit
of all humanity. The reestablishment of faith that takes place at the heart
of chapter 10 includes references to each of these two levels, and Equiano,
through his citation of Matthew 25:41,31 which aids him in conveying his
surety of God’s judgment of any shortcomings in the final days, shores up
his faith by considering himself to be a vital actor in the consummation

of God’s kingdom and in the liberation of all of God’s children, regardless
of race (158).
Remarkably, Equiano’s depiction of his full grasping of faith begins
with his engagement aboard a “ship called the Hope” (160), an aptly named
vessel whose symbolic significance should not be lost on the reader. When
he boards the Hope to take his post as steward, he is still in the grip of
the abject: “confusion seized me, and I wished to be annihilated” (160). As
Equiano sails for Cadiz, he reads deeply in the Scriptures. He recounts
that he “wrestled hard with God in fervent prayers, who had declared in
his word that he would hear the groanings and deep sighs of the poor in
spirit” (161). Persisting in prayer and reading, Equiano recounts that he
began to “meditate” upon the passage of Acts 4:12, the very passage to
which he holds open his Bible in his frontispiece portrait: “Neither is there
salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given
among men, whereby we must be saved.” This passage is not only one of
the most important verses one may cite from the New Testament, but is
also of primary importance to interpreting the Narrative. Matthew 4:12
counts Christ as the cornerstone of the Christian church, the foundation
upon which the faith of the faithful is built (Matt 4:11). Equiano also
cites this passage, as I have mentioned, in his emancipation scene, and his
meditation upon it at this later point in the Narrative tells the reader of
what is perhaps not the second, but the third “life” of Equiano, who lives
now as one freed not only from the bonds of earthly chattel slavery, but
also from the bonds of eternal sin.
Matthew 4:12 echoes another verse of scripture that Equiano cites
from Isaiah 12:2 and 4, which likewise prefaces the entire Narrative and
is found on the title page: “Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and
not be afraid: for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; he is also
become my salvation. . . . And in that day shall ye say, Praise the Lord, call
upon his name, declare his doings among the people.” As Equiano ponders
this passage in the light of his life and experience, wondering whether he
has lived a life sufficiently moral to justify his salvation, salvation indeed
comes to him. Meditation upon this and other verses of faith, such as Isaiah
25:7, cited below, finally leads to his full conversion:
I began to think I had lived a moral life, and that I had a proper
ground to believe I had an interest in the divine favour; but still
meditating on the subject, not knowing whether salvation was to
be had partly for our own good deeds, or solely as the sovereign
gift of God:—in this deep consternation the Lord was pleased to

break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light; and
in an instant, as it were, removing the veil, and letting light into
a dark place, Isa[iah]. xxv. 7. I saw clearly, with the eye of faith,
the crucified Saviour bleeding on the cross on Mount Calvary:
the Scriptures became an unsealed book. . . . It was given me at
that time to know what it was to be born again. (162)
By the time Equiano reaches Cadiz aboard the Hope, his aspirations
toward Christian faithfulness have been realized by way of his full conversion
and salvation. And as the Hope returns from Cadiz to London, Equiano
conveys to his reader a signal truth: that faith is confirmed only by doing
good and moral works. Primary among these good works is, Equiano will
have us know as he returns to the center of the British Empire, the abolition
of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that had, indeed, held such an empire at
the pinnacle of immoral and ahumanistic world power.
CONVERSION AND SALVATION
In retrospect, what I am calling Equiano’s “third life,”32 his renewed sense

of being and of the importance of just works, convince him that every mis-
fortune, every “providential circumstance” that had happened to him thus far
in his life led to his experience of conversion and salvation. His conviction
that through this mystical experience he is sealed in Christ’s salvation is
underscored in his recourse to the Biblical metaphor, “the earnest of the
Spirit” (2 Cor 1:21–22 and 5:5; Equiano 162). The “earnest of the Spirit”
is a significant metaphor: the Apostle Paul’s usage of “the Spirit” so closely
associates this aspect of the Holy Trinity with Christ that the two are, at
times, practically identical in his discourse. If the Spirit is so closely cor-
related with the identity of Christ, whom the Spirit succeeds as a comforter
on Earth, possessing and possessed by believers awaiting the rapture, then
the metaphor “the earnest of the Spirit” serves as a metonym for the name
of God’s son, whose sacrifice “sealed” believers, that is, saved them in order
that they might enter the Kingdom of God in the afterlife. As Equiano
comes to recognize the persistent presence of the Holy Spirit in his former
captivity, enslavement, and sense of abjection, time collapses for him in a
scene of contemporaneity: “Now every leading providential circumstance that
happened to me, from the day I was taken from my parents to that hour,
was then, in my view, as if it had but just then occurred” (Equiano 162).
The chief point made about salvation in these passages is that once salvation
is assured, man is not only redeemed, but also enlightened. For Equiano,
enlightenment is the primary benefit of salvation, represented by his imag-
ery of lifted veils and rebirth, and mentioned, for instance, in his citation
of Isaiah 25:7 (162): “And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the
covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations.”
From this point of view, we can see how important it is that Equiano
toggles between the Old Testament and the New in his discourse on
salvation. His recourse to Isaiah suggests the basis for such oscillation: the
name Isaiah, meaning salvation of Jehovah, is almost identical in meaning
to the name Joshua, meaning Jehovah is salvation. In the New Testament,
the name Joshua is rendered as Jesus; Jesus, in turn, is the name of the
Messiah proclaimed by Isaiah. Thus the book of Isaiah and its references
are seen by Biblical scholars as particularly powerful and prophetic. New
Testament writers regularly hearkened to Isaiah, whose words became deeply
engrained in English national culture. (Examples such as Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), itself an important influence on Equiano, and Handel’s oratorio
the Messiah (1741), a composition that shares a name and theme with
Alexander Pope’s poem of the same title, which appeared in the Spectator in
1712, come readily to mind.) Christ himself began his preaching ministry
by reading from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, declaring himself to be the
fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, and so the book is sealed in its prominence
among the Christian faithful.33
Such Christian discourses of faith further intensify Equiano’s experience
of salvation. To express this experience, he gives metaphors having to do
with the law of God, by which he is saved. The conveyance of God’s word,
in which Christ makes such metaphorical proclamations as “Verily, verily, I
say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot
enter into the Kingdom of God” ( John 3:5; Equiano 162), are interpreted
by Equiano during his conversion experience as types of judgment and
instruction. In John’s Gospel, Christ uses the trope of rebirth by water and
Spirit to challenge the ruler Nicodemus, and speaks of the entrance into the
kingdom as a central mystery that distinguishes between persons of faith
and those unfamiliar with “the way,” that is, God’s Word made flesh, Christ
himself. In the same scene in which he cites this passage, Equiano also
cites a proclamation from Psalms that confirms for him that the judgments
of the Lord are to be desired more than any wealth he might amass for
himself, “yea, more than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the
honeycomb” (Ps 19:10; Equiano 162). One might imagine that included
among the list of such less than desirable wealth would be the ownership
of persons.
It seems clear for Equiano that entry into God’s kingdom did not
call for simple acceptance of the Gospel of Christ, but was achieved by
way of embracing a mode of ethical living dictated by laws propounded
in the Old Testament, and rearticulated and reified in the New Testament
through Christ as the Word incarnate, such that an understanding of the
import of these metaphors is both accomplished and manifested through
action against slavery and actuation of free being on earth as well as in the
afterlife. Paul’s enigmatic phrase for the coming of the law reads: “For I was
without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and
I died” (Rom 7:9; Equiano 162). Equiano cites Paul’s words in an effort
to describe his own situation; that is, that as soon as the commandment
of God’s law was effected, he was rendered carnally dead because his sins
were made apparent. As the Bible now appears to Equiano as an “unsealed
book” (162), the force of God’s law is made fresh. His “unlawful self ” is
executed, to be replaced by an incorporeal, transcendent self that has been
saved and redeemed, such that his very body—and by extension, his text,
which symbolizes his inscribed, immanent being—emerges as a mystery to
be read and interpreted, and his soul—his transcendent being—stands out
as an actuated entity. For example, his allusion in this scene to the Epistle
to the Romans, concerned, in its entirety, to exhort God’s people to feel
reassured in his power, dovetails with his reference to a minor metaphor
in I Samuel 7:12: “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh
and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying Hitherto hath the
Lord helped us.” Equiano writes that he “set up [the Lord’s] Ebenezer”
(Ebenezer means literally “stone of help”) and he could thus boast of his
savior to the unsaved in whose midst he stood as a transfigured being
(164). Salvation in the Bible is a comprehensive event in the life of the
believer. Surveying it in Equiano’s Narrative, it is an event that marks
the experience of liminality and conviction, the incorporation of faith and
wisdom, and moves them dialectically forward through the transformed
being of Equiano himself.
ACTUATION
I will discuss the final phase, what I refer to as “actuation in praxis,” after a
manner that takes it to be dependent upon the others for the accomplish-
ment of the metaphorical mode of meaning making Equiano employs in
the text. Equiano is intent upon setting down his experiences and beliefs
in writing. What he has experienced is, primarily, an understanding of the
power of “the word,” which has granted him the “true” sense of not only
the Scriptures (in both the straightforward sense of that phrase as grounded
in literacy, and in the metaphorical sense of that phrase as it refers to the
body of Christ), but also of his own being. What he experiences by way of
spiritual conversion through the Bible’s teaching echoes his understanding of
Christ as both “the Word” and “the way.” That is, through “the Word,” one
is not only saved but also actuated, as Equiano points out in his conversion
scene. And salvation comes not by faith alone, but also by works in a way
that underscores the signification of his being as well as his text.
I will explain what I mean by this last line in these concluding
paragraphs of this chapter. The general material of the final phase of
Equiano’s Narrative is the familiar ground of understanding and action: there
is again the juxtaposition of the saved against the unsaved, and this portends
rather heavily as Equiano differentiates between those of his readers who
will refuse understanding and will thus forego salvation, and those who, by
persisting in their faith and via engagement with the world around them,
will be the saved agents of worldly transformation (164). My summary of
the process is borne out in Equiano’s multiple scriptural references near
the end of chapter 10 (164): if we consider his scriptural bricolage in this
chapter as a quilt of phrases that positions the reader to engage in future
social action, we find that there is a participatory moment that, ideally, is
engendered in the reader’s mind as soon as she or he completes the text. The
Bible’s invitation to the reader—to which Equiano directs us—is one that
ultimately has to do with being as it relates to new beginnings and existence:
the New Testament concludes not with a prognostication on the “end,” but
with an invitation to behold God as he makes “all things new” (Rev 21:5) in
a “new” world beyond the time of the present. Equiano likewise concludes
his Narrative with a vision of creation and “work,” which he had, earlier in
the text, struggled to distinguish from “grace” (164). Just as the actuation
phase of Equiano’s Narrative is participatory, the concept of work is of
significance. Equiano calls for the abolition of slavery, missionary work in
Africa (193), and education for the former slaves (196).
He also, importantly, commends and “blesses” those Westerners
who provide “liberal” support for the “oppressed negroes” (sic, 205), a
commendation that he offers along with a reference to Job 30:25: “Did not
I weep for him that was in trouble? was not my soul grieved for the poor?”
The passage from Job is striking, as it results from two readings. First, one
must place it in the light of Equiano’s reference, on the same page, to Isaiah
32:8, which speaks to setting aright the deceit practiced by those in power.
Isaiah 32:7–8 reads: “The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth
wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy
speaketh right. But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things
shall he stand.” Thus Equiano refers to the liberals who shall rightly be
called liberals, not those who practice deceit against the poor, yet proclaim
themselves champions of the downtrodden. Equiano’s citation from Job
follows this after a disjointed fashion. Biblical scripture shows Job to be an
upright man, yes, but also one filled with arrogance and self-righteousness.
His friends Eliphaz and Elihu try to point this out to him, yet Job appears
unaffected by their criticisms when he counters that he has always thought
of the poor, that he has always championed the troubled ( Job 30:25). There
is a bit of conscious irony in Equiano’s citation, which comes as he reviews
for his reader the activities of the British legislature as regards slavery and
the colonization of Africa, and this after, in his letter to Parliament, having
praised the legislature for its “liberal sentiment” and moral compass (xxi).
In a round about way, he exhorts the reader to be forthright and sincere in
his or her dealings with Africans, to resist villainy and embrace the role of
what the Bible calls the true “liberal.” Quite a nuanced stance.
An Actuated Being
In the closing pages of his Narrative, Equiano uses the Book of Proverbs,
also called the Book of Wisdom, to underscore his call for true liberals
to carry out moral and just social works. Proverbs 11, 14, and 21, all of
which are cited in the Narrative’s final chapter, insist upon the dialectical
tension of sin and righteousness. Equiano’s movement from these scriptures
to the Book of Micah in the final passage of the Narrative provides an apt
conclusion to his life story:
My life and fortune have been extremely checquered, and my

adventures various. Even those I have related are considerably
abridged. If any incident in this little work should appear
uninteresting and trifling to most readers, I can only say, as my
excuse for mentioning it, that almost every event of my life made
an impression on my mind, and influenced my conduct. I early
accustomed myself to look at the hand of God in the minutest
occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion;
and in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of
importance. After all, what makes any event important, unless
by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn ‘to
do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God!’34 To
those who are possessed of this spirit, there is scarcely any book
or incident so trifling that does not afford some profit, while to
others the experience of ages seems of no use; and even to pour
out to them the treasures of wisdom is throwing the jewels of
instruction away. (208)
I suggested earlier that the Bible’s final book, the Book of Revelation,
culminates in a gesture toward that which lies beyond itself. Citing the
Book of Micah as his final reference to scripture, in lieu of Revelation,
a more obvious choice for a religious writer aiming to reveal truth to his
readers, represents a concerted strategy on Equiano’s part. Biblical scholars
view Micah as a significant book of the Hebrew Bible. It shifts dialectically
between a condemnation of the present sins of the people, and an exposition
of God’s purpose in blessing them. Chapter 6 of Micah, from which Equiano
cites, concerns condemnation; it threatens idolaters and those who oppress
the powerless. As an allusion to Deuteronomy 10:12 (they read almost
identically), the passage from Micah calls upon God’s people to obey his
laws not selectively, but completely. Micah goes beyond issuing injunctions
against those who oppress and deal falsely with the powerless; it emphasizes
the importance of Judah and Israel’s return from exile.
By referring at the conclusion of his Narrative to the sense of exile that
opens his text and that, through the preponderance of the autobiography,
characterizes his sense of being, Equiano works to bring his account to a
conclusion marked by a provisional unity of meaning. A call for morality,
justice, and the end of exile are all subtended in the Narrative’s culmination
by the practice, not simply the profession, of an ideal, rather than a false or
incomplete, Christianity. At the end of his Narrative, wherein Equiano has
inscribed the widely varied experiences of his life, he invites his reader to
actuate the ideals of his Christian discourse by imbibing into their spirits and
undertaking through their works the “jewels of instruction” he has granted
them through a text replete with spiritual metaphors of his being.
If the Bible and its many metaphors eventuate in an archetype of litera-

ture, and Equiano looks to the fragmentary metaphors of the Bible to find
how all things have an origin, then he certainly looks to it as inspiration
for a discursive account of his own being and draws upon its metaphors
accordingly. Equiano’s autobiography should be seen as life-writing and as
the protension of being: a disclosure of displaced but strident being that
depends upon a practice of bricolage, in the sense that Lévi-Strauss gives

that term. He pulls together a system of thought out of the bits and pieces
of his experience and his reading, and this is the model he uses to convey
his sense of being through image, text, and textuality. It is the language
of the Bible that provides Equiano with words and metaphorical phrases
with which to account for himself and to describe the parameters of his
subjectivity. In that way, Equiano makes of his own text a talking book that
does not bind his being to it or within it, but protends his being toward
multiple horizons of readership. Refusing the indelible bond between being
and textuality postulated by Western philosophy, Equiano nonetheless uses
his autobiography to exhort, as does the Bible, readers to undertake mor-
ally responsible action, even as they actuate his very existence by engaging
meaningfully with his text.
Equiano’s Narrative puts forward this moralistic call during a period of
history that marked the emergence of the nation-state and its philosophical
and social discourses (as I discussed relative to the writings of Kant, Hume,
Addison, Pope, and others). Before the nation-state rose to take its place
as the guiding ideal of modern society, that role had been filled by the
church, to which Equiano, as we see, pays full homage and fealty. Equiano’s
writing takes note of that which is involved in such a transition. We now
understand better the ways in which Equiano’s text may be called an event
in the thinking of modern black being: his use of Biblical discourse and
its many metaphors culminates in an onto-theological discourse upon
the right aims of the only collective to which he felt he could belong: a
universal humanism that exceeds and, indeed, critiques the limits of race
and nation. For today’s reader and as an event of thought, Equiano’s text
has affected history as well as the sort of historical consciousness that was
lastingly propounded in nineteenth-century Hegelianism. Equiano worked
to negotiate the gap between church, nation-state, and empire, to articulate
a spiritual development of self-consciousness that would keep time with
the development of a translocal, global spirit while, paradoxically, allowing
for the expression of the particular and the realization of his being beyond
the limits of race and text.
Equiano’s exemplary negotiation of this paradoxical, metaphorical site
of existence emerges as an iterable (or, repeatable) precedent, as we shall see
in the forthcoming chapters. It is such iterability that founds the possibility
of a poetics of black being. Equiano draws upon his experience and crafts
his life story as useful testimony and instruction that, in turn, contribute to
a revised, critical ontology of black being.
4
Remnants of Memory
Metaphor and Being in
Frances E. W. Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life
It’s a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information

and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains
were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains
imply. . . . [M]y reliance on the image—on the remains—in addition
to recollection . . . yields up a kind of a truth. . . . [T]he image comes
first and tells me what the “memory” is about.
—Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” (1987)
Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible
testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony  .  .  .  that founds the possibility
of the poem.
—Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive (1999)
That is why thinking holds to the

coming of what has been,
and is remembrance.
................
But poetry that thinks is in truth
the topology of Being.
This topology tells Being the
whereabouts of its actual presence.
—Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet” (1947/1954)
If one project of contemporary literary theory is to submit the reading

of nineteenth-century African American literature to a certain number
143
of inquiries regarding metaphor and black being, then Frances Ellen

Watkins Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life (1872) serves as an exemplum
to the present generation of scholars. Not only does Harper’s work in this
collection of poetry continue Equiano’s use of spiritual metaphor as central
to the expression of black being; it also paves the way for later quasi-secular
expressions of black being such as those found in The Souls of Black Folk, The
Man Who Lived Underground, and Invisible Man, works that are not usually
discussed in light of Harper’s poetics.
Even so, the poems collected in Sketches of Southern Life—specifically,
those that constitute the “Aunt Chloe” cycle—have been invariably
interpreted by critics as a crucial literary representation of the postbellum
black vernacular subject. Harper’s poetry was highly praised in its own
time, and the century after Harper’s Sketches appeared saw a line of early
critics, led by James Weldon Johnson and J. Saunders Redding, who, though
ambivalent about the value of the preponderance of Harper’s verse and
fiction, saw the Aunt Chloe poems as the incipit of black vernacular poetry,
the cornerstone upon which later poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar
and Langston Hughes would build dialect verse and blues-infused metrical
compositions.1 Over the last twenty years, black feminist criticism—the line
of Frances Smith Foster, Hazel Carby, and Melba Joyce Boyd—has founded
its judgment on Harper’s poetic and novelistic representations of pre- and
post-Reconstruction life, her critique of sentimental white women’s fiction,
and her searing treatment of American racism and immorality.2 These two
lines coalesce in their attempts to limn Harper’s role as a poet who projects
the vernacular black subject into the realm of history. Yet it is black feminist
criticism that has been more intent upon identifying Harper as central to
the canon of great African American writers. Frances Smith Foster’s work
is indicative of this thrust. She explains that during Harper’s postwar travels,
Harper figured as an activist writer and race woman who “was especially
interested in working with women and frequently conducted private sessions
with them ‘about their daughters, and about things connected with the
welfare of the race.’ ” Harper’s journeys throughout the Reconstruction South
ended in 1871, the year before the appearance of Sketches of Southern Life—“a
substantially original work that,” as Smith Foster reminds us, “rendered in
poetic form many of the scenes and characters [Harper] had encountered.”3
Sketches is, then, an act of historiography as well as an act of onto-theological
metaphorics, and in this noetic convergence I see a clear connection between
the projects of Equiano and those that would come from Du Bois, Hurston,
Wright, and Ellison.
Remnants of Memory 145
Equiano’s autobiography, which I have just discussed, serves as a case

in point. The writing of a life, as Equiano achieves in his Narrative, has
long been recognized by contemporary scholars of poststructuralist and
new historicist bent to be an act of historiography, and even of “critical
historiography,” to borrow a term from the work of Michel de Certeau.4 In
this way, Equiano not only wrote an account of his life that would forcefully
(and counter to social convention) occupy the annals of history; he also
gave an account of slave being from within the constraints of the peculiar
institution. But while Equiano’s act of critical historiography unfolds under
the rubric of autobiography and thus makes numerous anticipated claims to
“truth” and “transparency.” Harper’s critical historiography unfolds through
versification, a concerted act of art and artifice that could be said to reveal
“truth” of a certain sort (à la Morrison), as long as the qualification was
not that its truth be “empirical,” especially since herself Harper had never
experienced slavery.
Harper, however, forges the “truth” of slave being through her art; her
poetry reflects the lived experience of so many freed persons, and especially
freedwomen, across the former slaves states, and they emerge in the forms
of composite figures, Aunt Chloe most prominent among them. Sketches
may thus be read as an “unauthorized,” collective memoir that employs
onto-theological metaphors as it gives witness to the being of the slave.
It is a particular sort of “life writing” that, like Equiano’s Narrative before
it, is intended to challenge and revise the accepted discourse on Western
humanism, expand the annals of Western history, and construct a world of
humanity wherein black being is safe, at liberty, and, ideally, agency-driven.
However, most of the criticism on Harper’s poems, even that which
appeared during the 1980s when black feminist criticism began to crystalize
its discourse, deals not with the onto-theological metaphorics that enliven
her poetics, but, in a more pointed fashion, with either her politics, her
feminism, or both. Patricia Liggins Hill’s useful 1981 essay, “ ‘Let Me Make
the Songs for the People’: A Study of Frances Watkins Harper’s Poetry,”
emphasizes the themes of uplift and feminism in all of Harper’s poetry,
including the Aunt Chloe poems. And while I certainly uphold her assertion
that “Harper has helped to lay a sound aesthetic foundation upon which
much of contemporary black poetry is based,” close critical attention to
those aesthetics is not given in her essay. More recently, Elizabeth Petrino’s
“ ‘We are a Rising People’: Frances Harper’s Radical Views on Class and
Racial Equality in Sketches of Southern Life” (2005), also sees the poems in an
act of “retelling history from the perspective of freedwomen,” but strangely
argues that Harper “refrains from dialect, thus rejecting stereotyped black
voices.”5 This is, of course, a position with which I disagree in this chapter,
because whether one calls Aunt Chloe’s speech “vernacular” or not, in its
time it was undoubtedly referred to (by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and later
by James Weldon Johnson) as “dialect” poetry. This does not mean that
Harper’s portrayals may rightly be called “stereotypical,” as I discuss quite
to the contrary in this chapter. Finally, the fullest and most authoritative
studies of Harper have been undertaken by Smith Foster and Boyd, both
of whose pioneering work I note above. Boyd pays especially close attention
to the metaphorics of Harper’s Sketches; her substantive biographical work
on Harper includes incisive expositional commentary on Harper’s poetics.
Amidst her groundbreaking studies of Harper’s corpus, Smith Foster has
detailed the thematics of Harper’s Reconstruction-era poetry, and echoes in
some ways my own attention to structure. My work in this chapter seeks to
build on the foundation established by these critics by placing Harper in a
genealogy of writers and thinkers whose literature employs onto-theological
metaphors. I seek to examine these metaphors as vehicles for the expression
and protension of black being.
In this chapter, I point out the ways in which Harper’s metaphorics,
not only at the level of the semantic, but also at the levels of structure and
orality, permit her to construct an ontology of slave being as counter-cultural
and as central to a critical, revisionist concept of the human. Harper’s
appearance as a focus of not only critical, but also, in this study, theoretical
attention has, I argue, much to teach us. Not only does she exemplify a
practice of historiography and onto-theological poetics that is aesthetic as
well as activist in nature; she also provides us with a poetic structure that
speaks as much meaning as her poetic metaphors themselves.
I suggest that it is the coincidence of Harper’s vision of art and the
ontological “truth” of black being that enables and gives voice to her poetic
feminism and political activism (what I will here refer to as a translocal
activism avant la lettre) in Sketches of Southern Life. Notwithstanding J.
Saunders Redding’s judgment that Harper’s poetry is clumsy because it does
not conform to the poetic conventions of its day, I demonstrate that Harper
uses her poetic structure to declare a “newness” of both black being and black
poetry. Harper has been criticized by Redding and others as a poet who
was deficient in technique, but whose staying power came largely through
her ability to read her work aloud before an audience, captivating and
transporting them in the process. I submit that there are further important
points to be considered here: that Harper’s techné was not insufficient or
foppishly amateurish, as Redding argues, but was, indeed, experimental.

Harper knew well the technical achievements of her poetic and narrative
models, which included her contemporaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
and the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Moreover, she was part
of an active and accomplished literary circle that included Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Lydia Maria Child, and indeed was well
their peer. In Sketches she sought to achieve a sort of symbolic representation
of African American women that existed nowhere in the canon of American
literature that preceded her. Even Harriet Jacobs’ unparalleled achievement
in critical autobiography (her 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl) did not represent with great depth the African American vernacular
subject. Harper would not only challenge the techné of her narrative models
by insisting upon the metaphorical language of the black folk; she would
also, through her own portrayal of slave women, counter the stereotypical
image of the black woman as found in the most influential novel of her
time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a point I discuss at length below.
Given her immersion in the literary conventions of her day,6 one
must simply consider that Harper felt some need to write beyond these
conventions in order to represent compellingly and meaningfully the realities
of slave being. Certainly, she must have felt that the experiences of the
freedwomen with whom she visited during her tour of the Reconstruction
South (between 1865 and 1871) would have been impoverished had their
expression been forced to conform itself to that of free white women and
their sentimental conventions of themes and narration. Harper’s poetic
structure, her mythos and techné all required refashioning if her poetry were
to achieve the lofty goals she set for it. Out of Aunt Chloe’s southern black
metaphorics, Harper crafts a foundation for making black poetry—and black
being—“new.”
As I mention above, this new foundation would be buttressed by late
nineteenth-century poets such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, but the raising
of its bones in the twentieth century would be undertaken in the poetry of
Langston Hughes and the prose of Zora Neale Hurston as they, together
among myriad other artists, crafted what came to be known as “New Negro”
literature. Harper must certainly be seen as a foremother, if not indeed a
mother of this literature, but such is not the only importance we are called
upon to draw from her ontological metaphorics. Through it, Harper also
helped erect a new nineteenth-century black feminism that took its cue not
only from the lights of African American literary history that both preceded
her and were of her own moment (e.g., Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Mary
Ann Shadd Cary, Charlotte Forten, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Keckley,
to name only a select few who were both feminist activists and writers/
memoirists). Her feminism also emerged out of an intellectual and social
milieu that included such abolitionist and suffragist leaders as Douglass,
Child, and William Wells Brown, among others.
Because Sketches of Southern Life emerges from this context and serves
at once as poetry and an undeclared collective memoir (an alternative, critical
historiography, the composite testimony of freed African Americans Harper
met in the course of her postbellum travels), an examination of the Aunt
Chloe poems through the layered framework of memory, metaphor, and
being carries a certain significance. As I describe that layering, I shall imply
its theory—a theory of onto-theological poetics practiced in tandem with
a theory of history; an effort to discover an analogy for the task of the
poet who seeks—in full understanding of the long genealogy to which
Harper belongs, from Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, to Maria Stewart and
David Walker, and on to Jacobs and Keckley—to act as a surrogate witness
to historical and contemporary contexts of black being, and to, in turn,
project such being toward a future world through the metaphorics of black
vernacular expression.
The Evolution of Harper’s Vernacular Poetry
In order to bring Harper’s metaphorics into greater relief, in this section I

will underscore the important play of sound and sense as it evolves in her
poetry. Doing so will show how Harper’s relationship with language allows
her to approximate an ontology of slave being through poetic expression.
I will discuss a number of Harper’s signature poems that appear between
the decades of 1854 and 1874. Harper wrote and published a great deal
of poetry during these years. Not surprisingly, much of this poetry deals
with the themes of freedom and slavery, women’s rights, and labor. What is
perhaps more striking is that during this period, the Aunt Chloe poems were
the only ones among Harper’s poems to make extended use of the slave’s
vernacular. Not only did this vernacular affect the “sound” of Harper’s poetry,
especially since she was often given to reading her poetry aloud before various
audiences; it also affected the “sense” of her poetry, since black vernacular
language is so often composed of syntactical and semiotic elements that
result in fluid, multiple, and often ambiguous semantic meanings.
Discussing these poems—and the place of the Aunt Chloe poems
among them—allows us to see more clearly the signification of black being
through metaphorical language in Harper’s oeuvre. And it allows us to

see how and, perhaps, why Harper signifies black being quite differently
in the Aunt Chloe cycle than in her other poetic compositions. Harper’s
poetics enjoin a poetics of being at work in African American literature
since Equiano. And, as I discuss more pointedly in the final section of this
chapter, her attention to an ontology of slave being resonates brilliantly with
the ontology later at work in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.
“The Slave Mother” (1854) is among Harper’s best-known and most
widely anthologized poems. Coming early in her poetic output, it is also
among the most conventional in meter and imagery. It takes up the themes
that characterize much of Harper’s corpus: honorable motherhood; the
indelible ties between mother and child; and the horrible ills of slavery.
Harper eschews the popular meter of iambic pentameter in favor of
alternating lines of verse written in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
The first two lines of the opening stanza are written in iambic trimeter, and
thus they are read quickly: “Heard you that shriek? It rose / So wildly on
the air.” The reader is thus plunged into the poem’s narrative suspense, and
emphasis is placed on these lines as conveying the central action around
which the poem revolves. As we continue to engage Harper’s lines of
alternating meter, we are carried along by the relatively quick tempo of the
poem, our eyes falling down the page until we reach the ultimate stanza,
which concludes the narrative thus: “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks /
Disturb the listening air: / She is a mother, and her heart / Is breaking in
despair.” By moving us along so quickly, yet never relenting on the intensity
of her message, Harper’s use of meter works with the meaning, for while
we are briefly uplifted by the poem’s imagery in the seventh stanza (“His
love has been a joyous light / That o’er her pathway smiled, / A fountain
gushing ever new, / Amid life’s desert wild”), we are swiftly carried along
the stream of the slave mother’s despair as the poem progresses. Harper
forms this individual poem as a narrative whole, meant to impress upon
the mind of the reader and the ear of the listener the dramatic image of
the most heart-wrenching of America’s childless mothers: the slave mother
whose child is torn forcibly from her “circling arms.”
While, as I mention above, early critics such as Redding critiqued
Harper’s technical skills, Harper does, in fact, craft her poems quite carefully.
Her attention to craft is very much in evidence in “The Slave Mother,”
where she relates the first and last stanzas closely. Where the word “shriek” is
singular in the first stanza, in the last, there are multiple “shrieks,” as though
the reader were confronted with a multitude of grieving slave mothers folded
into a singular figure who stands as the symbolic avatar of all such mothers.
And while the first stanza is rendered in the past tense, the final one is
rendered in the present. Such shifts in time and number work with the
poem’s meaning, and its effect is such that the reader is carried along in
the poem’s time and sounding, surrounded by the multitude of mothers it
implies. However, any use of Biblical metaphor is fully absent from this
particular piece. In its place, Harper renders metaphors of maternal and
moral sentiment, the most striking of which comes in the fifth stanza:
He is not hers, although she bore

For him a mother’s pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
Is coursing through his veins!
While the metaphors that enliven this stanza are not unusual, they
do, in fact, speak directly to the reader the sentiments of Harper’s maternal
figure. Even so, this poem grants the slave mother power through pathos.
Indeed, Harper relies upon the reader’s sensibilities, for she neither depicts
the slave mother in active resistance to her oppression (a strategy she did use
to great effect in an earlier poem entitled “Eliza Harris,” 1853, for instance),
nor does she direct the reader toward a specific action by modeling action
upon the narrator or the poetic figure.
Instead, Harper asks the reader to contemplate the scene before her
or him, and in contemplating the scene she hopes the reader will not only
broaden her or his understanding of what is at stake in the poem, but also
the reader’s stake in what is implicated in the poem’s meaning. I would
argue that while the poem deals deftly in conventions of sympathy (feeling
for someone else), it does not fully engage the reader on the more intimate
plane of empathy (feeling with someone else, or putting oneself in the other’s
place), a plane that might have been reached had Harper permitted the
slave mother in the poem to speak directly to the reader, as she later allows
Aunt Chloe to do. Thus while this poem appeals to the reader’s morality, an
appeal that is certainly not without merit, it does not, to the fullest extent
possible, demonstrate the consciousness, or conscious being, of the slave.
Harper seems to work toward redressing this shortfall in “The Slave
Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” published in 1856. The poem dramatizes
the true story of Margaret Garner, whom Harper depicts as drawn toward
the state of Ohio by the brightly shining “northern star.” Garner’s story
is now well known, but required critical attention and interpretation as it
was told and retold during Harper’s lifetime and well beyond. After she
fled to Ohio with her four children in search of freedom, Garner’s quest
was thwarted by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. As she faced recapture,
Garner determined that her children would be better off in death than in
a life of perpetual servitude.
The movement from the first-person voice of the poem’s first five
stanzas to the third person in the remaining eleven stanzas seems, in
part, to obfuscate the slave consciousness that Harper seemed intent upon
expressing. She does, in the eleventh stanza, revert again to the first person,
but then only through the voice of the narrator. As with the earlier poem, it
is the voice of the free narrator, rather than that of the enslaved being, that
gives the most direct evidence of consciousness, though the slave mother’s
consciousness is represented through indirect dialogue. Indeed, Harper
insists that Garner fulfilled her motherly duty toward her children: “I will
save my precious children / From their darkly threatened doom, / I will
hew their path to freedom / Through the portals of the tomb” (A Brighter
Coming Day 85). Garner succeeded in killing one child, the infant, before
she was subdued and captured. Harper closes the poem thus: “Sends this
deed of fearful daring / Through my country’s heart no thrill, / Do the icy
hands of slavery / Every pure emotion chill? / Oh! If there is any honor, /
Truth or justice in the land, / Will ye not, as men and Christians, / On the
side of freedom stand?” Garner’s American tragedy and Harper’s appeal to
American conscience make clear in this poem her own poetic consciousness,
and alludes tantalizingly to that of Garner.
Harper, too, was personally affected by the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Act. In its wake, her home state of Maryland passed a law in 1853
stating that any person of color who came into the state by way of its
northern border could be sold into slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act was a
threat to all free persons of color, North and South, because it put their
liberty at risk. Harper’s family, led by her Uncle William, left Baltimore for
Canada, where he felt they would be safer. By Frances Smith Foster’s account
(in her introduction to A Brighter Coming Day), it is not clear why Harper
did not go to Canada with them. Instead, Harper went only as far North as
Ohio, where she took a position as an instructor at Union Seminary, a school
founded in 1847 by the Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) Church. Effectively, Maryland’s 1853 law meant that Harper could
never go home again. She lived, as William Still pronounced her in his The
Underground Railroad (1872), in “exile” (540), an exilic existence that draws
her into relation not only with the subjects of her poetry, but with uprooted
and exiled writers such as Equiano.
She published a poetic lamentation of her exile in 1857, “Bury Me in a
Free Land,” and as she did so she transformed the pain of her homelessness
into a pointed social and political critique. The poem has impacted readers
to the extent that it has become Harper’s epitaph, thus it is quite central
to any discussion of the evolution of Harper’s poetics. Each of this work’s
eight quatrains develops a poetic statement that reinforces the poem’s overall
meaning, which is, in short, a call to abolition. The major devices that move
the poem along are rhyme and repetition. The end rhyme scheme Harper
uses is aabb; she employs both pure rhymes and slant rhymes. Pure rhymes
make up the largest part of the rhyme scheme, existing in such pairs as “will/
hill,” “grave/slave,” and “lash/gash.” Slant rhymes, where sounds are closely
related but not identical, come in such combinations as “bay/prey” and “high/
by,” and even these are quite close to pure rhymes. The rhyming combination
of grave/slave repeats in the second stanza, and the word “slaves” closes the
poem. Harper’s use of repetition is dramatic, as she places a narrator in the
text to convey a vividly imagined set of scenes. The most constant repetition
in the poem, however, is a variation upon the first-person pronoun, “I.”
None of the stanzas lacks this pronoun. Stanzas two through four employ
anaphora—they commence similarly: “I could not rest,” “I could not sleep,”
“I could not rest.” With each recurrence we are reminded of the poet’s
dying wish for peace in death, yet we are also compelled to examine that
which conditions her wish: the prevalence of slavery in the land of her birth.
Thus birth and death, being and non-being are juxtaposed; the recurrence
of the “I” in the poem keeps us quite aware of the narrator’s existence and
subjectivity, and with each recurrence we are just as aware of the imminent
proximity of her death. With each stanza, with each recurrence, a new aspect
of her consciousness—which productively navigates the tension between life
and death—is presented to dramatically different effect.
The decade that followed would see Harper moving into different
intellectual territory, both literally and figuratively. In short order, the
1860s moved Harper quickly through significant phases of her adult life:
she married in 1860, became a mother herself in 1862, and was widowed
in 1864. Her marriage had constituted a pause (though not a complete
cessation) in her public life. Now that she was widowed and left with her
deceased husband’s considerable debt, she took up fully once again her
public work.
It may seem overly facile to conclude that with the close of the Civil
War and Harper’s subsequent tour of the South during the Reconstruction
period came an even stronger sense of poetic consciousness on her part,
but such does seem to be the case upon examination of the poems that
she produced during this era. This conclusion is certainly borne out by
an examination of the 1865 poem, “President Lincoln’s Proclamation of
Freedom,” a lyrical expression of hope for the future conveyed in both pure
and slant rhymes as well as an emphasis upon black self-determination.
“President Lincoln’s Proclamation of Freedom,” is a composition of
nine quatrains whose strongest structural characteristics are rhyme and
repetition. The rhyme scheme is abcb. We have, of course, seen such a
scheme in much poetry from Harper. However, in this poem Harper insists
upon pure rhyming elements. The rhyming pairs of each quatrain are years/
tears, bright/light, Caroline/shine, crime/time, key/free, light/light, dust/just,
away/day, light/sight. The first thing we are led to notice is the absence of
slant rhyme. Slant rhymes can be great innovations; they often insist upon
the unexpected. Pure rhymes are clear and bold; they call attention to the
poet’s versification and intentions. The pure rhyming pairs are metronomes;
they establish a pattern, both aural and visual. They are neither opposites,
nor synonyms; by themselves, they establish no true sense of meaning.
Their purpose appears to lie in their ability to call attention to the meaning
that inheres in each stanza. In this way, they work in concert with the
repetition of certain elements of the poem. The word “shall,” which appears
fifteen times in the poem, sharply underscores the poet’s emphasis upon
a determined future for the newly freed slaves. It appears in all but one
stanza, and is connected to images of light and processes of enlightenment
that, the poet intimates, attend emancipation. The metaphorical reference
to “the sun-kissed brow of labor” should be read in light of Harper’s poem
“Free Labor,” discussed below. Self-determination, freedom to participate
as workers in the public marketplace, and the moral attributes of labor
(through which one contributes to society), are all emphasized in the poem.
The use of anaphora in the poem (coming primarily through the repetition
of the phrase “It shall” in the first three stanzas) grants this piece the quality
of an anthem. Though the anaphora breaks off in the middle of the poem,
the rhythm reminds one of the strident tones of Julia Ward Howe’s “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), itself modeled after “John Brown’s
Body” and the early African American camp song, “Say Brothers, Can You
Meet Me?”7
Thus in this later poem that, like the Aunt Chloe cycle, appeared
during Reconstruction, Harper employs the usual conventions of Western
poetry in rhyme scheme, form, and voice while speaking to and of black
being in ways that she generally did not before her southern tour. When
compared with other of Harper’s poetic figures that appeared during this
period,8 Aunt Chloe appears to be a symbolic maternal figure that not only
served as a composite representation of the many freedwomen Harper spoke
with and interviewed during her southern tour; she also appears to be a
literary figure whom Harper rescues from misrepresentation. Since Harper

had many times acknowledged the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and had based one of her most important poems, “Eliza
Harris,” upon a scene from Stowe’s novel,9 it would not be a stretch to see
that Stowe’s Aunt Chloe is multiply refashioned and recuperated in Harper’s
poems. In Stowe’s narrative, Aunt Chloe appears as a stereotypical “mammy”
figure, one with a good heart and good intentions, a dedicated wife and
mother, but also presented as central to the novel’s comic relief. For instance,
when describing Aunt Chloe, Stowe writes:
A round, black, shining face is hers, so glossy as to suggest that

she might have been washed over with white of eggs, like one
of her own tea rusks. Her whole plump countenance beams
with satisfaction and contentment from under her well-starched
turban.  .  .  .  A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre
of her being. Not a chicken or turkey or duck in the barn-yard
but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed
evidently to be reflecting on their latter end [. . .]. (66–67)
To make certain of the point—that of the stereotype—at work in

Stowe’s novel, one need only note her description of Uncle Tom himself:
“He was a large, broad-chested powerfully-made man, of a full glossy
black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an
expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and
benevolence” (68). Uncle Tom’s blackness of skin and inveterate Christian
morality seem to be linked as cause and effect. Whenever he overheard his
children or other adult slaves complaining about their oppressed condition,
Tom chastised them with the greatest sense of moral superiority that Stowe
could manage to convey through him (and through his blackness). And
while Aunt Chloe appears to be equally dark, she does not match Tom in
morality. She is striking, however, for the dialect with which she speaks. The
following passage will suffice as an example of Chloe’s everyday language
in Stowe’s book:
Here you, Mose and Pete! [Chloe exclaims, speaking to her own
sons] get out de way, you niggers! Get away, Mericky, honey,—
mammy’ll give her baby some fin, by and by. Now, Mas’r George,
you jest take off dem books, and set down now with my old
man, and I’ll take up de sausages, and have de first griddle full
of cakes on your plates in less dan no time. (69)
Harper’s revised image of Chloe is quite far from that provided by

Stowe, a point that is confirmed by reading any of her Aunt Chloe poems.
In “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” for instance, the third poem in the series, Aunt
Chloe emerges as a plainspoken moralist who speaks in the vernacular, but
with none of the hyper-comedic and stereotypic characteristics with which
Stowe over-burdens her own Chloe. As the composite sketch of wise African
American women Harper encountered during her travels through the South,
the Aunt Chloe who appears in this collection of poetry also undoubtedly
serves as a model for Aunt Linda, a character who figures importantly in
Harper’s most accomplished work of fiction, Iola Leroy: Or, Shadows Uplifted
(1892). It is reasonable to assume that a powerful literary representation of
the women Harper encountered during her visits to the South, and who
served collectively as the basis for the characters of Aunt Chloe and Aunt
Linda, would not be served by the conventions of Harper’s usual poetic
style. While she maintains her use of iambic meter and alternating lines
of three and four iambic feet in the Aunt Chloe poems, she seems to have
relinquished her use of anaphora, traditional imagery of light, and other
narrative techniques found in the earlier poetry I discuss above. In its place,
we find the consistent metaphorical play of black vernacular speech.
As I discuss at length in the following section, Harper’s Chloe uses
metaphorical language that is ripe with such vernacular commonplaces as
those Zora Neale Hurston would, in the 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro
Expression,” term double descriptives (e.g., “mighty ugly,” found in the first
stanza and “honey-fugle,” appearing in the second stanza). It is important
to note that while these were commonplaces in the everyday speech of the
African American working and former slave classes of Harper’s day, and
while they would appear to form the basis for what Hurston identified as
metaphorical innovations that were “characteristic” of black vernacular, they
were, in fact, ingenious innovations when employed in nineteenth-century
Western poetic forms. In this way, their use set the tone for a new mode
of expressing black being.
With her series of poems on Aunt Chloe, Harper won praise from
even her harshest critics. J. Saunders Redding, who had roundly criticized
her poems as lacking in force and originality, saw Harper’s vernacular poems
as groundbreaking. Harper had, Redding reluctantly admitted, anticipated
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s use of dialect and James Weldon Johnson’s attention
to folk speech. Further, she had done so without becoming ensnared in what
Redding, Johnson, and others called the trap of dialect poetry. According
to these critics, dialect poetry could do little more than express humor and
pathos. Harper demonstrated the limitations of such criticism. In the Aunt
Chloe poems, she succeeded in moving beyond the limitations of dialect

poetry as a literary convention, to its use as a site of ontological query and
critique.
Between Metaphor and Black Being:

Aunt Chloe’s Structure of Poetic Memory
How could she bear witness to what she’d never lived?

—Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975)
This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name

to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless,
about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience
from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept,
as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
—Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (1973)
I hope the foregoing and necessarily brief survey of Harper’s vast poetic
output—that appearing both before and after Sketches of Southern Life—
has provided a framework for examining and understanding key elements
of Harper’s poetics, especially her insistence upon ontological and Biblical
metaphors that distill black experience and give expression to black being.
Such an aesthetic choice undoubtedly places Harper in the genealogy of
African American ontological metaphorics that I map in this study, a
genealogy that descends from Wheatley and Equiano through Du Bois,
and on to Hurston, Wright, and Ellison. None of this is to argue that there
is a singular black experience from which all African American poetics
descends; instead, I argue that there are perceptible traces of ontological
metaphorics that run across, between, through and underneath the widely
varied works that establish an African American poetics of being. In the
whole of her poems and as a significant contributor to this poetics, Harper
accomplishes many things: the building of a new black feminism that takes
its cue from and engages such outspoken female forebears as Maria Stewart;
the inscription of a new black idiom, particularly confirmed in the poetry of
Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the prose of Charles Chesnutt; and an insistence
upon an activist poetic idiom, a gesture that was not recognized by early
readers of Dunbar’s poetry, but that is very much in line with Harper’s
intellectual milieu.
Yet for the contemporary critic and theorist, Harper does present
additional challenges. She was, indeed, the sort of translocal activist extolled
in contemporary critical discourse calling for a new critical humanism, or
a “planetary humanism” (to borrow a term from the work of Paul Gilroy),
and much of her poetry emerges from such activism. That is, as a translocal
activist, she traveled far and wide in her antebellum efforts to abolish slavery
and in her endeavors to rehabilitate the formerly enslaved after the Civil
War. As Frances Smith Foster, Maryemma Graham,10 Melba Boyd, and
others have pointed out, after the war as well as before, Harper regularly put
herself in bodily danger as she went from place to place, literally, from camp
to camp, lecturing, teaching, and ministering to the poor and the displaced.
It is during this journey of what Édouard Glissant would call “purposeful
wandering”11 that Harper set herself to work on attaining for the African
American population not only women’s rights and civil rights, but also, as
would Du Bois and others after her, human rights. Harper’s work shows us
the ways in which attention to the black condition is also—necessarily—
attention to the human condition. Thus in the Chloe poems, she opens her
poetry to the truth of this condition in a practice of vernacular hermeneutics.
One difficulty that lies in reading the Chloe poems in particular is
that the truth of the black condition during slavery was one riddled with
trauma, and thus, as one finds in many of the main texts of trauma, any
poetic act of remembering and testifying, of witnessing an event such as
slavery, contains an impossibility, what Giorgio Agamben calls a “lacuna.”
It consists as much of memory as it does of that which is forgotten or
repressed, a symbiotic representation of presence and absence. In his
examination of the act of witnessing Auschwitz in narrative, for instance,
Agamben argues that there is a discernible “structure of testimony,” and
that this structure evinces a reality that surpasses its “factual elements.” For
Agamben, “the aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical
knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification
and comprehension.”12
Toni Morrison’s account of her writerly practice in crafting narratives
of black life during the era of slavery affirms this problematic:
The crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact

and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because
facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.
So if I’m looking to find and expose a truth about the interior
life of people who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean that they
didn’t have it); if I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave
narratives left—to part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to

implement the stories that I heard—then the approach that’s
most productive and most trustworthy for me is the recollection
that moves from the image to the text.13
The image of which Morrison speaks has implications for the partial
meaning transmitted to her through found memory, which itself results
from what she calls a “literary archeology”: “the remains, so to speak, at
the archeological site . . . surface first, and they surface so vividly and so
compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of
a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to
the revelation of a kind of truth.” This route allows her to explore “two
worlds—the actual and the possible.”14
The problematic that Agamben and Morrison underscore seems to
function compellingly in poetry such as Harper’s, which is driven by the
memory and witnessing of slavery, and whose structure appears to proffer
what I will call a topology of slave being. The phenomenological sense of
the word “topology” on which I draw defines it as the art of assisting the
memory by associating the thing to be remembered with some building or
place (either psychic or material) whose particulars are familiar. To refer
to the structure of Harper’s Aunt Chloe poems as one that sets forth a
“topology of slave being” thus points out that the configuration of the
poems—that is, the structure of the poetic cycle—purposely sets forth an
anatomy of the slaves’ existence through a witnessing of their experience.
Equipped with these insights, the critic discovers in Harper’s text what
appears to be a “clearing,” in Martin Heidegger’s sense of the term,15 a
site of revelation or unconcealment of truth and inner being not unlike
that which Morrison describes in her interactions with narratives of slavery.
Heidegger uses the image of a “clearing” as a metaphor that conveys to us
an idea of the process by which the work of art sets up a “world” that is
conceptual rather than imaginative. The work of art, he argues, engages in
a process of “presencing” that culminates in a “setting forth, a making.”16
Yet simultaneous to this “setting forth,” which is, for Heidegger, an act
of unveiling and a divulgence of truth, stands an active concealment that
resists presence doubly. The beings whose presence may be set forth in the
world of the work of art may resist such illumination (Heidegger calls this
concealment “refusal”); or a being may present him- or herself as other than
he or she is (concealment as “dissembling”). For Heidegger, “the open place
in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a rigid stage with a permanently
raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course. Rather, the
clearing happens only as this double concealment.” It “grants and guarantees

to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not.” What
is more, it grants us “access to the being that we ourselves are.”17 The Aunt
Chloe poems collectively abide in this sort of narrative structure, one that
emerges from a triple act of critical humanism: the archaeology of the slave’s
memory, the witnessing of slavery through poetry, and a poetic enunciation
of subjectivity that seems determined to present a topology of slave being
that is at once revelatory and concealing.
However, phenomenology is not often an approach taken by readers
and critics of nineteenth-century women’s writing, let alone African
American women’s writing of that period. Long has been the very act
of recovering these works, some of which were completely lost or simply
obscure, and others that were damned by short sighted criticism that was,
at times, guided by early twentieth-century masculinist and sexist impulses,
and/or, later, by the dictates of mid-twentieth-century Black Arts aesthetics.
As I say at the outset of this chapter, it is only through the “search and
recovery” work undertaken by women academics dedicated to listening to
black women’s voices that writers such as Harper have re-emerged into
scholary and critical discourse.
Even so, these acts of vernacular hermeneutics, which may be seen as a
species of phenomenology, play interestingly in Harper’s poems. They allow
Harper a modality by which to set the problematics of African American
being forth into history, establishing a historicity to which the speech acts
of Aunt Chloe bear witness. Chloe speaks in the stead of the slaves and
freed persons who were—through illiteracy, absence, or death—unable to
speak for themselves. However, as we shall see, her poetry does not put
forth a full range of knowledge that grants the reader total access to what
might be considered a holistic or transparent slave presence. The poems deal
skillfully with those aspects of slave experience that can only be put forth
as semiotic traces. Even so, the relative silence of the slave collective and
the partiality of Chloe’s speech acts do not augur a lack of subjectivity. On
the contrary, Harper’s negotiation of absence and presence in these poems
calls for an alternative conception of being. We can see such a landscape
of alternative concepts of being take shape in the fragmented metaphors
of Sketches of Southern Life.
As the narrative proxy of the absent slave, Aunt Chloe provides
poetic testimony that sets forth from the circular framework of the text.
Six poems inhabit this circle. The first, whose title appears in all caps,
“Aunt Chloe,” is an introductory piece consisting of sixteen quatrains
that set the themes advanced in the subsequent compositions. The titles
of the poems that follow—“the deliverance,” “aunt chloe’s politics,”

“learning to read,” “church building,” and “the reunion”—appear in
a smaller font with what I will call title capitalization, such as you see here
through the presence of typographical markers. Thus the reader is meant to
comprehend them as evolving on a circular narrative plane that, though it
approximates completeness, is suggestive of the sort of “clearing” Heidegger
describes. These pieces declare their own version of absence and silence.
They simultaneously reveal and dissemble even as Harper shapes them
as metaphorical speech acts that set into motion an ontological itinerary
of testimony. Taken together, the poems bear witness on behalf of those
who cannot speak. They declare a relation between the impossibility of
speech and the living subject, the survivor of slavery; they declare their own
immanence even as they protend toward a possible world. The poems thus
serve as Harper’s articulation of a critical humanism, alternative concepts
of subjectivity (which, in her historical moment, largely excluded persons of
African descent), and her metaphorical archive of the slaves’ being.
I begin my analysis of these poems by outlining the plan of the poetic
cycle in an attempt to catalog the rich thematics of its lyric engagement.
This inventory, which commences with an examination of the dual frame
of the poetic cycle—the first and final poems—will permit us to return to
a description of how the metaphorical processes of memory, witnessing, and
being together emerge from a critical practice of historiography at work
in the series of poems. They allow the critic to discover onto-theological
metaphors of being or consciousness in the midst of a poetic lacuna.
We meet the eponymous narrator of the poems in the opening stanza
of the first poem, “Aunt Chloe,” and immediately become acquainted with
her range of themes. Aunt Chloe can speak philosophically, or reach to the
depths of pathos; her diction, in thought and voice, is almost always drawn
from the rhetoric of the black folk—the beautiful poetry of the sacred, the
aphoristic qualities of slave wit, the transition from thought to action evident
in her verbalization of nouns, and so on. All emerge in this first poem, and
all course through the cycle of poems, such that varying rhetorical moments
not only penetrate and stand in relation to one another but also make an
attempt at self-representation.
Within these Sketches, Harper essays to limn the world of Aunt Chloe
and her episteme,18 and in this way, her poems share, as numerous critics
point out, constituent elements that characterize the slave narrative, though
with some crucial changes. Indeed, the initial lines of the first poem do
not proclaim the fact of birth that generally opens slave narratives (“I was
born”), but instead announces an intention of historiography and memory—

“I remember, well remember, / That dark and dreadful day”—an intention
that is, as the following lines reveal, at once individual and collective. (I
should note here that Equiano’s narrative, an archetype of the eighteenth-
century slave autobiography, likewise does not begin with “I was born,” but
rather with a proclamation of his thought and conviction: “I believe. . . .”)
Chloe’s effort of remembering indicates a simultaneous gesture toward an
idealist holistic history and a fragmentation of the psyche. Her traumatic
articulation of memory may be seen as a semiotic trace that allows both
her and the reader access to a historical past.19
In the first stanza, Chloe recalls the day her sons, Jakey and Ben,
were sold away to pay for her dead master’s debt. And in the narration,
Chloe’s autobiographical poem becomes poly-vocal: Chloe tells her own
story of loss, which carries within it cousin Milly’s commiserations (“ ‘Oh!
Chloe, I knows how you feel, / ‘Cause I’se been through it all; / I thought
my poor old heart would break, / When master sold my Saul’ ”) and Uncle
Jacob’s ministrations (“ ‘Just take your burden / To the blessed Master’s
feet; / I takes all my troubles, Chloe, / Right unto the mercy-seat’ ”).20
Considering the poem’s title—“Aunt Chloe”—one is struck that this poem
presents not Chloe alone but also those of her set. She is introduced as an
individual encircled by an empathetic community that sadly informs her that
her children have been sold (SL, 117). This community, it seems, opens the
way for Chloe to communicate to the world beyond her own. In the face
of her loss, which she struggles to nurse “all alone,” Aunt Chloe recalls that
she “wasted to a shadow, / And turned to skin and bone.” But Uncle Jacob’s
words “waked up” her “courage,” after which she began “to pray.” It is then
that “a something” begins to speak to her: “And it often seemed to whisper,
/ Chloe, trust and never fear, / You’ll get justice in the kingdom, / If you
do not get it here” (118). This metaphorical “something” is characterized
in terms of prescience, a knowing founded on belief and faith even as its
articulation is disembodied. Not only are the first poem’s speakers among the
living (Chloe and Milly) and the dead (Uncle Jacob). The voice that comes
to drive it, speaking without benefit of quotation marks, is the whispering,
spectral “something” that fortifies Chloe with a sense of hope that had
eluded her until the moment she turned to prayer. Chloe figures, then, not
as an independent person, but as one whose poetry shapes a dialogic matrix
of metaphorical, discursive forces that are both worldly and spiritual. In this
way, of course, Harper’s poetry follows closely the example set by Equiano:
the navigation of the immanent and the transcendent in his attempt to reveal
his being. Harper’s poetry demonstrates for us the continued significance of

the onto-theological that nineteenth-century African American metaphorics
inherits from the previous century.
In the poetic cycle, the connection between the first poem and the final
one, “The Reunion,” initially appears to be the conclusion the final poem
provides. The title—“The Reunion”—indicates the coalescing of various
elements into one body or whole, obliquely underscoring the ways in which
Chloe’s being is at stake. It is taken up with the return of Chloe’s son,
Jakey. Harper shows us Chloe as a free woman; while walking “down the
street,” she hears “a stranger asking / For Missis Chloe Fleet” (SL, 129).21
The “stranger” turns out to be Jakey, and the scene of his reunion with his
mother is related swiftly. Chloe’s emotions run the gamut from laughter,
to a remembrance of her distress at losing her sons (“My heart was awful
sore”), to a sense of “comfort” and a longing for “peace” (130–31).
By virtue of the final poem’s title, we expect that Chloe’s lost family
will be returned to her. However, Harper makes clear that peace has not
come because Chloe has not yet reunited with her second son, Ben, who has
married and now has three children. Once Ben and his family join Chloe
and Jakey (“ ‘You must write to brother Benny / That he must come this
fall, / And we’ll make the cabin bigger, / And that will hold us all’ ”), Chloe
hopes she will attain a certain tranquility that comes with the fulfilling of
motherly and familial duty. “ ‘Tell him I want to see ’em all / Before my
life do cease: / And then like good old Simeon, / I hope to die in peace’ ”
(SL, 130–31).
The figurative reference to Simeon of the New Testament, who blessed
the newborn savior Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, adds a layer of meaning to
the conclusion of Harper’s poetic cycle. The Apostle Luke depicts Simeon
as a “just and devout” man who awaited “the consolation of Israel” and
was possessed of “the Holy Ghost.” Early Christians frequently sang his
recitation, known generally as the “Song of Simeon,” or “Nunc Dimittis,” at
Compline, or evening prayers; it indicated a fulfillment of God’s promise—
the advent of the Messiah, Christ, in whose coming Simeon believed and
in whose imminence he had faith. Once Simeon had seen the baby Jesus,
taken the child “up in his arms” and “blessed God,” he declared that he
could then depart earthly life “in peace, according to thy word: For mine
eyes have seen thy salvation.”22 A close reading of the final poem implies
the anatomy of the entire poetic cycle: the reunion of Chloe’s family is
analogized to Simeon’s witnessing of the coming of the Messiah.
Chloe, of course, is no Simeon. As the first poem discloses (and again
like Equiano before her), she has not been of devout nature throughout
her life but learned the way of devotion through the teachings of an elder
(in Chloe’s case, Uncle Jacob) and her engagement with the otherworldly
“something” given in the first poem as spirit. Harper’s metaphorical evocation
of the messianic advent symbolizes the restoration of faith and the unity of
God’s people, who are redeemed through the fulfillment of God’s promise
in his Word. It is important here to note, as we saw in our reading of
Equiano in the previous chapter, the Christian belief that this fulfillment
is possible only in the actuation and realization of God’s Word made flesh;
that is, human salvation comes only by way of the unified body of Christ,
symbolized by God’s Word (the Bible), and Christ’s descent to earth is
intended to deliver God’s people. Harper’s final poem, however, is hardly the
act of perfection that its invocation of the Song of Simeon would lead some
readers to infer. Chloe does not achieve wholeness. Instead, she envisions a
death mediated by hope and longing. She can only hope for actuation, and
can only desire the peace of Simeon; she cannot unproblematically obtain it.
Here I take Harper to be saying something fundamental about the
situatedness of black being in the context of slavery, something that does,
in fact, resonate with Equiano’s hope that his readers will not cast away
the “jewels of instruction” they should have obtained by reading his life
story, but will instead embrace the lessons of his journey (his “way,” again a
reference to Christ as “the way” to salvation), and thus “actuate” his being.
Chloe serves Harper as an ontological operator whose poetic force comes
via her verisimilitude, as a metaphorical instrument in the struggle for
being on the bio-political plane of slavery’s aftermath. Harper makes clear
in a number of instances that her work pursues a project of understanding
through a balance of contemplation and action.23 In the slave and post-
slave contexts, what is at risk is black being, and Harper conveys these
stakes through a sense of the significance of social virtue as a response
to the trauma of slavery, and through a concern for moral action coupled
with intellectual contemplation. Harper’s historiography, presented to the
reader as Chloe’s act of remembering, gives evidence of this association
between thinking, being, and doing. Harper conveys Chloe’s experience
(her history, her consciousness, her actions) in poetry; thus, the poem
metaphorically constitutes Chloe’s being and the problematics associated
with black existence both during and after slavery.
If the final act of the poetic cycle—the postponement of Chloe’s family
reunion—is deferment, Chloe’s being, by analogy, is effectively dissimulated:
the final poem obscures the lacuna between memory and being, or history
and being, the very gap that the cycle sets about negotiating. The cycle, in
other words, embodies Chloe’s fractured existence and thus works toward
a topology of the nature of her being. If, then, we see in this sequence of
poems an implicit depiction of Aunt Chloe’s being as partial and dialogic, as
formed by discourses that are both temporal and atemporal, that interchange
with eras past and future, then we may also see in these fragmentary and
dialogic interactions the basis of Chloe’s epistemology, a way of knowing
that responds to her present circumstances and fortifies her sense of being.
Chloe’s sense of being becomes evident in the poems that constitute the
cycle.
One aspect of the tension between being and memory that characterizes
Harper’s poetic cycle is its contention with the transcendent: Chloe and
her community seek to rise above, to transcend the constraints of both
enslavement and newly—but not wholly—won freedom. Such is indicated
by the salvific title of the second poem, “The Deliverance.” This piece divides
easily into five thematic parts that reflect the sweep of history and the
ebb and flow of politics. In this poem, we note a theory of history that
seems, upon initial perusal, to insist upon a striving toward transcendence
and metaphysical wholeness. Ultimately, however, the poem underscores the
immanent.
The first part, comprising stanzas one through fourteen, beyond
introducing “Mistus” and her son Thomas, takes up the theme of war, a
sort of trial by fire through which the slaves would have to pass before
being delivered by freedom. In the second part, stanzas fifteen through
twenty-seven, Uncle Jacob (then still living) seeks to reassure all the slaves,
and effectively serves as a seer and spiritual advisor to Aunt Chloe. Part
three, made up of stanzas twenty-eight through thirty-four, begins with
the entry of the conquering Yankee troops into the South, upon whose
appearance Chloe and the other slaves celebrate. Stanzas thirty-five through
forty-three, making up the fourth part, chronicle the rise and fall of a
number of American presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and
Ulysses S. Grant. With the mention of Grant in this section, Chloe pilots us
through the thick of the Reconstruction years, and she is an effective guide.
In addition to graphing the obvious point of Lincoln’s assassination, she
mentions what was widely known as Johnson’s “swing around the circle”—
an unsuccessful eighteen-day speaking tour in which he traveled through
the Midwest and offered explanations of his policies—and notes Grant’s
(temporarily) successful move to break up the Ku Klux Klan.24 In part five,
the focus is on suffrage and, in particular, the role women play in keeping
their husbands from corruption. The women depicted seem to take as part
of their marriage vows a sort of moral-political responsibility to which they
determinedly hold their husbands true, even at the risk of the marriage itself.
“The Deliverance” provides sedulous spadework for the remainder of

the cycle. It is marked by a shift from the mystical and anagogic in parts
one through three, to the political in parts four and five. We should be alert
to Harper’s establishment of a continuum here—from the metaphysical to
the temporal, from transcendent freedom to immanent political exigencies.
(In this way, I should say, she echoes Equiano, whose call to abolition, in
tandem with his call to liberal Christianity, essentially constitutes a political
discourse.) Harper’s consideration of the slaves’ temporalities continues in
the next poem, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” which carries on the discussion
of suffrage introduced in the second poem and urges responsible action
under the Fifteenth Amendment. It is followed by “Learning to Read” and
“Church Building,” which together reflect two pillars of Harper’s aesthetic
philosophy.25 First is the importance of the written word, specifically as it
relates to the accessibility of sacred text and self-edification. (After Chloe
learns to read hymns and the Bible at the age of sixty, she buys her own
cabin: “And I felt as independent / As the queen upon her throne” [SL,
128]). Second is the import of religion itself. The practice of each—an
investment in the intellectual as well as in the spiritual—serves to prepare
Chloe for the final moment she narrates; the intellectual and the spiritual
are the twin portals that lead to her reunion with her sons, Jakey and Ben,
or at least this is what we are given to believe. However, that Chloe cannot
consummate her poetic act—that she cannot fully achieve free subjectivity
precisely because of her historical situation—is manifest not only in her
family’s failure to reunite, but also in Harper’s, and thus Chloe’s, inability
to provide holistic testimony.
As author, Harper attempts to bear witness to Chloe’s experience of
slavery from a site that exceeds slavery’s limits: a freeborn Southerner,26
Harper had never had such experiences as those she sought to portray
through poetry, though she would have been witness to them. Harper was
born in the slave state of Maryland. Her hometown, Baltimore, a pro-slavery
city, was populated with no fewer than 25,000 free African Americans in
1850, and 3,000 or fewer enslaved persons of African descent,27 so Harper
likely had many early experiences with the institution of slavery, although
she did not live it herself. During her tour of the Reconstruction South,
various conversations with freedwomen prepared Harper to undertake this
metaphorical testimonial. Nonetheless, Harper is, by definition, an outsider
who works to give voice to the lived experience of the black slave. If we
follow Orlando Patterson here, we may read the fictional Chloe as inhabiting
a space of social death from which Harper bids her speak.28 Harper insists
that Chloe bear witness from the inside of death, that she provide what
Agamben describes as “impossible testimony.” Thus, the poetic cycle is

actually a layered ontological narrative that permits Harper to create a
character who serves as a witness to slavery and as a survivor of slavery’s
trauma.
However, it seems evident that Harper necessarily dissembles in her
effort to present the truth of the slave’s existence: Chloe’s enunciation
is essentially Harper’s. Thus, there is a clear semiotic and rhetorical link
between author and poetic witness: Chloe’s testimony presupposes the lived
experience of historical slave women and conveys it—in vernacular speech—
as truth, thereby validating and certifying that experience. In her verse,
Chloe renders the absence of the historical slave as presence, as being; she
speaks in the name of an inability to speak, and thereby gains authority.
As the source of Chloe’s testimony, the absent slave is imaged/imagined
as constitutively indeterminate. Chloe bears witness to the indeterminate
nature of slave being. She permits the silenced to speak.
I am thinking of this textual permission as one wherein the ineffable
does not embrace the exotic, but casts it off and demands full access to the
concept of the human through the performance of speech. Chloe’s speech
act is an essential overcoming of the negative. It negates silence on three
discernible levels of consciousness: that of the author (Harper); that of the
witness, narrator, and survivor of slavery (Chloe); and that of the collectivity
of silenced slaves (the paradoxical human/nonhuman, those who speak but
do not speak for themselves, those who survive in representation though they
might have perished). There is a way in which Harper, as a freeborn woman
of color, and Chloe, as a freedwoman who, in Harper’s poetic imagination,
survives the terrors of slavery, are intertwined. Their fates and existences
are interrelated; neither the freeborn and the freed nor the author and
the narrator can be reduced to separate identities. They must be read as
intimately related.29
The intimate relation between narrator and poet stands as a commentary
on the moral necessity Harper resolved to convey to her reader. What I
wish to explore further is the notion of Harper as the witness who works
to “complete,” in Agamben’s terms, Chloe’s testimony. Harper amasses
scattered remnants of memory and arranges them in a poetic “whole” that
is, nonetheless, fragmented: the poems refuse to present Chloe as a fully
constituted presence who emerges from slavery’s travails unmarked, perfect.
Harper’s act here is purposeful and comes by way of a number of refusals,
which, following Heidegger, we may describe in terms of dissembling. Chloe
speaks as one, when in fact she is many. She speaks for Harper as well
as for slaves and freed persons. Her dissimulative voice makes testimony
possible even as she (and thus Harper) omits pertinent facts of her history,
such as the location from which she speaks, the dates during which she
lives, and her parentage as well as that of her children. Chloe is, then, the
uncommon slave narrator who refuses to substantiate and authorize her
discourse with the conventional declaration that often commences with “I
was born.” Even as she refuses to cite her origins, she refuses a holistic
ending. Such insistence upon indeterminacy is, to my way of thinking, also
an insistence upon a specific moral, a critical humanism that emerges from
the pen of a nineteenth-century African American feminist activist.
I see the remaining time in Chloe’s text—the time Harper does
narrate, the fragments of Chloe’s existence she does give in poetry—as the
motivity that advances the feminist and activist moral upon which Harper
insists. The remaining time of the text may be seen as a projected world,
projected toward the future as well as the past, and thus it coalesces with
the present time of the reader in contemporaneity.30 The poems exist as
thought, productive thought in the time of the present. The role of thought
and knowledge in the poems is of great importance. For instance, once
emancipation comes, Aunt Chloe acquires literacy in spite of her advanced
age of sixty, an achievement that should be seen in light of her longstanding
desire before the war that all the slaves should gain and share knowledge
even as they endured captivity:
Our masters always tried to hide

Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery—
‘Twould make us all too wise.
But some of us would try to steal
A little from the book,
And put the words together,
And learn by hook or crook.
(SL, 127)
The edification of the mind Chloe expounds here is paralleled in

the poem “Church Building” by the building of a “meeting place” (SL,
129) where the slaves would edify their spirits as well as their minds.
Both endeavors advance piecemeal: “book learning” is gained “by hook
or crook”; the funds for the church grow as the former slaves “pinched,
and scraped, and spared, / A little here and there” (129). As they pertain
to the evolution of Chloe’s being, these exemplary accomplishments, each
presented as representative moral acts in the aftermath of oppression, serve
to alleviate her solitude and to enact community. Yet they also, and this
most importantly, perhaps, attest to the ontological “world” Harper seeks
to reconstruct through memory and metaphor.
“Learning to Read” and “Church Building” underscore the centrality
of thought in Chloe’s poetry, not simply in its recourse to vernacular
metaphors and its validation of literacy and self-improvement, but also in
its very recollection of these undertakings—both Chloe’s remembrance as
well as Harper’s memorializing of slave being through witnessing and a
poetic structure intent upon recreating a world. Heidegger calls this type of
thinking through an act of remembrance: “thinking holds to the / coming
of what has been, and / is remembrance.”31 He relates this concept of time
and memory to the function of poetry as a work of art. For Heidegger, the
“nature of the work of art” is “the truth of beings setting itself to work”:
The work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force. To be

a work means to set up a world.  .  .  .  World is never an object that
stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective
to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death,
blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever
those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are
made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and
are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. 32
In the Aunt Chloe cycle, the absent and the ineffable, enacted
by way of dissembling and refusal, coalesce with an act of “worlding”
through testimony and representation. I have said that the poems achieve
historiography; they strive to archive a period of time that is accessible to
us only through narrative. Harper’s interviewing of slave women and her
translation of their narratives into poetry make it possible to witness slavery
from the inside, to enter an existence beyond our own; the poet grants us
limited access to the inside of death, as it were, and partially preserves
the voice of the witness. The poems serve as a modality that enables our
imperfect observation of Chloe’s inmost nature: Chloe—as being—is at
stake in the poems. In situating Chloe’s experience as a half-open portal
to the existence and experiences of many historical slaves, Harper renders
the poems absolutely necessary to our contemporary conceptions of slave
being. The Aunt Chloe cycle puts into play a relation between poetry and
being, vernacular speech and historical action. The poetic cycle is effectively
a process of protension that extends Chloe’s world to our own.
In Chloe as a constructed subject, we find, evoking Agamben’s terms, a

“field of forces always already traversed by the incandescent and historically
determined currents of potentiality and impotentiality, of being able not
to be and not being able not to be.”33 This is the risk of Chloe’s poetic
existence. As she translates Chloe’s partial history into poetry, Harper
disallows the mysticism we often attach to narratives of slavery. In some
respects, twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers perceive the effort of
the slave to speak her/his piece in one of two ways. First, the slave narrator
often seems to us thwarted in his/her narrative attempts by the trauma
of slavery; readings of slave narratives often convey a sense of awe in the
face of what we deem ineffable acts forcefully existing between the lines
of text given by the slave narrator. If this condition does not predispose
us to a certain reception of the “silences” within the slave’s text, then the
conventions of nineteenth-century women’s abolitionist writing, wherein it
was considered improper to reveal the full horrors of slavery, may encourage
us to accept the key omissions and aporia as natural to the text’s conception
and structure. It would seem that the intersection of the speech act and
the historical archive in the Aunt Chloe poems calls for a different sort of
reading than that to which we have become accustomed in our analyses of
the slave’s text.
Perhaps, as Agamben writes, the “relation between what is said and its
taking place” will allow us to codify Chloe, as “the subject of enunciation,”
differentially. I take Agamben to echo Julia Kristeva in arguing that it is
possible to “bracket,” or identify, or determine, that which has been conveyed
in an act of speech as an aspect of the historical context. Similarly, Agamben
may take the “subject of enunciation” to refer to the individual who speaks,
the “I” who enunciates. Either case refers to the gist of his conclusion
that “the relation between language and its existence, between langue and
its archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very impossibility
of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech.”34 It is clear that
language demands a subject (a living individual) in order to exist. Thus
Chloe, as a subject deploying and deployed by metaphor, bears witness to the
impossibility of the slave’s testimony. For without Chloe as speaking subject,
the slave’s metaphorics, as well as his or her being, would suffer a death.
5
A Technology of Modern Black Being

“The Conservation of Races” as a
Critical Ontology of Race
Little more than twenty-five years after Sketches of Southern Life, in the 1897
essay “The Conservation of Races,” W. E. B. Du Bois took up the project
of ontological metaphorics exemplified in Harper’s work, and extended it
toward the modernity of a new century. Even in our own day, modernity,
through its apparatuses of the plantation and the slave ship, often works
toward the erasure of slave being and the eradication of its contingencies; it
seeks certainty and absolutism, such as it invests in the idea of the “whole,”
white subject. Harper counters the deficient humanism of the Enlightenment
and its project of modernity, and puts in its place a vernacular hermeneutics
that queries, represents, affirms, and protends black being toward our own
time. As we have seen in chapter 4, Harper’s Aunt Chloe, a vernacular, black
subject, seeks redress through her own metaphorical enunciation and actually
reconfigures the possibilities of poetry as existential potentiality. The Aunt
Chloe poems are a re-instantiation of the contingent, a resurgence of the
impossible: Chloe’s speech act emerges from a caesura between being and
nothingness. Harper refracts language through Chloe, and in doing so, she
recasts a vision of how Chloe’s being, as given in metaphor and as testimony
to historical events, may (and must) be received. Thus, the Aunt Chloe cycle
not only places before the reader the interstitial as productive of meaning
and alternative subjectivity, but also serves to negate “impossible” black being.
Coming in the wake of Harper’s poetics at the close of the nineteenth
century, “The Conservation of Races,” a work that continues to garner
widespread critical attention in the twenty-first century, is perhaps most
significant for its articulation of a revisionist theory of modern black being
exactly twenty years after the end of Reconstruction. It is also significant
for another reason, one not widely noted by Du Bois’s critics, but which
171
I take up as a central aspect of the transhistorical thrust of my study:

“Conservation” engages in a complex act of metaphorical conceptualization,
which takes shape in tandem with its critical ontology of race and blackness.
In doing so, Du Bois draws forward the ontological metaphorics at work in
the writings of preceding generations of African-descended thinkers such as
Harper and Equiano, and lays the foundation for the conceptual metaphors
of modern black being that inspirit The Souls of Black Folk.
It is striking that “Conservation,” which Du Bois presented at the
March 1897 inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy, appeared
some five months before the essay, “Strivings of the Negro People.”
“Strivings,” published in the August 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly,
would be republished in 1903 with few changes as the first chapter of The
Souls of Black Folk. In both “Conservation” and “Strivings,” it becomes clear
that the question of being, or, more specifically, modern black being that
bore in 1897 upon the thought of Du Bois was whether human history
could be revised from a global perspective that sought some mediation of
the national as well as the racial. Du Bois essentially inquired whether
the purview of history could be expanded from narrow nationalist and
racist perspectives that excluded the Negro from the annals of modern
existence, to a broader one that allowed for what Du Bois himself termed
“human brotherhood,” which Hannah Arendt would later refer to as “human
plurality.” My argument in this chapter is that Du Bois indeed undertook
and achieved such a plural, global historiography of modern black being
in “The Conservation of Races,” one that sought to mediate and engage
head-on the paradox of global humanity and particularized racial being
through a concerted use of historical narrative and an understanding of
the power of ontological metaphor. More to the central focus of this study,
my reading of “Conservation” will demonstrate how Du Bois draws upon
the onto-theological metaphorics exemplified in preceding generations of
African American thought, secularizing them as he argues for a critically
revised concept of the human. Moreover, as I will show in the following
chapter, Du Bois’s metaphorization of race in “Conservation” is taken up
and refined in The Souls of Black Folk, where he adapts much of the sort of
onto-theological and anagogic metaphors we see in Equiano and Harper
to an ultra-modern and secular set of conceptual metaphors of black being:
the veil, the color-line, and double consciousness.
As Du Bois lays the foundation for these conceptual metaphors in
“The Conservation of Races,” he touches upon most of the usual categories
of American history—race, gender, class, national belonging, and so on—
A Technology of Modern Black Being 173
yet ultimately forces their expansion through a nuanced critique. Fairly

inaugurating a vista of eighty years of writing (his early writing was published
in the 1880s while he was yet a student; he began writing professionally
as an academic and activist in the mid-1890s; and he continued to publish
and write up to the time of his death in 1963), Du Bois’s thought both
echoes and sounds against the themes that characterize the times in which
he lived. It is a small wonder that his writing, even in its earliest stages,
continues to engage us. Perhaps what we continue to respond to in Du Bois
is his fervent, at times outraged, attention to the past, present, and future of
global humanity, democracy, and justice. In “The Conservation of Races,” his
passion in writing conjoins metaphorical discourse and black being, prophecy
and realism as he undertakes what I am calling a transhistorical, critical
ontology of race, in the sense that Michel Foucault gives this term in “What
is Enlightenment?” (1984). The sort of critical ontology Du Bois undertakes
correlates with what Foucault would later describe as “an attitude, an ethos,
a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the
same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and
an experiment with the possibility of “going beyond them” (50). Du Bois’s
critical ontology also advances what Spillers and Derrida more recently
refer to as the necessity of ontological contemporaneity and agency, as I
discuss in chapter 2. Du Bois’s is an inquiry that concerns questions of
being, historicity, and historiography, but it is also one that examines such
questions while putting forward a considerable plan of action and redress.
The sort of critical ontology Du Bois employs to deconstruct the
concept of race in “Conservation” also serves to analyze collective racial
memory. Harper’s work, as I discuss in the previous chapter, might be
considered an outgrowth of such collective memory. And while poetry
such as Harper’s is of signal importance to our ability to theorize slave
consciousness, Du Bois employs the processes of critical ontology, which
in this instance unfolds by way of a historical analysis of the limits of race,
in order to profit from an archaeology of the sort exemplified in Harper’s
testimony of black being. He analyzes black collective memory as constitutive
of race, at the same time that he uses narrative to explain and deconstruct
the idea of race as a metaphorical concept, and even to move beyond “race”
as a limited category of being and toward a global, illimitable humanism.
In “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois’s critical ontology narrates
the experience of black social memory to tell stories not only of the varied
African-descended peoples in far-flung places who constitute humanity
wherever they abide, but of peoples the world over whose collective histories
converge beyond the limits of racialization in a noetic space that he calls

“human brotherhood.” He tells of their mores and customs, their languages
and sayings, their religions and cultural practices, their failings and progress.
By telling and re-telling these stories of collective human being, as he does
in “Conservation” and elsewhere, Du Bois’s ontology makes clear that
the operation of history works in tandem with the operation of national
identity and the construction of racial identities, themselves evolutionary
processes that, in modern times, provide a vantage point and a structuring
principle through which the telling of history is regularly filtered. History
and historiography, indelibly linked to the conceptualization of the human
and thus to the question of being, are also intimately related to ideas of
race and nation. Du Bois sought to highlight the dangers inherent in such
intimacies through his critique in “Conservation.”
Most, if not indeed all scholars of Du Bois’s work recognize his
historiographical intent1 in “The Conservation of Races,” but few acknowledge
the ways in which the essay not only employs ontological metaphorics
that critique the notions of race and nation as absolutist categories, but
also, more to the point, the ways in which the metaphorization of race
in “Conservation” in fact lays the groundwork for the major ontological
metaphors that structure and bring to life Du Bois’s chef d’oeuvre: The Souls
of Black Folk. I argue for attention to Du Bois’s metaphorization of race in
“Conservation” because this essay is not one that exemplifies, in the words of
Wilson J. Moses, the tenets of “classical black nationalism.”2 Instead, I will
show how the essay deconstructs the categories of race that allow for and
validate absolutist black nationalism as well as white supremacy. The message
of “Conservation” is not one of racial or nationalist absolutism conveyed
through straightforward and ordinary language. Instead, Du Bois introduces
the reader to a set of metaphorical terms related to a specific vision and
interpretation of the past and present that is concerned with, above all else,
the articulation of a set of future possibilities. For example, in recalling, near
the beginning of his text, the “hard limits of natural law” that give rise to
the “practical difficulties of every day” (815), Du Bois seeks a description of
the Negro’s present reality that effects a useful and critical mimesis of his or
her social condition. And this he does not through autobiography or poetry,
as do Equiano and Harper respectively, but neither does he do it through
the discipline he most intently practiced during the 1890s, sociology. Rather
than presenting his readers with “scientific” facts, such as those he published
in his 1897 study of Farmville, Virginia (“Conservation” lacks statistics, tables,
graphs, and other visuals employed by Du Bois in much of his sociological
work), Du Bois begins his critical ontology with a historical narrative, a sort
of muthos3 not wholly unlike that described by Aristotle in his Poetics. For
instance, the first line of the essay reads, “The American Negro has always
felt an intense personal interest in discussions as to the origins and destinies
of races: primarily, because back of most discussions of race with which he
is familiar, have lurked certain assumptions as to his natural abilities, as to
his political, intellectual and moral status which he felt were wrong” (815).
In my reading of this crucial entry point into the essay, a sort of narrative
vestibule, if you will, where Du Bois situates and prepares his listeners and
readers for the argument he will painstakingly elaborate, I see Du Bois
framing this statement in a manner that is akin to the most recognizable
form of muthos, that of the tragic, moral “hero” who seeks to embrace the
ethical, while all along the forces of the cosmos have led him to a certain
ironic and regrettable end: “He has, consequently, been led to deprecate and
minimize race distinctions, to believe intensely that out of one blood God
created all nations, and to speak of human brotherhood as though it were
the possibility of an already dawning tomorrow” (815).
The elements of narrative are indeed here: the demiurge upon
whose mythological shoulders rests the heavy responsibility for rendering
all his creations as equal beings; the appeal to humanitas in the phrase
“human brotherhood,” a form of human virtue that calls for a balance
of contemplation and action; the “dawning to-morrow,” whose figurative
presence in the sentence evokes images of a supreme heavenly being that
guides understanding and ensures a future. What Du Bois argues, however,
is that this masculine and “heroic” figure, as I will call him, must recognize
that race, while invalid as a scientific concept, has deep and sustainable
roots in social structures as well as in culturally central historical narratives.
Thus, in spite of science’s conclusion and Du Bois’s pointed rejection of
racial absolutism and its ills, he tells his audience not only that there does
indeed exist a color-line, effected through social structures and enforced
through white supremacist practices of racism the world over. We must
also, he argues, recognize the existence of the color-line in the various
manifestations it takes, whether in myths of racial absolutism that maintain
a fiction of purity of blood, or in racial phenomenology that assigns racial
essences by way of such questionable “sciences” as craniology, phrenology,
and so on. Within its global context, in which it is very much alive, race
continues to wield a vital, determinative force in American life, no matter
the Negro’s efforts at eradicating and transgressing its categories. Du Bois
puts the matter thus:
The final word of science, so far, is that we have at least two, perhaps
three, great families of human beings—the whites and Negroes,
possibly the yellow race. That other races have arisen from the
intermingling of the blood of these two. This broad division of the
world’s races which men like Huxley and Raetzel have introduced
as more nearly true than the old five-race scheme of Blumenbach,
is nothing more than an acknowledgement that, so far as purely
physical characteristics are concerned, the differences between men
do not explain all the differences of their history. It declares, as
Darwin himself has said, that great as is the physical unlikeness
of the various races of men their likenesses are greater, and upon
this rests the whole scientific doctrine of Human Brotherhood.
Although the wonderful developments of human history
teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and
bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles
which groups of men have played in Human Progress, yet there
are differences—subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may
be—which have silently but definitely separated men into groups.
While these subtle forces have generally followed the natural
cleavage of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities, they
have at other times swept across and ignored these. At all times,
however, they have divided human beings into races, which, while
they perhaps transcend scientific definition, nevertheless are clearly
defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist. (816–817)
Early in his essay, then, Du Bois not only acknowledges the scientific
doubt surrounding racial classification, but also takes the concept of “race”
and places it beyond the realm of science and biology and under the auspices
of history and sociology, two fields in which he himself was rigorously
trained. His narration of the idea of “race” is as a concept deeply implicated
by culture and inseparable from the historical processes that have empowered
the rise of civilizations and nation-states.
When he goes on to call race the “most ingenious invention for human
progress” (817), he therefore engages a number of discourses. First among
these is the idea of modern “Human Progress” (816) itself, the idea that
appears to stand as the analytic motivity of the essay. That is, the signal
question of the role of Negroes in the modern era, how they would defend
their freedom and, importantly, how they would advance in modern society,
founds the impetus of “Conservation.” For Du Bois, getting at the root of
these questions demanded an analysis of the place of race in the history of
“human philosophy” (815) and in the concept of “Human Progress” (816),

a concept that always holds a significant rapport with the ideals of the
Enlightenment, and the nationalist, materialist, and racist ideologies that
emerge from the Age of Reason. Du Bois deems race to be a contrivance
that emerged from this age, a figural phenomenon unmoored from empirical
and biological evidence, yet anchored in a materialist modern American
culture that depends upon the limitations of race for its progress among the
community of nations. Modern American progress, materialist advancement,
nationalist exclusions, and the “invention” of race were thus all of a piece
and together occupied the crucible of Du Bois’s analysis.
Du Bois’s analysis yields the conclusion that race manifests a deceptive
and elusive metaphoricity, and that this metaphoricity signifies more than
simple figurative discourse. When Du Bois places race beyond the realm
of scientific empiricism and critiques race as an invention that serves the
doctrine of modern progress and nationalist exclusions postulated by the
Enlightenment, he actually employs concepts that take shape by way of
a forceful ontological metaphor in order to interrogate and deconstruct
the metaphysical tradition that so strongly influenced his own intellectual
formation. Race may be a “dead” metaphor, in the sense that Paul Ricoeur
gives this term—that is, its metaphoricity may not be immediately
recognizable, since it is taken to be a literal, concrete “fact” by racial
absolutists—but it nonetheless exerts a long-lived and forceful influence
over the everyday lives of modern people of African descent. That is, its
metaphoricity is rarely ever recognized as such by the general public, though
scholars such as Gates4 have written of it in these terms; it is instead taken
as a statement of empirical human reality.
When it came to race, Du Bois never quite managed to succumb to
the teleology that his readings in the Enlightenment encouraged him to
seek. The rise of the nation-state during the Enlightenment era and the
concurrent ascent of scientific racism strongly impacted Du Bois’s evolving
concept of race in a way that forecasts more recent thought on the nexus
of race and nation. Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, writes of how the work
of Johann Blumenbach, long considered the father of the modern system
of racial classification and cited by Du Bois in his essay, emerged at the
moment when the modern American nation-state was being founded and
its economy, largely built on the institution of slavery, was being theorized.5
As in The Souls of Black Folk, “Conservation” proceeds via a metaphorical and
symbolic analytic that tests the limits of these sorts of social formations by
casting them as longstanding and grounded in history, but as nonetheless
subject to changes that come about through social evolutionary processes.
As he probes these limits and after describing Americans and Negroes

as conglomerate peoples, that is, as groups formed out of the exigencies of
history and migrations (both forced and voluntary) rather than monolithic
biological origins, Du Bois goes on to characterize the Negro as both an
American and a Negro only to a certain point. Beyond this point, his identity
is to be, for an ill-defined period of time and for reasons of political and
social exigency, exclusively that of “Negro.” Yet Du Bois concludes “Con-
servation” with an “Academy Creed” (and the word “creed” here is intended
to refer to more than a set of beliefs; it is a set of principles intended to
guide the future actions of the Academy) that underscores the ephemeral
nature of such seemingly voluntary racial identities. Du Bois writes:
We believe it the duty of the Americans of Negro descent, as

a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the
Negro people [to make a “contribution” to “civilization and hu-
manity”] is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood
has become a practical possibility. (825, my emphasis)
In his examination of the American Negro subject in particular and the

modern notion of race in general, Du Bois ends by describing the African
American as existing in a state of liminality—a sort of “in-betweenness”
that he will theorize to a greater extent in Souls. Du Bois sees the Negro
as being able to shrug off his Americanness at will and adhere to a Negro
identity, but only “until” African Americans have fulfilled what he sees as
their obligation to contribute meaningfully to world civilization, and only
until the threat of discrimination and annihilation based on race and color
has itself been obliterated.
The crux of Du Bois’s understanding of the metaphoricity of race
lies not only in his analytic of race as an “ingenious” modern “invention,”
but also in his belief that the black racial identity that correlated with the
concept of race could be “maintained” at will “until ” the “mission of the
Negro people” had been “accomplished.” This is a point that critics in the
vein of K. Anthony Appiah appear to overlook. If we interpret clearly Du
Bois’s theory of race in 1897 based on his own words and the hermeneutics
of his narration (that is, if we seek to understand Du Bois’s thought by
immersing ourselves in the epistemological flow of his text), then there is
little need to question his 1940 stance on biological determinism, as Appiah
does in his well-known 1986 essay, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois
and the Illusion of Race.”6 Du Bois argues early on in “Conservation” that
the metaphoricity of race is so liminal, so temporal that it may be cast off
once a political and social prerogative has been attained. The temporality
evident in Du Bois’s final proclamation (in the “until” that he stresses in the
“Academy Creed”) makes it difficult to ascertain any clear meaning in his use
of the term “race” as literal, biological fact. “Conservation” thus appears to
function heuristically; it serves as an exemplary technology by which a critical
ontology of race and blackness is performed using a hermeneutical process.
The hermeneutics of race in “Conservation” never manifests itself as fully
teleological and deterministic. If Du Bois is the quintessential dialectician
that David Levering Lewis, Wilson J. Moses, and Anthony Appiah claim
him to be,7 he never quite arrives at a synthesis of his argument that will
allow him to pronounce without hesitation a teleological and absolutist
definition of race.
The argument is unfinished, as Appiah notes, but not because Du Bois
cannot grasp that biological science was no basis for racial identification.
Rather, he rejected the synthesis that would demand a fixed idea of race.
The interpretation he advanced was a stratagem designed to dislocate race
from its paradigmatic position in modern Western thought, an act of
dislocation and metaphorical dislocution that would effectively throw into
question the very concept of race, setting the stage for Du Bois’s repeated
attempts throughout his oeuvre to trouble an ostensibly stable definition of
the meaning of race and color in the American social and political context.
His metaphorization of race problematizes the collectivities of race and
nation-state alike, probing notions of essentialism and particularism while
noting the inherent volatility and instability of such ideas. In so doing, Du
Bois’s critical ontology intercedes between the dangers of racial particularism
and the perils of an uncritical Western universalism.
Being in the Occasion of Discourse:

“Conservation,” Metaphor, and the Historical Narrative of Race
The argument I advance here does not seek to show that Du Bois’s perspective
on race was “right” and “non-essentialist,” for I have elsewhere pointed out
the ways in which a number of aspects of contemporary criticism has sought
erroneously to identify a sense of biological determinism at work in the
essay.8 Here, I intend to show that the metaphoricity alive in Du Bois’s
articulations on race in “Conservation” not only reflects his understanding
of the ambiguities of “race” itself, but that this metaphoricity also sets the
stage for the development of the three major conceptual metaphors of being
that guide and give intellectual substance to The Souls of Black Folk. At
the meeting of what appear to be ambiguities and inconsistencies in Du

Bois’s thought, one often finds instead metaphorical contingencies of which
Du Bois is fully aware and makes use as he works to give birth to new
epistemologies and ontologies that shine forth upon the difficulties of black
existence. Just as scholars have lately begun to recognize that early on in
the evolution of his thought, Du Bois considered the color-line to be not
simply an American phenomenon, but a global one, we should come to a
fuller understanding of the ways in which his deployment of the metaphorics
of race in “The Conservation of Races” prepares us for the metaphorics of
black being in Souls.
There are three problematics set forth by the usual readings produced
by critics of “Conservation,” who generally read a tenor of racial absolutism
into the essay, and these should be addressed as I move on to my purpose
in this chapter. I identify them as problematics of racialized being, historical
narrative, and conceptual metaphor. Each demands an exegesis of “The
Conservation of Races,” and together they converge to form an additional
problematic at work in the essay. This additional problematic is textual, of
course, but more specifically, we find it in greatest evidence when we give
due consideration to the intellectual chain that draws together processes of
thought, writing, reading, and hearing. These meet in Du Bois’s occasion of
discourse, in this instance, the convening of the American Negro Academy.
I have assigned to the occasion of the essay three senses, which I will
introduce in turn. First, in much scholarly writing on this essay, critics have
attached its meaning to the person of the speaker, namely, Du Bois. That is,
the essay has been read as Du Bois’s intimate occasion of self-expression;
thus the character of the essay is often read as the character of Du Bois
himself. Second is our consideration of the essay as a discursive event. The
subject of the essay is brought to the forefront of the scene through Du
Bois’s version of historical narration. He seeks to describe, represent, and
express the sense and meaning of race, nation, and black being at the close
of the 1800s and the dawn of a new century. Thus, Du Bois seeks not only
the engagement of an argument that is, as he demonstrates, open-ended
and oriented toward the future, but, more importantly, he seeks an effect in
the wake of his argument. He seeks an exchange—of speech and hearing,
of information and intellection, of knowledge and action. The essay is the
temporal occasion of this sort of coming together, whereby the codes of
metaphorical language are employed in the service of political thought and
the call for a specific sort of moral action.
Third is the temporality of this discourse. Du Bois draws upon
a discourse that is historical in nature; that is, he draws upon certain
metaphorical terms masquerading as concrete language—most important

among them the idea of race itself—that pertain to the history of science,
the history of societies across the world, and the ways in which these
histories have been documented and narrated. These metaphors serve as the
provisional unities upon which his own discourse is formed. In turn, they
draw upon language as a system of signs, which serve as the fundamental
elements of meaning and which give the illusion of timelessness, of being
beyond history. Thus the metaphorical language Du Bois uses precedes
him historically; he must draw it forth from the sediment of the past and,
provisionally, anchor it in the present through the occasion of narration.
Further, if he is to achieve the aims of his discourse, he must draw upon
the unities and discontinuities of language in such a way that his discourse
and the racialized being which is its subject may be projected toward the
future in a gesture of contemporaneity, as I discuss in chapter 2.
There is in our reading of Du Bois’s text a further problematic at
work. First, we cannot fully re-situate Du Bois’s oration in its original
setting. Despite historical accounts of the evening in question, including Du
Bois’s own and that which I provide here, we cannot be fully certain of the
manner in which Du Bois’s interlocutors reacted to his discourse. That is
to say that through our reading of the text, we are at a loss in any attempt
to experience a common reality shared by the author and the auditors. We
must instead rely upon historical representations of this, representations that
grant us only a partial idea of the full levels of understanding achieved by
the listeners. Second, we are at equal pains in attempting fully to situate
“Conservation” in our own horizon of reading and hearing; in fact, we can
no longer “hear” Du Bois. Thus the illocutionary aspects of his discourse,
the tone and inflections he used to underscore or direct the meaning of
words he articulated, are lost to us. We do not have these inflections for our
own use as we interpret the essay. Likewise, we must strive to appreciate
fully the nuanced sense of such words as “race,” “nation,” “progress,” etc.,
in late nineteenth-century parlance. It is no understatement to say that
the text requires a hermeneutical process to approach fuller understanding.
“Conservation” is neither fiction nor poetry, but its language poses a similar
sort of fundamental hermeneutic problem as these forms. In Du Bois’s essay,
metaphor, being, narrative, and the occasion of discourse, articulate one with
the others, and this articulation forms the core of the hermeneutic problem
one initially encounters in reading the piece.
We might be aided in our examination of this hermeneutical problem
by drawing upon certain of Paul Ricoeur’s broader theoretical propositions,
in which he summarizes the arguments of John R. Searle and J. L. Austin,
two linguistic philosophers who investigate discursive events similar to that

enacted by Du Bois:
The act of discourse, according to these authors, is constituted by

a hierarchy of subordinated acts, distributed across three levels:
1) the level of the locutionary or propositional act: the act of
saying; 2) the level of the illocutionary act (or force): that which
we do in speaking; 3) the level of the perlocutionary act: that
which we do by the fact that we speak. If I tell you to close the
door, I am doing three things: I relate the predicate of action
(close) to two arguments (you and the door); that is the act of
saying. But I tell you this with the force of an order, and not of
a contestation or a wish or a promise; that is the illocutionary
act. Finally, I can provoke certain effects, such as fear, by the fact
that I give you an order; these effects make of discourse a sort of
stimulus that produces certain results; that is the perlocutionary
act. . . . By its nature, it seems, discourse undergoes a process of
exteriorization that moves it from thought to various forms of
locution. (Ch 5, pg 14, ln 16–18: “Du Texte à l’action”)
What I wish to draw from Ricoeur here is that in its transformation

from thought to text, discourse such as that which Du Bois proffers in
“Conservation” is transformed into work or action. Ricoeur’s position on
this point is interesting: not unlike the distanciation Marx theorizes with
regard to the product of man’s labor, Ricoeur argues that there must exist a
certain distance between the individual and the written text. This is because
in the inscribing of discourse there exists a method of stylization by which
thought becomes situated in text. Thus, according to Ricoeur, stylization
exists in a dialectical relation with the occasion of discourse. Stylization
indicates a sort of working of language wherein a writer such as Du Bois
stands analogous to the artisan. He is no longer one who simply speaks: he
is the artisan who “works” language (123). He is, as well, one who interprets
language in order to convey thought in the occasion of discourse. Du Bois,
then, provides the foundation for the hermeneutics of his text in the very
structure of his work.
Does he thereby also provide the foundation for a hermeneutic of
himself ? In other words, in the occasion of discourse as work, does Du
Bois willingly render himself as object, as he is so often appropriated by
his contemporary reader?
It seems that a response to this question requires our consideration of

two points. First, the hermeneutics of Du Bois’s writing and tropology in
“The Conservation of Races,” to include further analysis of the occasion of
discourse, marked by the 1897 convening of the American Negro Academy.
Second, the perlocutionary act constituted by way of ontological metaphor
in Du Bois’s text, which stands to prompt his listener toward the embrace
of certain points of belief, and, beyond this, to certain modes of being and
action, articulated in the text of the essay as well as the “Academy Creed.”
These are, of course, two aspects of the poetics of being that I see at work
throughout the tradition of African American literature, as I have argued
thus far through the examples of Equiano and Harper. I will turn to the
second point regarding the perlocutionary aspects of Du Bois’s metaphorics
in the next section of this chapter.
Along the lines of the first point, the relation of speech (or, parole) to
writing is of some significance. Ricoeur and others have argued that writing
does far more than fix speech into place (From Text to Action 124); more
importantly, writing liberates the text from the author. In something of a
New Critical fashion, Ricoeur insists that the text no longer bears the burden
of intentions placed upon it by its author; textual existence and authorial
psychology (or authorial signification) do not share the same fate. In other
words, the author’s text is displaced from his or her horizon, such that it may
be re-situated and recontextualized in a new, more temporally immediate
environment, namely, that of the reader. There, while it may not be heard
in the author’s own voice, it may indeed be analyzed: it may undergo a
process of hermeneutical interpretation aimed at establishing understanding.
This is the sort of dialogic situation described by Mikhail Bakhtin,
underscored by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and exemplified in Du Bois’s text.9
Ricoeur’s notion of understanding is to a good extent informed by his readings
in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, with whom Du Bois took a graduate course
during his graduate studies at the University of Berlin.10 Dilthey’s concept of
understanding, Ricoeur argues, will not leave us ensnared in Dilthey’s own
romantic notions, nor will it leave us in the trappings of structuralism. Instead,
we will find ourselves afoot in the “monde du texte,” the world of the text.
Ricoeur draws from Dilthey’s often misunderstood notion of befindlichkeit (a
way of understanding or feeling oneself situated in the world) the conclusion
that understanding exists dialectically with being in a specific situation, as the
projection of the most appropriate existential possibility with regard to the
situation in which we find ourselves. Ricoeur’s theory of the text adopts and
adapts Dilthey’s stance. What we are regularly called to do in interpreting
a text is, he points out, to undertake an interpretation of a “proposition de

monde,” a world proposition. That is, we are called to interpret the world we
are capable of inhabiting, with the aim of projecting upon it an appropriate
possibility. This is, in his words, what he calls “the world of the text, the
world proper to this unique text” (From Text to Action 128).
Obviously, such a world may be envisioned with not a little of the
chaos so aptly described by Equiano in his Narrative, and by Harper in
Sketches, even if the aim in both writings is to mitigate such chaos by
imposing upon it the myriad possibilities that emerge by way of one’s vision
and enactment of a critical humanism. Richard Wright in “The Man Who
Lived Underground,” and Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, two texts I discuss
in chapters 7 and 8 of this study, likewise seek to impose upon the world’s
chaos what Ellison calls a “pattern.” As Ellison puts it, and as I shall expound
later, “the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of
the chaos against which that pattern was conceived” (580–581).
I would suggest, then, that the poetics of black being Du Bois
devises in “The Conservation of Races,” the “plan of living” (to borrow
another of Ellison’s phrasings) he describes—Du Bois writes of “planning
our movements, [and] guiding our future development” (“Conservation”
815)—is a plan envisioned against the background of the world’s racist and
nationalist chaos and projected upon a possible world. The “Creed” Du Bois
proposes at the end of “Conservation” is likewise projected against a world
of chaos and with hopes and belief in a better, race-less world to come.
Such is clear in his stated belief that the Negro’s “race identity” should be
maintained only “until this mission” of a critical and lasting contribution
to humanity has been “accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood
has become a practical possibility” (825). Even so, as black being is clarified
and protended a “pure,” absolutist notion of black being is neither advocated
nor dreamed of. Like Equiano and Harper before him, Du Bois’s notion of
black being is one whose “conflict within” (Ellison) must still be negotiated.
Mae Henderson has written in “Speaking in Tongues,” that “black women’s
writing” is distinguished by “the privileging (rather than repressing) of ‘the
other in ourselves’ ”11 Revising and expanding this framework, I read in
Du Bois’s thought a model of African American ontological metaphorics
that addresses a subject of whichever gender othered and “racialized” in
the experience of being. It is this racialization, and its attendant economics
and social strictures, that produces a white world in which black being
is distorted and “dislocuted” (disarticulated, unsaid, and therefore cast as
non-being). The black text and its ontological metaphorics create a space
for a discourse with the “other that is within,” as well as a discourse with
the other Other.

In this way, it seems, the world of text in African American literature
is homologous to the world in which we live. Those texts that interest me
in this study act with the intent of bettering this world even as they render
it mimetically (by way of representation with a difference). And I say this
as I take into account the inability of the text to represent fully that to
which it refers in the world about it. Of course, poetry and fiction present
the greatest examples of writing in which the referent may readily disappear.
Poetry is especially important in this regard, as, in many of its forms, poetic
language works for the embellishment of speech and not for the elucidation
of processes at work in the world outside of the text. However, as I have
argued throughout this study in relation to African American literature, and
specifically in poetry such as Harper’s and in an essay such as Du Bois’s,
with their contestatory metaphorical language, ontological metaphorics in
the African American literary tradition often work not only in service of
their own aesthetics, but also subtly set before the reader and hearer the
particulars of lived conditions, as well as the sensibilities of shared humanity,
and an exhortation to act, ethically and responsibly, in light of that which
one has read and understood.
A Technology of Black Being: “The Conservation of Races”

as the Contested “Mediation by which We Understand Ourselves”
To gain an understanding before the text is, as Ricoeur has put it in more
general terms, a functionary dimension of the notion of text. Beyond
understanding Du Bois’s text in itself, what I wish to call forth from Ricoeur’s
theory is the idea of the text as “the mediation by which we comprehend
ourselves” (129). That is, I wish to propose viewing “Conservation” as the
mediation—a technology—in this particular instance by which Du Bois
intends that African Americans come to understand themselves as a world
historical people with a meaningful future. Indeed, the two notions that
most concern many present-generation readers of “Conservation”—that of
race and nation—are notions that often come to us, as they came to the
interlocutors of Du Bois’s time, through text itself. Thus we, and they, come
to understand the parameters of racialized and national being through the
mediating and historicizing qualities of text or even the absence of text:
we know that certain social and national groups have been situated (by the
hegemon) quite low in the world chain of being because of, to cite one
reason among many, their reliance upon orality rather than literacy. These
groups are considered to be outside of history and thus ahistorical persons

lacking the full qualities of historical being. As I have noted, the process
of understanding promoted by Ricoeur holds at its core the problematic of
alienation: we necessarily operate at a distance from the historical realities
of race and nation, and can only approximate these realities through texts
that represent them to us and thus allow us some access to a historicity
that might otherwise retreat into oblivion. The texts that give us access
to a reality not our own might be either oral or written, but the force
of representation depends upon the textured nature of the narrative, a
weaving usually accomplished through metaphorical innovations capable of
setting past lives, experiences, and beings before us. They serve as dialectical
points of interaction, as depositories of culture, inert but full of possibilities
because they can bring us to a greater sense of ourselves. The text serves
as a technology through which we may understand ourselves; it advances
propositions and reveals potentials.
This point allows us to reach a provisional conclusion as we move to
consider the perlocutionary aspects of “Conservation,” a task I undertake in
the following section: that in “Conservation,” the world of text provides an
opening onto the world of black being of Du Bois’s time by way of reflection
upon and analysis of the condition of a collective people; the world of
text thus aids in collective comprehension. We may then also consider two
additional points: the hermeneutics at work in Du Bois’s philosophy of the
language of race and nation, and the powerful force of textual situatedness
itself. Doing so allows us to reflect upon the philosophical discourses that
gave shape to the metaphorics of race and nation in Du Bois’s time (and
that still permeate our own temporality). It also allows us to account for the
forces of society that frame and impact his discourse. It is from this point
that we may return to “la chose du texte,” to the potentiality and perlocution
of “Conservation.” That is, what is it that the essay reveals, and what did it,
in its own time, call upon its interlocutors to do? Further, what does it, in
the time of the present, call upon us to do?
I have pointed out that what contemporary critics have often done
in their readings of “Conservation” is to effect at least two substitutions.
First, many have allowed or even called upon present-generation readers
of the essay to take the place at once of the interlocutors with whom Du
Bois interacted during the ANA meeting, and the readers who read the
occasional pamphlet issued by the ANA later that year. The argument may
certainly and reasonably be made that Du Bois intended his writing for
posterity; yet the fact remains that he spoke to the contemporary situation
of his audience and readers. Thus there is a process of displacement and

decontextualization that the essay regularly undergoes in many approaches
to it. This we must acknowledge and take into account.
Second and in an analogous fashion, the essay as scholars know it
(from its useful reprint in the 1986 compendium, Writings, to its strangely
truncated form in the 1999 Norton Critical Edition of The Souls of Black Folk)
regularly stands in for the act of locution as well as for Du Bois himself.
As I have mentioned, we often feel that by reading the essay, Du Bois
speaks to us; likewise, we feel ourselves placed in an interpersonal relation
of sorts, whereby we respond to him as he speaks. Through this relation, we
assume that we know Du Bois as an individual, even though our knowledge
of him is necessarily posthumous. It is, therefore, a necessarily imperfect
discursive act, for he cannot respond to us. The case of “Conservation” is
unlike that of “The Talented Tenth,” where public backlash against the
writing was striking, such that Du Bois took up the topic forty-five years
after its initial publication in 1903, and then only to make his point more
stringently and relentlessly. Most readers outside of the academy do not
know “The Conservation of Races,” but they do know “The Talented Tenth”:
it is a discursive metaphor that is often used to mark Du Bois as elitist.
Du Bois, however, never revisited “Conservation.” He never apologized for
or revised his concept of race as stated there, not even in Dusk of Dawn
(1940), where his major concern was to attempt an “autobiography of a race
concept,” and thus to speak of himself in symbolic terms that made plain
the transformative power of race metaphors. In any case, among scholarly
readers, “Conservation” has come to stand in for Du Bois without due
consideration of the occasion of his discourse. In a sense, “The Conservation
of Races” has functioned to “conserve” a certain version of Du Bois himself
for academic posterity. In this way, the essay serves as a peculiar archive
of social and intellectual memory and a repository of reconstituted being,
such that critical tendencies have moved away from analysis of the material
object of the text and its meanings towards a symbolic object that may be
seen as theoretically constructed: Du Bois as symbol. Ironically, Du Bois’s
writing after 1900 encourages such gestures, for, as I discuss elsewhere
more pointedly, he regularly makes of himself a symbol to be construed as
representative of the experience of black people.
To counter such ad hominem tendencies, a structural analysis or close
reading of the essay, where we move paragraph by paragraph through its
sentences, phrases, and words, might allow us to discern categories of
meaning in the text (for example, we may propose categories headed by
such terms as “race” and “nation,” and then chronicle their situated use
in each instance in which they appear). However, it would seem that, in
doing so, we would explain, not interpret, their use. Ricoeur’s distinction
between these critical processes is quite helpful here, and is worth quoting
at length. He writes:
To interpret . . . is to appropriate to ourselves here and now

the intention of the text. In saying this, we are laid within the
enclosure of Diltheyan ‘understanding.’ However, what we have
just said regarding the semantic depths of the text to which
structural analysis returns invites us to understand that the
intention in which the aim of the text is not . . . the presumed
intention of the author, the experience of the writer into which
one may transport oneself, but what the text wills, what it wishes
to say, for he or she who obeys its injunction. What the text wills
is to place us within its meaning, that is to say—according to
another acceptance of the word “meaning”—in the same direction.
If, then, the intention is the intention of the text, and if this
intention is the direction that it opens for thought, the semantic
depths must be understood in a fundamentally dynamic manner.
I will, then, say this: to explain is the disengaged structure, that
is, the internal dependent relations that constitute elements of
the text; to interpret is to take the path of thought opened by
the text, to put oneself en route towards the orientation of the
text. We are invited by this remark to correct our initial concept
of interpretation and to seek, within the subjective operation of
interpretation as an act upon the text, an objective operation
of interpretation that would be the act of the text. (Du Texte à
l’action 174–75, my translation)
Ricoeur’s comments point up a central theoretical problem in our usual

approaches to this text, in that what Du Bois works at in “Conservation”
is the interpretation of social phenomena with the aim of advancing
propositions regarding black historicity and black being. What we, as
critics, often aim for when we discuss this essay is the explanation of his
interpretation at the level of the noun (“race,” “nation”), or at the level of
the ad hominem. We assume we have no need of an interpretation of the
dynamic semantic depths of his discourse. Du Bois’s writing on race and
nation will continue to vex us until we come to see it as a quintessential
interpretation of language, history, and ideology, with all of the inevitable

ambiguities and directions of these modes of thought.
The Interpretation of Black Historicity:

Reading “Conservation” in Context
One cannot, to be sure, demand of whole nations exceptional moral

foresight and heroism; but a certain hard common-sense in facing the
complicated phenomena of political life must be expected in every
progressive people. In some respects, we as a nation seem to lack this; we
have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed
with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer
them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently,
we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than
on solving it. . . . The riddle of the Sphinx may be postponed, it may
be answered evasively now; sometime it must be fully answered. It
behooves the United States, therefore, in the interest of both scientific
truth and of future social reform, carefully to study such chapters of
her history as that of the suppression of the slave-trade. . . .
From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as
men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.
—Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 1896
If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is

going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which
will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of
nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and in
interpretation. If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for
our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving
us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give
up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results
of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic
fact in order to educate the new generation along the way we wish.
—Black Reconstruction, 1935
“The Conservation of Races” is one of a succession of Du Bois’s writings

that begins not only with a recognizable muthos, as I have noted, but also
with a compelling historical imaginary into which we, as readers, are to
delve in order to attain the sort of interpretive understanding Du Bois (as
he makes clear in the above passage from Black Reconstruction) would have
us seek. Du Bois gives us to understand that without such context, our
work of interpreting the information he provides will be hindered. We are,
then, called to extend our discussion of Du Bois’s historical imaginary in
“Conservation” by interpreting his own historical method and philosophy
in “Conservation” in relation to a number of his other pre-1900 writings
before going on to discuss the thought and work of other agents of the time.
Throughout his career, Du Bois regularly availed himself of many
statements on the province of history and the nature of historiography.
He also put his own theories of history into practice in nonfictional and
creative texts alike, and in most all of his works, historical imaginary and
historical prophecy commingle. In what I call Du Bois’s historical imaginary,
that set of metaphors, plots, narratives, and symbols through which Du
Bois re-members a veritable succession of African American epistemes
in the services of presenting the African American—as well as the white
American—reading public with a tool with which to assemble a varying and
fluid African American identity—the past may be recuperated and refigured,
but it is always accounted for, such that it, in often symbolic ways, lends
itself to the oracular. It points toward a viable political and social future.
Du Bois’s political vision was born of the marriage of history and desire,
of the past confronted with the future expectations of the individual as
well as the collective. In history, one finds the allure of origin; yet Du Bois
denied to history the surety of hermeticism. For him, history resonated
with the present, such that, to his mind, the historian was brother to the
sociologist and the philosopher; each must listen for the resonances by which
present conditions variously create themselves, as well as the implications
such resonances hold for the future. In this way, Du Bois’s discourse on
racialized being effects a contemporaneity of the sort theorized by Derrida,
Spillers, and Morrison (see chapter 2), reflecting specifically the injunction
to act that is central to the intention of so many African American texts.
The following historical, political, and philosophical context can
provide a framework for understanding key elements of Du Bois’s poetics,
including his privileging of the discourse of history in “Conservation,” a
privileging that firmly places Du Bois not only within a genealogy of African
American ontological metaphorics, but at its center. It is with “Conservation”
and Souls that one sees this metaphorics in the midst of its “secular turn,”
even as it retains traces of the anagogic that is so central to the writings
of Equiano and Harper and that will re-emerge in Souls. I take Du Bois
to insist throughout his oeuvre, and pointedly in early writings that reflect
his philosophy of history, that history and historiography serve symbolic

functions in Western society, such that they are linked through narrative to
metaphor and black being.
Many of Du Bois’s early writings, specifically “The Problem of
Amusement” (1897), “The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia” (1898), “The
Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (1899), and The Philadelphia
Negro (1899), open with a historical narrative that, in some cases, begins in
the eighteenth century with a pointed discussion of the particular history
of slavery.12 This historical imaginary is significant because it points to Du
Bois’s acute interest in the dawning of modernity and in the rise of African
American literature and historiography through the slaves’ oral poetry in
the Spirituals and the slaves’ narratives, with their varying plots and turns,
insistence upon the abolition of slavery, and inestimable lens into the nature
of slave being as an early form of African American historiography.
For example, in one of his less-discussed but quite significant essays,
“The Study of the Negro Problems” (1898), Du Bois points out that the
final decade of the nineteenth century has been fertile for the observation
of sociological phenomena resulting from the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
He then provides a general definition of a “social problem”: it is “the failure
of an organized social group to realize its group ideals, through the inability
to adapt a certain desired line of action to given conditions of life. . . . Thus
a social problem is ever a relation between conditions and actions” (71).
The Negro problem in particular, he writes, is a “plexus of social problems,”
subject to the vicissitudes and antinomies of history. Thus, he concludes, the
points at which [Negroes] fail to be incorporated into this group

life constitute the particular Negro problems which can be divided
into two distinct but correlated parts, depending upon two facts:
First—Negroes do not share the full national life because as a
mass they have not reached a sufficiently high grade of culture.
Secondly—they do not share the full national life because there
has always existed in America a conviction—varying in intensity
but always widespread—that people of Negro blood should not
be admitted into the group life of the nation no matter what
their condition might be. (72–73)
In this essay, as in “Conservation,” Du Bois’s use of the terms “race”

and “nation” demands close attention, and should be compared to his usage
of these terms in “The Present Outlook for the Darker Races of Mankind”
(1899). Race appears to be subservient to nation, though in “Conservation”

(and he repeats this necessity in “The Study of the Negro Problems”), he
argues that racial belonging must be privileged above national belonging
with the goal of solving such problems through “race organization for
common ends in economic or intellectual lines” (73). The problems often
consist in the relation between the “modern state” (which is, at times for Du
Bois, interchangeable with his use of “nation,” but which undoubtedly refers
to the modern nation-state), and the races that have historically inhabited
that state. In the case of a diverse nation-state such as the United States,
the population consists of various racial groups that are, for all practical
purposes in Du Bois’s time, largely separated/segregated from one another.
Thus the racial groups, because of limited intergroup contact, may be referred
to as nations themselves, even as they reside in a common modern state. As
nationalist logic turns, race groups may be looked upon as national groups
that may or may not enjoy the privileges and protections of a modern state.
In this respect, “Present Outlook” is of a piece with “Conservation”:
each employs the terms “race” and “nation” symbolically, such that the words
become mediating social tropes that codify a certain historical imaginary and
put into play a set of meanings approximating a holistic system through
which one comes to “belong” to a group—a national group, a racial group,
or both at once. What Du Bois appears to stress in his writing is that these
tropes cannot be defined or even discussed independently of one another;
they intersignify to such a great extent in the service of ostensibly stable
institutional systems that function to exclude African Americans from the
life of the country that they must be addressed with a great deal of agility,
showing with certainty the interconnectedness of their meaning effects. As
Du Bois employs them in his writings, tropological systems of race and nation
go beyond language in providing an interpretive context for particular notions
of belonging. They establish a narrative medium—an historical imaginary—
through which collectives as well as individuals within a social group may
look in search of one of the greatest benefits literature, broadly defined in a
new historicist sense, can grant: the expression of one’s very humanity.
When reading and interpreting “Conservation,” then, we must speak
of symbolic conventions of reading and writing, into which are inscribed a
certain philosophy of history and being. Du Bois recounts history in each of
his early writings in order to draw upon or identify its patterns and narrative
codes that reflect the conditions of existence under which the African
American people strive. He presents to his readers historical narratives that
can both reflect and inform contemporary perceptions of social problems and
that can, further, give shape to actions in response to these problems. What
we must flesh out, then, is how we might draw upon Du Bois’s philosophy
of history, which I have elaborated through his historical imaginary, for
the identification of patterns of metaphorical language, repeated imagery,
narrativized plots, and the evaluation of historical contexts that have shaped
perceptions of the idea of racialized being. Du Bois’s construction of an
historical imaginary of race is an evaluative framework, one that is logically
prior to the choice he presents regarding racial identity and global, rather
than national, belonging. Attention to these points alive in Du Bois’s
thought may lend a certain legibility and legitimation to the social action
he suggests in response to the idea of race, and that is that, as he states
in the “Academy Creed,” black racial identity should be maintained only
until the problem of racial and national belonging is resolved through a
contribution to world culture and civilization. What the reader gains from
Du Bois’s historical imaginary is, then, the ephemerality of race as well as
the sanction of committed social action, which he uses as a foundation for an
inscription (for the future as well as the present) of a sense of subjectivity or
being. Social acts and the act of writing may be seen, then, as the mediated
outcome or product of a specific episteme and its symbolic codes.
Let us push this analysis of Du Bois’s symbolic or mediated action
further through an examination of the historical context out of which he
wrote. If the intersignification of the symbolic codes in “Conservation”
persist in compelling us, it is because the essay is a testament of history’s
texture of action. “Conservation” translates this history into cultural text.
Du Bois’s statements on the role of history are many and vital. I have
chosen two, given at the beginning of this section, which I will use as a guide
to what I see as essential to understanding the historical imaginary of Du
Bois’s time. The seeming paradox of history and metaphor, though it may
induce contestations that the two are unlikely related, can nonetheless tease
us into thought with respect to “Conservation.” What exists in Du Bois’s
historical imaginary that impinges upon both the occasion of his discourse
and our reading of the text? Further, what serves, in our own horizon of
reading, to draw us repeatedly to this essay?
An exposition of the ideas that mark the historical period in which
“Conservation” was written may seem a bit too obvious as we work to
respond to these questions. We know of the legends of the 1890s, of
Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells, above all, of Frederick Douglass
and Alexander Crummell, for whom Du Bois held great admiration. Yet
even those who find nothing striking in these reflections on the times may
consider these figures and the events that make them relevant to a greater
understanding of “The Conservation of Races.” My brief examination of
the times derives from Du Bois’s conclusion in “Propaganda of History”

(1935) that history functions symbolically in society, such that it is linked
to ideology. In other words, as he makes clear in “Conservation,” attention
to the history of an idea (such as race) can clarify the deeper meanings
cloaked in these orders of thought. Historiography is largely concerned
with processes of identity, identification, and belonging, three elements of
metaphor itself. Metaphor is a process of naming, of identifying objects,
persons, and events through semantic substitutions, and thus it is a process
through which transpositions across orders of meaning take place. It is,
however, also important to bear consistently in mind that the meaning
of metaphor is not static, as a number of metaphor’s critics have alleged,
but dynamic and constantly in movement, as the etymology of metaphor,
from the Greek for “transfer,” makes clear. Noting this point takes us back
round to the guiding metaphor of “Conservation,” that race is “an ingenious
invention for Progress,” which, in turn, depends upon historiography for
documentation as such. To elaborate this point, let us look back to the years
that immediately precede the publication of Du Bois’s essay.
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 marks a moment of
great import in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and thus it may
serve as an apt historical moment in which to note an early context for
“Conservation.” The Exposition took place in Chicago a scant twenty-eight
years after the close of the Civil War, nine years after European interests
carved up Africa to satisfy their hunger for colonial power at the Berlin
Conference of 1884, and four years before the founding of the American
Negro Academy. At the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, as the Exposition
is also known, Du Bois was in Berlin undertaking graduate studies abroad,
yet he took note of its import. The architectural layout of the fair spoke
its message to the world. The central attraction was the White City. True
to its name, it comprised white buildings, which occupied the central area
of the fairgrounds. It was, by design, the domain of upper-class white
men, who used the venue to display wealth, military arms, and advanced
technology. At the far end of the fairgrounds, the Midway Plaisance provided
space for the exhibition of continental Africans and other non-European
peoples (!), as well as German and Swiss villages. Separating the Midway
from the White City was the Women’s Building, which not only displayed
artifacts documenting the progress white women had made in literature,
art, and a number of other fields, but also boasted, after concerted appeals
for space by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and other African American
leaders, the largest, though unofficial, exhibit mounted by African American
men and women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper attended the 1893 Fair,
where she gave a speech entitled “Woman’s Political Future”13 before the
World’s Congress of Representative Women, a meeting held in conjunction
with the Columbian Exposition. Christianity, temperance, family, and human
rights are all themes that Harper forcefully exerts in this essay, which may
be one of her finest.
Considering Harper’s piece as an aspect of the historical context in
which the “Conservation of Races” arose allows us to see how Harper’s
poetics as exemplified in her verse is connected to her political activism.
Further, it allows us to trace a bridge of thought between Harper and
Du Bois, who might otherwise appear to be less than political and social
contemporaries. The Columbian Exposition was intended by American
industrialists such as the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to demonstrate
America’s progress and prowess since the Civil War. Carnegie considered
world’s fairs to be bloodless fields of international striving upon which
each nation contended for artistic, scientific, and technological supremacy.14
The fairs were also meant to be material displays of white men’s social
and political power. It is true that white women were allowed a building
dedicated to the display of their work and advancement. Significantly, the
Women’s Building was designed by a woman architect, Sophia Hayden.
Yet it has often been remarked that the very layout of the fairgrounds was
meant to underscore the supremacy of white men in all realms of life: the
Women’s Building was situated at the edge of what was called the White
City, and could be found near the entrance to the Midway Plaisance.
Home to displays of persons of color from around the world, largely
those of colonized countries, the Midway also provided space for the
amusement of visitors to the fair. While the White City displayed the
height of technological knowledge and military might, the Midway granted
one the leisure of observing that which was considered uncivilized. The
linear arrangement of the fairgrounds—from the White City of men, to
the Women’s Building (which engirded and perhaps in some eyes feminized
the entire Negro American exhibit) on the margins of the City, to the
flamboyance of the Midway (where the people of color were themselves
on display in makeshift villages and the like)—was yet another way of
announcing the ideal order of things in America.
Harper begins her essay by subverting the assumption that lay at the
center of the fair’s organization: the dominant conviction that all serious
cultural advancement was white and male. Because of their ability to
contribute morally and spiritually to the advancement of the nation, women,
she argues, remain central to not only American, but also global society.
“[M]ind is more than matter,” Harper insists, and because “the highest
ideal” is “always the true real,” woman, the possessor of true sentiment and
knowledge, Harper seems to say, surpasses man in her intellectual purity. As
a consequence, woman has the opportunity to lead the world to “grander
discoveries” than those supposedly made by Christopher Columbus (436).
Of course, Harper’s rhetorical posturing here is on point, as the World’s
Fair that year was held in honor of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. (A
dubious claim to discovery, as Native Americans had erected a civilization
that was already thriving upon Columbus’s arrival.) She insists that America
was standing “on the threshold of woman’s era” (“Woman’s Political Future”
437), an era in which the cultural work of women would open a whole
new world of cultural possibilities. It was up to women to build a stronger
national character, not only through the rearing and educating of children
(this is also made clear in Harper’s poetry, as we have seen through her
emphases on motherhood), but also through direct participation in the social
sphere. As she asserts in the Aunt Chloe poems, Harper saw voting as
supremely important, and she also called upon women to enter the work
force and claim “at least some of the wealth monopolized by her stronger
brother” (437). As her own life evidenced, Harper saw woman’s future as
flourishing beyond the sphere of the domestic. Indeed, she actively advocated
the participation of women in political as well as economic realms, and
called upon them to temper the avarice and immorality of some male leaders
with what she referred to as the distinctive feminine virtues of temperance,
Christianity, and universal human rights.
Harper’s efforts to articulate an African American and female
positionality was echoed in the work of Frederick Douglass and Ida B.
Wells, who had fought to ensure exhibition space for the descendants of
the slaves. In spite of Douglass’s and Wells’s efforts to ensure that African
Americans would have space in which to represent themselves at the fair, the
exposition’s white male American organizers had well ensured their power
and authority to define a multitude of identities upon an international stage.
They were intent upon limiting as best they could the voices of African
Americans, proposing “Colored American’s Day,” August 25, 1893, as a paltry
offering that was rejected by many leaders of the black community. Wells
and Douglass, who was himself given greater visibility at the fair because
of his position as representative of Haiti, were a formidable but uneasy pair
united in combating the heavy-handed exclusions of the organizers. They
went to great lengths to publish and distribute a pamphlet of well-informed
critical essays, entitled “The Reason Why the Colored American is not in
the Columbian Exposition.”15 Douglass’s moralistic chiding of American
exclusionary practices in his introduction to the pamphlet was sustained by
Wells’ more forceful rendering of statistics that illustrated the persistence of

the awful American practice of lynching. Wells drew a crucial and heretofore
unspoken analogy between the political terrorism represented by lynching
and economic oppression, and repressive codes of sexuality and morality.
Douglass’s death in 1895 left African Americans worried about who
would succeed him in leadership. Wells had positioned herself admirably
with her fiery editorials, forceful speeches, and international anti-lynching
campaign, but she was outmaneuvered by the conciliatory message of
Booker T. Washington, whose 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address secured
his popularity among both Northern and Southern whites, and made his
ascendancy inevitable. The fact that she was a woman undoubtedly was an
issue; however, Wells continued to play a vital role in African American
political life through her work in founding the National Association of
Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, the same year of Plessy v. Ferguson,
which upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” public facilities
for blacks. Segregation manifestly had the support of the highest court in
the nation. As United States citizens struggling for equal rights, African
Americans found themselves in a perilous political position, grappling with
the problem of national belonging in 1890s America at the same time that
they worked to define themselves as a world-historical people demonstrating
proof of their progress on the international stage of the World’s Columbian
Exposition.
Importantly, their actions in 1893 challenged the philosophy of world
history advanced by the prominent German thinker, Georg W. F. Hegel, who
had, in 1820 and again in 1830, delivered the influential set of lectures that
would comprise his Philosophy of History.16 Hegel commences his Philosophy
by dismissing both North America (where his focus rested on the former
colonies of the United States, deprecating Canada and Mexico as weak
states that elicited no fear from the “North American Federation”) as well
as Africa, and for two different reasons. America is, Hegel writes, “the land
of the future” (Philosophy of History 86): while it manifests a “prosperous
state of things; an increase in industry and population civil order and firm
freedom” (sic, 83–84), it is simply “a land of desire for all those who are
weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe” (86). As a “Land of
the Future,” Hegel continues, America “has no interest for us here, for, as
regards History, our concern must be with that which has been and that
which is. In regard to Philosophy, on the other hand, we have to do with
that which (strictly speaking) is neither past nor future, but with that which
is, which has an eternal existence—with Reason; and this is quite sufficient
to occupy us” (87).
While America is deemed by Hegel to be the land of the future—

unactualized, and thus irrationally positioned outside of his philosophy of
history—Africa was to suffer a different fate in Hegel’s analysis. Though
its pastness suited well Hegel’s requirements for History, Africa had, to his
mind, remained “shut up” from the “rest of the World” (91). It lay “beyond
the day of self-conscious history,” “enveloped in the dark mantle of Night”
due not only to its “tropical nature,” but also its “geographical condition” (91).
It thus displayed “no movement or development,” no sense of present self-
awareness and thus no Reason, and so Hegel concluded quickly that it had
“no historical part in the World”: “What we properly understand by Africa,
is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of
mere nature, which had to be presented here as only on the threshold of
the World’s History” (99).
Hegel’s portrayal of Africa as “unhistorical,” as a collective “undeveloped
spirit” meant that, to his mind, Africa and Africans lacked the insight and
self-reflexivity that constitute what Enlightenment- and Romantic-era
philosophers referred to as self-consciousness, or self-conscious being: “In
Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not
yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for
example, God, or Law—in which he realizes his own being. This distinction
between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being,
the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet
attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher
than his individual self, is entirely wanting” (93). The African Spirit remained
unrealized, Hegel argues, because in lieu of an organized religion, Africans
practiced “sorcery” and superstition. And since they recognized no higher or
supreme being, Hegel contends, they consequently demeaned themselves as
degraded beings who indulge in a “perfect contempt for humanity.” So intense
is their degradation of human life, Hegel insists, that they practice tyranny
and cannibalism with impunity, and they practice slavery in such a way as
to outstrip even the European colonies in their viciousness. Hegel painted a
dire, bloody, and highly suspect portrait of African brutality. He wrote, for
example, that heads of African states “composed [solely] of women” took
“captives in war” as husbands, casting away male children or pounding their
own children with mortars, and using their blood to “besmear” and thus
mystically empower themselves (italics in original, 97).
Hegel’s overview of Africa’s past went to great extents to rationalize
leaving Africa outside of his philosophy of history. He in fact argued that
because of the African’s natural disdain for humanity, exemplified in their
supposed blood-thirsty cruelty, Africans likewise devalued freedom, since
freedom is “the essence of humanity” (99). Slavery thus came naturally

to the African; bondage would, Hegel contended somewhat paradoxically,
beneficially provide Africans with “a phase of advance from the merely
isolated sensual existence—a phase of education—a mode of becoming
participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it” (99).
Slavery, in other words, would allow Africans to advance toward European
notions of being and self-conscious existence. Thus the abolition of slavery,
Hegel argued, should be only gradual, a method that “is therefore wiser and
more equitable than its sudden removal” (99).17
The Exposition’s organizers addressed America’s abolition of slavery—
which had not come gradually, as Hegel counseled, but, through the
cataclysm of Civil War—immediately yet obliquely. By denying African
Americans space in the “white city” to document and exhibit their own
history and progress, and by thus forcing them into a small, inadequate space
provided by the Fair’s Women’s Committee, who were themselves forcibly
limited in their participation in the Fair’s organization, the white men at the
Fair’s helm tightly controlled representations of their version of America’s
redemption story. The Fair presented a concise, white masculinist narrative
of how ably the young nation-state had rebounded from the desolation of
its Civil War, only twenty-eight years earlier. America had managed not only
the abolition of slavery, a major component of the American economy, but
had also worked assiduously to emerge from the deep economic depression
into which the South had subsequently fallen.
America had, in the language of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, established
itself as a political constituent of some importance in its present historical
moment. The organizers highlighted the postbellum ideals of American
nationalism and imperialism that had begun with the Mexican American
War of 1847–1848 (and which would ultimately reach their nineteenth-
century apotheosis in 1898 with the advent of the Spanish-American War,
liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and granting America Guam, Puerto
Rico, and the Philippines as territories). Late nineteenth-century American
imperialism took the place of its official slave economy, which was in turn
transformed into peonage, black codes, and Jim Crow laws. During this
the Gilded Age, Manifest Destiny seemed indeed to be America’s Destiny;
immigration reached its peak as industrialization took root; the black codes
that were the legacy of the Civil War were enforced to keep blacks “in their
place” in the economic and social scheme of things; and Jim Crow rode high.
The decade during which Du Bois wrote “The Conservation of
Races” was thus not exempt from the racist Hegelian historicism that had
infected Western thought. It was a time of great social ferment for African
Americans as well as whites. Du Bois’s brand of activism was not the only
sort to take hold of the black social and cultural imagination. Black theater
emerged during this period, and figures such as Will Marion Cook, the
Johnson Brothers (Rosamond and James Weldon) and their collaborator
Bob Cole, and Williams and Walker were popular performers. The coon
song and ragtime were all the rage. Scott Joplin, whose “Maple Leaf Rag”
was an instant hit in 1899, came into prominence, as did Ernest Hogan, the
African American vaudevillian who in 1896 had written “All Coons Look
Alike to Me,” a minstrel song used in white shows. Charles Chesnutt and
Paul Laurence Dunbar were major literary figures of the day, and Dunbar
himself wrote lyrics for minstrel songs, co-authoring the one-act musical
play, Clorindy, Or The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) with Hogan. Antonín
Dvorak came to America from his native Bohemia in late 1892 to serve as
director of the newly-founded National Conservatory of Music in New York
City, where he began to sketch out his Symphony in E Minor, popularly
known as the “New World Symphony.” Dvorak counted several African
American composers among his students, including Will Marion Cook, and
would later alternately both uphold Negro folk music as the future of an
American school of composition, and flatly deny that he himself had been
influenced by the Negro themes that were quite evident in his own work.
What is more, the 1890s in both America and Europe witnessed the
rise of anarchy. Bombs, assassinations of major public figures (American
President William McKinley would be murdered by an anarchist at the turn
of the century at yet another fair, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in
Buffalo, NY), and political tracts calling for the overthrow of all government
abounded. Labor organizing, widespread socialism (one of the most popular
novels in the United States in the 1880s—to which Du Bois would often
refer—was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), a
utopian nativist novel that advocated socialism and sold over one million
copies), and progressivism became watch phrases as many were talking about
reform. But in spite of widespread attention to social reform and progressive
ideals and, indeed, despite the broad popularity of African American cultural
forms such as those mentioned above, pseudoscientific doctrines of black
inferiority continued to abound in the United States and Europe much as
they had during the late eighteenth century, and they played a significant
role in the confusing mix of progressive and regressive ideologies.
The inaugural gathering of the American Negro Academy was intended
especially to counter regressive social discourses of the 1890s, but also to
undergird and encourage the significant social and cultural advances African
Americans had made since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by
Lincoln in 1863. The orientation of the ANA, which Booker T. Washington

had been invited to join, but whose membership he had declined, flew in
the face of the Tuskegee principal’s conservative dictates, and was indeed
aimed at challenging Washington’s materialist and complicitous solution for
navigating the confusing times of the 1890s. Instead of calling for a sentiment
of concession and accommodation among blacks, as Washington had done
in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, Du Bois’s group demanded that
blacks not be damned to continue their quest for freedom at the bottom
rung of the social ladder, but that they instead be granted opportunities
based on their ability and interests. Du Bois’s paper opened the Academy
meeting, but first I will turn briefly to Alexander Crummell’s speech, which
followed Du Bois’s lecture on the meeting’s program. It will provide us with
further understanding of the ideological context that informed the thrust of
the Academy’s mission, as well as Du Bois’s plain interest in guiding and
shaping this mission.
After being duly elected founding president of the ANA (Du Bois
was voted secretary), Alexander Crummell, an Episcopalian of some note
who had published, among other works, a collection of sermons and essays
entitled The Future of Africa in 1862 while on residency in Liberia, and the
book Africa and America (1891), dealing with the condition of blacks in post-
Reconstruction America, proceeded with a lecture entitled “Civilization, the
Primal Need of the Race.” Described as a manifesto of high culture by
David Levering Lewis (1993, 170), Crummell’s oration emphasized topics
he treated at length in Africa and America, including the need for higher
learning among Negroes, and for the study and production of literature,
art, and philosophy, among other humanistic endeavors. He argued that
the “special race problem of the Negro” in America was his “civilization”
(1969, 3). Crummell felt that blacks in America were destined to attain a
certain “place,” or, that blacks were destined to attain a certain historicity,
and that this place and historical being could not be reached “until we
attain the role of civilization” (4). “To make men you need civilization; and
what I mean by civilization is the action of exalted forces, both of God
and man. For manhood is the most majestic thing in God’s creation; and
hence the demand for the very highest art in the shaping and moulding of
human souls” (4). The “master-need” of the race was neither Washingtonian
materialism nor a predisposition toward “blood and lineage as the root
(source) of power and progress,” Crummell argued; “the leader, the creative
and organizing mind, is the master-need in all the societies of man” (4,
6). Crummell, in other words, was arguing not simply for self-conscious
black being, but pointedly for self-conscious black manhood, a masculine-
gendered self-reflexivity that would allow for the attainment of the sort of
world historical being of which Hegel had declared all Africans incapable.
The emphasis on manhood, civilization, and historicity, and the
de-emphasizing of “blood and lineage” as sources of “power and progress”
preached by the elder scholar deserve further comment, for both are concepts
that Du Bois revisits in “The Conservation of Races” and throughout the
essays that comprise The Souls of Black Folk. Crummell defines civilization
as “the action of exalted forces,” very much akin to the higher Being Hegel
deemed necessary for a philosophy of history, but the influence of racist
pseudoscience and the doctrines of nationalism that abounded during the
era in which he wrote added certain other connotations to the word. To
be civilized was to be a man worthy of human rights, citizenship, and
enfranchisement, and thus, as a construct, civilization held far-ranging
connotations regarding race and sex. The ideal citizen was, of course, white,
male, propertied, and monied. White manhood tended to define itself in
relation to white womanhood—“true” womanhood—which demanded that
a woman be pious, submissive, domestic, and chaste. Black male concepts
of manhood in the nineteenth century operated in a somewhat, though not
wholly, analogous fashion. Indeed, nineteenth-century black nationalism, as
it was articulated by a number of prominent black men, depended heavily
upon notions of ideal black manhood, and this manhood was, to a significant
extent, modeled after an anxious white patriarchy, which demanded the
subjugation of women in order to propagate itself. Crummell’s essay “The
Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and Her Needs” (1883/1992)
provides evidence of this stance. Harper, of course, openly dissented from
this perspective, yet a good number of prominent African American women,
Anna Julia Cooper among them, did not disagree with Crummell’s paternal
and patriarchal conclusions.
The white man, however, defined himself not in relation to white
womanhood alone, but also in opposition to the sort of “man” he was
not, specifically “the Negro” or “the Indian.” The journalist Ray Stannard
Baker, for example, in his essay “What is Lynching? A Study of Mob
Justice, South and North” (1905), rendered a dubious argument against
this practice by pointing out that in lynching blacks, the white man would
become as savage as Negroes. What he seemed also to fear was that whites
in Europe would look at American practices of lynching—savagery in a
country that Hegel had judged unworthy of a philosophy of history just
as the African continent ironically was—and deem them cause enough to
withhold from America full membership among the community of nations.
Even so, black men’s desire to be viewed as vital components of the national
body politic entailed their almost wholesale acceptance of Euro-American
ideals of civilization. Furthermore, the idea of civilization extended itself

to the domination of colonialism—the mission civilatrice of the French and
the varying concepts of Manifest Destiny practiced by the Americans and
the English, ideologies adopted by both Alexander Crummell and Edward
Wilmot Blyden in their writings on Africa. Because the black masses as
well as white women were generally considered to be less than civilized
by their elite, both groups were to be dominated by those classes of white
men who were more “evolved”; we see this clearly in the history of the
1893 Columbian Exposition. And while Social Darwinism itself did not
initially arise as a measure through which African Americans and women
were purposefully and specifically oppressed, racial theories of civilization
came nonetheless into practice under its aegis. With these many events
of the nineteenth-century’s final decade in mind, let us again turn to the
hermeneutics of “The Conservation of Races.”
“Conservation” and the Hermeneutics of Race
The civilizationist overtones in “The Conservation of Races” are somewhat

consistent with Alexander Crummell’s philosophy, yet Du Bois is quite
clear about the shortcomings of white civilizationism, and he articulates
this through extended irony. Among the earliest of his serious ruminations
on the peculiar situation of the black man in America, Du Bois begins his
speech before Crummell and the ANA, as we have noted, by ostensibly
building a case against the idea popular among the black elite that the notion
of race should be set aside in favor of achieving universal brotherhood. The
American Negro, he writes, has been
led to deprecate and minimize race distinctions, to believe

intensely that out of one blood God created all nations, and to
speak of human brotherhood as though it were the possibility
of an already dawning tomorrow. Nevertheless, in our calmer
moments we must acknowledge that human beings are divided
into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of
the world’s races have met, and the resulting problem as to the
future relations of these types is not only of intense and living
interest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind. (815)
Du Bois’s stated aim in the early portion of the essay is to encourage

Crummell and other African American civic and academic leaders who
were present—Kelly Miller, Archibald Grimké, and others to view the race
“problem”—“the problem as to the future relation of these types” (815)—as

the decisive factor that renders their present moment in history epochal
and distinctive. In this reframing of the so-called Negro Problem, which,
as we recall, Du Bois deems a plexus of social problems, he calls upon
the members of the ANA to reconceptualize their understanding of race
and to place the idea of race at a greater primacy than that of nation. The
American Negro’s zeal in minimizing the importance of race is naïve, Du
Bois warns. History has been built on the race ideal, he argues, and black
Americans, no less than members of other races, must come to terms with
the importance of race and its function in the political and social machinery
that undergirds national law and governs the interchange among nation-
states. In his attempt to shed light on the meaning of race as a concept,
we should recall that in his critical ontology of race Du Bois traces what
he calls “the question of race in human philosophy,” and thus he traces the
force of a concept that comes to demarcate “our guiding lines and boundaries
in the practical difficulties of every day” (815). Instead of emphasizing the
maxim that “out of one blood God created all nations” and the already
accepted universality of “human brotherhood” (this is the sort of humanism
Du Bois’s discourse in “Conservation” ultimately embraces), he first calls
upon African Americans to recognize “the hard limits of natural law” (815),
implicit within which are the limits of race. Within this frame of reference,
which is superficially essentialist but manifestly ironic, Du Bois determines
to interrogate “the real meaning of Race” (815), and its significance for the
Negro people.
And what is this “real” meaning? A good deal of the difficulty scholars
have generally encountered in untangling Du Bois’s ideas on race lies not
only in the varied accounts of the meaning and history of race as an
idea (proffered, for example, by historians and scientists such as Thomas
Gossett, Joel Williamson, William Stanton, Winthrop Jordan, and Stephen
Jay Gould) and the place of this idea in Du Bois’s thought (as analyzed
by philosophers such as K. Anthony Appiah, Lucius Outlaw, and Robert
Gooding-Williams). The difficulty is also evident in the inability of scholars
of nationalism and race studies to come together on a definitive idea of
the nation and to agree upon just what criteria grant groups of people the
right to nationhood. Du Bois draws upon the exigencies of racialist and
nationalist discourses as he limns the meaning of race in America, and the
collusion of these two social, political, and economic forces demanded that
he bring to bear upon philosophies of being the meaning of blackness in
the modern world. This “strange meaning of being black” is, of course, Du
Bois’s central theme in The Souls of Black Folk, and this is one of the ways in
which “Conservation” serves to prepare the way for Souls. Du Bois’s critical
ontology of the meaning of race in “Conservation” lays the foundations for

and facilitates the concept metaphors of the color-line, the veil, and double
consciousness that would lend depth and meaning to his later work on
black being.
Grasping the implications for black being in “Conservation” thus
requires further contextualization of Du Bois’s ideas regarding black
nationalism, his understanding of what it meant to belong to a national
community, as well as the implications of being excluded from such
membership on the basis of racial identity and/or color. We may accomplish
this through a brief discussion of the wide-ranging discourses on nationalism.
In Nationalism, first published in 1960, Elie Kedourie describes the movement
as one of many ideological currents that responded to or reacted against the
impersonal bureaucracy that governed groups of people (xv). Hans Kohn
writes in Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (1965) that “Nationalities
are the products of the living forces of history, and therefore fluctuating
and never rigid. They are groups of the utmost complexity, and defy exact
definition” (9). In The God of Modernity (1994), Josep Llobera stresses that
nationalism does not encompass the same realities when applied globally.
He limits the scope of his text to Western Europe, “the birthplace and
lieu classique of nationalism” (ix–x). Paul James’ Nation Formation (1996),
focuses on what he calls the “structural subjectivities” that provide the
foundation for nation building: “the body, space, and time. [. . .] The body
relates to the nationalist emphasis upon organic metaphors such as the ‘blood
of the people’; space is relative to the emphasis on territoriality; and time
is important to the cultural themes of historicity, tradition and primordial
roots” (xiv). Paul Gilbert, in The Philosophy of Nationalism (1998), argues that
nationalism may be thought of as the overt expression of the political beliefs
on which the nation is founded. Conversely, Benedict Anderson, author of
Imagined Communities (1991), maintains that nationalism must be understood
as emerging not out of political ideologies, but out of the large cultural systems
that preceded it, namely religious community and the dynastic realm (12).
For Anderson as for many other scholars, the eighteenth century marks “not
only the dawn and the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of
thought” (11). He defines the nation-state as “an imagined community—and
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Anderson’s text has
taught us to understand nation-states as metaphorical constructions that are
not ornamentations of language, but mimic the “hard limits of natural law”
Du Bois underscores at the outset of his essay.
Like those of race, the metaphorics and mimesis that represent
the “limits” of the nation-state through figurative language call us to see
nationalism as both myth and symbolism, as an instrument that is both
expressive of and crucial to the birth of modernity and modernist thought.

The imprecision with which the concept is often discussed may contribute
to a lack of understanding of Du Bois’s usage of “race” in relation to “nation”
in “The Conservation of Races.” Within nationalist terminology there exist
fine shades of meaning that are important to a fuller understanding of
the concept of nationhood, yet none of these is hard and fast, in spite
of nationalism’s attempts to erect such limits. While the terms “nation,”
“state,” and “nation-state” are often used interchangeably, there are subtle
variations of which one must be aware and which may aid us in grasping
Du Bois’s intent when speaking of the invention of race and of an emerging
black nation. A “nation” is usually characterized by its relatively large size
and independent status, and may be thought of as a community of people
composed of one or more nationalities or ethnicities. In this concept of the
nation, pluralism is expected and is inherent to the body politic; common
origin is not underscored in the classic idea of the nation, but emphasis
is placed on the ability of the body politic, comprising peoples of varying
nationalities, from which one might infer disparate ethnic and/or historic
origins, to govern itself. A “state” may be defined as a politically organized
body of people usually occupying a definite territory, especially one that is
sovereign. Common origins or ethnicities are not germane to the definition
of the state; rather, greater emphasis is placed on the occupation of a specific,
autonomous geographical territory with recognized spatial boundaries.
The concept of the “nation-state” stands apart from these definitions. The
nation-state is that form of political organization under which a relatively
homogeneous and theoretically historical people inhabits a sovereign state,
especially a state containing one as opposed to several nationalities. The
concept of the nation-state generally rules out notions of both pluralism and
ethnicity. It demands the myth of a monolithic national culture, common
origins, and homogeneity, promulgated through such metaphors as “the
body politic” and “the blood of the people.” In the West, the ideology of
nationalism usually operates upon the postulates of the nation-state.
As Du Bois works at excavating the “meaning” of race in American
and world history from this plethora of theories, we should recognize the
emphasis he places on the power of language in general, and the metaphorics
of the word “race” in particular, to do the work of politics, culture, and
representation in such social structures as the nation-state. Whenever
language does the work of culture, language becomes, as Julia Kristeva has
noted, metaphoric.18 It functions according to the laws of discursive logic
in which truth is not necessarily that which is true, but that which is given
the appearance and assurance of being true. As with his hermeneutics of the
“meaning of being black” in Souls, in searching for “the real meaning of Race
in “Conservation,” Du Bois recognizes this metaphorical discursive logic
and seeks, not only through the political organizing of such an institution
as the American Negro Academy but also through writing—a discursive,
perlocutionary and even illocutionary act (as I discuss above)—and by
deconstructing racial and nationalist metaphors as well as the history of
signification these metaphors are capable of evoking, to counter it. At the
center of the question of race in America is the question of who belongs
and who does not; who possesses the criteria that grant one “Americanness.”
When we speak of the relation of being and metaphor, we speak of an
appurtenance to specific categories, and especially to categories of meaning,
which are regularly transposed and transgressed in metaphorical operations.
When it comes to metaphors of racialized being especially, there is, as Stuart
Hall (1997) points out, no safety in the terminology of race, of difference,
of nationalism.
Kristeva’s conclusion regarding the metaphoricity of language as it is
called upon to do the work of culture is manifested in the way Du Bois’s
discourse enacts a process of identification, whereby the signifier “black,” or
more specifically, the “Negro race,” provides the basis for a political agenda
intended to battle racist white nationalism. And nationalist ideology, as
both an expression and consequence of modernity, is central to Du Bois’s
understanding of the evolution of racialist thought. This subject consistently
reappears in his discourse and provides the foundation for his “unveiling”
project in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois explores the meaning of race from
a point of view that is both historical and contemporary to his time. In
fact, Du Bois speaks of the “invention” of race in much the same way that
Benedict Anderson speaks of the “invention” of the nation. Anderson writes
that “nationness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life
of our time,” and argues in favor of viewing nationalism as a cultural artifact:
“[T]he creation of these artefacts [sic] towards the end of the eighteenth
century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete
historical forces” (4). Du Bois’s account of the development of the races into
what he calls their current “morphological” states reflects these “crossings,”
and is aligned with the evolution of the nation-state’s body politic. He traces
its roots to “vast families” that merged to form the city-state, which, upon
integrating with other geopolitical entities, contributed to the intermingling
of what were then taken to be different racial types:
The age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents

the maximum of physical differences. They were practically vast
families, and there were as many groups as families. As the families

came together to form cities the physical differences lessened,
purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile,
and all who lived within the city bounds came gradually to be
regarded as members of the groups, i.e., there was a slight and
slow breaking down of physical barriers. (819)
Du Bois describes the city-state, in loose and flexible terms, as a

“practically vast” family whose members were related not simply by blood,
but by culture, economics, and history: “This city became husbandmen, this,
merchants, another warriors, and so on. The ideals of life for which the
different cities struggled were different” (819, emphasis in original). The
“crossings” narrated by the young professor are inherent to his understanding
of the evolution of nations as well as races:
When at last cities began to coalesce into nations there was another
breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men. The
larger and broader differences disappeared, and the sociological
and historical races of men began to approximate the present
division of races as indicated by physical researches. At the same
time the spiritual and physical differences of race groups which
constituted the nations became deep and decisive. The English
nation stood for constitutional liberty and commercial freedom;
the German nation for science and philosophy; the Romance
nations stood for literature and art, and the other race groups are
striving, each in its own way, to develope [sic] for civilization its
particular message, its particular ideal, which shall help to guide
the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human life for
which we all long, that “one far off Divine event.” This has been
the function of race differences up to the present time. What
shall be its function in the future? (819)
Leaving aside Du Bois’s opinion on the predilections of each nation

to favor certain disciplines and sciences, the manner in which he explains
how certain “race” groups, comprising the “sociological and historical races
of men,” functioned as nationalities which came to stand for ideals is
significant. And his attempt at classifying American Negroes as a “nation,”
the first step in declaring them members of a legitimate “state” with rights
to self-determination, makes the question one of urgency. Multiple levels of
metaphorical discourses of being are thus at play. “American” denotes not only
geography and bio-politics; as an “identity” it also results from the alchemy of
nation-making, particularly the ideal of cultural assimilation, which discards
old ethnic identities in favor of a new, unified, even symbolic one. “Negro”
effects a process similar to that of “American.” “Negroes” in nineteenth-
century America were “new world blacks,” separated from their homeland by
the Middle Passage and the attendant history of slavery, and lumped together
under a convenient signifier that distinguished them by not only, and not
strictly, color of skin, but also by an African cultural heritage. This outwardly
imposed signifier of identity dismissed the ethnic differences among blacks
in the new world as unimportant to the order of things in plantation and
post-plantation societies. The plural identity of the Negro American not only
lays the foundation for an existence defined in terms of an historical void in
the wake of slavery and colonialism; it provides for its structure. Thus, when
one speaks of the “American Negro” in terms relevant to nation and race, one
might characterize this expression, like the “cultural artifact” of nationalism,
as belonging to the tradition of mythmaking or metaphorization. The very
phrase “American Negro” conjures images of hybridity and plurality, and the
imagined community of the nation and the invention of race emerge as the
necessary determinants of the American Negro’s identity.
To some degree, this aids in explaining the ambiguity present in Du
Bois’s text. In “Conservation,” Du Bois endeavors, on the one hand, to
dismantle received theories of racial pseudoscience that labeled blacks inferior
and placed them at the bottom of the “great chain of being,” and on the
other hand, to establish some grounds upon which to valuate and perpetuate
the very sort of nationalist discourse that sustained racialist theorizing. The
loss of ethnicity experienced by the black subject during the crossing of the
Middle Passage reconfigures this quest as a search for a nationality upon
which a certain racial signification is bestowed from without. O. R. Dathorne
writes that the “ ‘Negro’ becomes a figment of the imagination” (8), meaning
that color, which is used as an ontological signifier denoting (connoting, as it
were) racial identity, becomes a border that demarcates the rigid opposition
of white and other. This is integral to the process of becoming a “new world
black,” and is indicative of the transmigration of the black body across the
Atlantic on the journey towards a reconstruction of self and identity, a
reconstruction now formed in a context of racial determinations that had,
up to that point in history, remained relatively unthought. A significant factor
in this process of transformation is the imbibing or ingestion of other cultures
and cultural forms, and the adoption and adaptation of these forms for new
and specific purposes of social survival and progress. The loss of ethnicity
during the horrific voyage of the slave ship, and the artificial construction
of borders of nationality and race cast the new world African as a member
of a seemingly cohesive new social group, without ethnic differentiation
among blacks. Dathorne refers to this process as the evolving of a collective,
historical black American identity which, while tacitly recognizing its diverse
constituent elements, positions Africa as the ancient, mythological center and
foundation of this personality, what he calls “Afro-Americanitude.” Following
this argument, it was the new world that transformed historical Africans into
New World or modern “Negroes,” harnessing their various contradistinctions
under one modern social indicator that nonetheless barred them from any real
sense of Americanness. The terms “American” and “Negro,” which function
similarly as inventive and integrative forces of modernity, operate at odds
one with the other.
It is in this way that the equivocation over the appropriateness of
membership in the modern American nation-state regarding those deemed
“outsiders” becomes evident in Du Bois’s analysis of theories of race and
nation. The concept of race and the corresponding concept of ethnicity, to
which the term “Negro” is implicitly relevant, theoretically disallow among
blacks the “othering” specific to the concept of the nation-state. That is
to say that during Du Bois’s time, there was a significant way in which
the term Negro, or black, was used as a racial signifier that could also be
employed, in counter-discourse, to aid folks in organizing under one political
umbrella, to borrow phrasing from Stuart Hall. Thus the solidarity that
emerges from Du Bois’s analysis of a race identity—which I see as distinct
from (though related to) the consciousness of black being—is, for blacks,
preferable to allegiance to a nation-state that repudiates them. Blacks had a
more difficult time assimilating not because of differences of ideals or even
culture, and Du Bois makes this clear, but mainly because of differences of
physicalities that were presumed, via discourses of racial pseudoscience, to
represent a specific racial essence, itself taken to be an indicator of national
belonging and of intellectual capacity. Therefore, when writing of the nation-
state and acceptance into the national body, Du Bois found it first necessary
to consider and examine strategems of identity rather than being. Doing so
set the stage for entering into the question of being in Souls.
Strategic praxes of racial identity (e.g., coming together under a signi-
fier of racial identification so as to carry out plans of political action through
solidarity) constitute a key modality in Du Bois’s analysis of race. He found
examples of such solidarity in the activism of Harper, Douglass, and Wells.
Du Bois’s example claims that it is only through a critical ontology of race
that one may grasp the “uses” of a black racial identity that can be employed
subversively to test and break the limits of racist thinking and aggression.
Of course, there is a risk in Du Bois’s effort at valuating a black
identity by granting it primacy over the identity that comes through national
belonging. In seeking to define and give shape to what he imagined to be an
emerging black nation (emerging from the “races,” just as other nations had),
Du Bois’s gestures were designed to further the illusion of homogeneity and
unity among American blacks, and to underscore the force of social conflicts
that were defined by racial differences. He lists “eight distinctly differentiated”
historical races, which he names mainly in terms of nationality:
They are the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle

Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance
nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa
and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern
Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of
Eastern Asia. (817–18)
While Sterling Stuckey (1987) defends Du Bois’s classification as an

enthusiastic dismissal of racial categorization, it is unclear how Du Bois
came to choose these eight as the major race groups. The minor ones—the
“Esquimaux,” the South Sea Islanders and the American Indians—figure
less prominently, but are mentioned to underscore the fact that the larger
races are, in fact, “far from homogeneous”:
The Slav includes the Czech, the Magyar, the Pole and the
Russian; the Teuton includes the German, the Scandinavian
and the Dutch; the English include the Scotch, the Irish and
the conglomerate American. Under the Romance nations the
widely-differing Frenchman, Italian, Sicilian and Spaniard are
comprehended. The term Negro is, perhaps, the most indefinite
of all, combining the Mulattoes and Zamboes of America and
the Egyptians, Bantus, and Bushmen of Africa. Among the
Hindoos are traces of widely differing nations, while the great
Chinese, Tartar, Corean [sic] and Japanese families fall under
one designation—Mongolian. (818)
Du Bois’s declension of “races,” which he names not as biological

groups but as national groups, grants him the expansion and revision of racial
terminology he seeks and permits him to define race as “a vast family of
human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common

history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily
striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly
conceived ideals of life” (817).
Du Bois certainly did not base his concept of race on any firm idea
of biological determinism. What is more, his statement on race begs the
question: how does it happen that within a “race” constituting a “vast family,”
some members are “involuntarily” striving toward a collective goal? How, in
fact, are they constrained to do so if they are not bound by some inexorable
duty toward the larger collective, enforceable by decree of the offices of the
larger collective?
When Du Bois writes in “Conservation” of the nationalistic and racial
attributes that consign the individual within the body politic and draw the
line between the public citizen and the private individual, the examples he
follows form the bedrock of nationalist Enlightenment thought of Equiano’s
time. For instance, the organicism evident in Du Bois’s expostulations on
race is central to Immanuel Kant’s own definition of a nation. Du Bois
maintains that the Negro race “must be inspired with the Divine faith of
our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a
victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of
earth a Divine truth that shall make them free” (“Conservation” 823, italics
in original). When we read Kant, whose writing grants us our germinal
understanding of what a modern nation-state is, after reading Du Bois, the
resonance between the two texts rings clearly. Kant writes in 1797:
The human beings who make up a nation can, as natives of

the country, be represented as analogous to descendants from a
common ancestry (congeniti) even if this is not in fact the case.
But in an intellectual sense or for the purposes of right, they can
be thought of as the offspring of a common mother (the republic),
constituting, as it were, a single family (gens, natio) whose members
(the citizens) are all equal by birth. (Kant 1797/1985, 38)
Du Bois was quite familiar with Kant’s particular brand of political

philosophy, and writes in The Autobiography of having read Kant alone with
George Santayana during his undergraduate years at Harvard (143). In
Kant’s theory, a group of human beings, though biologically unrelated, may
be thought of as descending from a common “mother,” which stands as a
metaphor for the republic, or the nation, for the “purposes of right,” that
is, for the purposes of citizenship and protection under the law. Thus, men
and women who have come together in order to establish a social and
political bond may do so under a nexus of affinity or common spiritual
conviction while lending themselves to a process with metaphoric, organicist
connotations, including such abstract notions as “the blood of the people”
and “the body politic.” In other words, Kant “invents” a consanguineous racial
relation among disparate groups of people in order to ensure the advance of
the nation-state. In this light, Du Bois’s recognition of the metaphoricity of
race, that it is “the most ingenious invention for human progress,” resounds
with a portentous sort of relation in thought.
Metaphorical discourse stands at the heart of the history of speculative
philosophy regarding nation-formation, and helps us see more clearly Du
Bois’s emphasis upon the historical “voluntary and involuntary strivings” of
the American Negro. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom, as with Kant, we have
already encountered in our discussion of Equiano, writes:
Indeed, each individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to

or differing from the general will he has as a citizen. His absolute
and independent existence can bring him to view what he owes
the common cause as a free contribution, the loss of which will
harm others less than its payment burdens him; and considering
the moral person of the State as an imaginary being because it
is not a man, he might wish to enjoy the rights of the citizen
without wanting to fulfill the duties of a subject, an injustice
whose spread would soon cause the ruin of the body politic. In
order for the social contract not to be an ineffectual formula,
therefore, the sovereign must have some guarantees, independent
of the consent of the private individuals [.  .  .]. So the fundamental
contract tacitly includes this engagement, which alone can give
force to all the others: that whoever refuses to obey the general
will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body. (24)
The public citizen and the private individual converge within Rousseau’s
social contract, where the private citizen submits him- or herself, or is
constrained to submit by the general citizenry, to the greater good of the
collective. For Rousseau, this gesture is crucial to the longevity of the body
politic, and echoes Du Bois’s conception of the black folk, who, as individual,
racialized beings, are “voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the
accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life” (817).
It would seem that in the year 2014, more than 200 years after Equiano
presented us with his Narrative, more than one hundred years after the
appearance of both Frances E. W. Harper’s Sketches and W. E. B. Du
Bois’s Souls, more than sixty years after Ralph Ellison won the National
Book Award for Invisible Man, and more than forty years after Asa Philip
Randolph organized the great March on Washington that catapulted the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to prominence, we would be finished
with the idea of race, at least in biological terms. Scientists have told us
repeatedly that there are greater differences within so-called racial groups
than there are between them. Indeed, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
only a decade ago ran a series aimed at convincing its audience of the
universality of human sisterhood and brotherhood. In Race: The Power of an
Illusion (2000), a young African American girl was shown to have DNA that
closely resembled, for example, that of a young Danish boy. The point to
be taken was that race matters not, or at least not in a way that permits us
to distinguish among people by classing them into racial groups that have,
historically, fallen under the dictates of political and economic imperatives.
Race, however, does matter to some experts in the scientific world.
Yet another PBS series aired the same year, this one entitled The Mystery of
the First Americans (2000), focuses on the discovery of Kennewick Man. It
points out that many scientists see the validity of race from the perspective
of forensic anthropology, which assesses the reality of race by examining
morphological differences among human beings. For them, the reality of race
is evident in the bony traits of the mouth and cranium. A prominent nose,
which is said to humidify air more efficiently in hot, humid climes, leads
many anthropologists to the conclusion that racial differences coincide with
specific climatic zones. They stress that such characteristics as the curliness
of one’s hair or the color of one’s skin may not be quite so significant to a
serologist who is primarily interested in questions of blood relation which
may stretch across the boundaries of time and space. On this side of the
argument, race is more than skin deep, and cannot be denied to satisfy the
exigencies of political correctness. Thus, the question of race raised by Du
Bois in his 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races” appears to be just as
hotly under debate today as it was then.
I have argued that the ingredient most crucial to a successful reading
of Du Bois’s discourse on race is an awareness that this discourse is always
mitigated by a metaphorical logic that is chiefly concerned with narratives
of national belonging and racial identity, rather than being. Du Bois’s
critical ontology of race draws upon the upheavals of his own time as well
as the long durée of metaphysical nationalist discourse, which employs a
metaphorical, organicist language in order to overcome the schisms (such as
those arising between the individual and the political collective) that were
the bane of philosophical thought during the Enlightenment and Romantic
periods.
There is much objection to analyzing the idea of race in terms of
metaphor, and these objections arise when some conclude that metaphor is
only figurative speech, both spoken and written, and that its importance ends
when we are done examining florid poetry, or beautiful prose. However, I
must agree with Stuart Hall when he deems metaphor to be an “absolutely
deadly political [question]” (290). Du Bois’s concept of race in “The
Conservation of Races” is not only metaphorical and contingent; it is also
political and activist. In proposing the categories of race and nation as not
simply oppositional, but as coefficient, overlapping, and imprecise, that is,
as possessing metaphorical qualities that escape concrete definition, and in
problematizing the categories of manhood and civilization (for his reader
if not for himself ), Du Bois, in a sense, gives the “program” for subsequent
work. As he puts it, he proposes an activist program for how race shall and
should “function in the future” (819). In this light, “Conservation” may be
interpreted as a preparation for an encounter with the being that lies within
those raced as black. As a work of critical ontology that supplements the
work of Harper, Douglass, and others even as it counters the outrageous
claims of Hegel, “Conservation” refuses racial absolutism. Instead, it prepares
us for the ontological metaphorics of the “meaning of being black” that comes
forth in Souls. The Souls of Black Folk, a text constructed from and constituted
by fragments—essays—is, like being black itself, plural and multiple in
form, with each vignette, story, sociological tract, and historical rendering
lacking the deep structure of a unified tome, composed of fragments and
proliferating details that demand a certain “economy” of hermeneutical
analysis. This economy is mediated by what I am calling a metaphorical
poetics of black being, one that explores the very existential indeterminacy
elaborated by Du Bois more than a century ago.
6
Habitations of the Veil

Souls, Figure, Form
Du Bois announces at the outset of The Souls of Black Folk that black being is
conveyed metaphorically in the problematic, fragile, and, at times, capricious
mediation of consciousnesses that prevails across the boundaries of race,
language, and writing. It seems no accident, then, that the first word of the
book’s opening essay, which is entitled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” is the
word “Between.” Du Bois writes:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:

unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through
the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round
it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me
curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly,
How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent
colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do
not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I
smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the
occasion might require. To the real question, How does it feel
to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. (363)
What occurs in this space “in between,” what Nahum Chandler has termed
a site of sedimentation (that which requires what I will call “thought-full”
archaeological spading, giving due consideration to the thought processes
that hold Du Bois’s attention), is not the projection of an essence, presence,
or particular frozen in time, and therefore static. Instead, we witness what
Martin Heidegger would later theorize as the projection of a horizon of
multiple existential possibilities. The linguistic structures we perceive through
The Souls of Black Folk represent what the philosopher Clive Cazeaux has
called “ontological conditions of experience” (85), and the very possibility
217
of our recognition or apprehension of the set of experiences Du Bois gives

the reader across time requires powers of perceiving both similarities and
dissimilarities as we strive to make sense of that which we have discerned.
This power is, in Aristotle’s terms, the power to grasp the import of meta-
phorical discourse. Heidegger, adapting Aristotle’s perspective, calls it “the
quiet power of the possible.”
Drawing upon this relation of the metaphorical and the possible in
his reading of Heidegger, Cazeaux writes that ontological metaphors—those
philosophical metaphors that intimate or disclose being and subjectivity—
could be said to recognize “that all concepts resonate with possible trans-
positions and, [as] such [bring] to the fore the world-making power of
speaking” (Cazeaux 197). Cazeaux and the Shakesperean scholar Terence
Hawkes both personify ontological metaphor (by identifying it as a site
of subjective possibility) even as they describe it as an object of thought.
Hawkes, for example, maintains that ontological metaphors “construct a
reality from within themselves, and impose this on the world in which we
live” (Hawkes 47). In deconstructionist terms, ontological metaphor, as that
which insists upon the existential, may be said to engage with that which
is beyond yet also included in language. “[O]ntological metaphor,” Cazeaux
writes, “structures experience as an openness to transposition [across catego-
ries of existence and meaning], an openness to movement between concepts,
with the consequence that what belongs to one concept and what belongs
to another cannot be taken for granted” (Cazeaux 197).
The movement of metaphor between and among such concepts and
categories of meaning creates a nexus of relations and a fluid sort of knowl-
edge. As Cazeaux points out, this sort of “metaphor necessarily opens itself
to what is beyond metaphor” by posing a challenge to binary distinctions
such as subject/object and presence/absence (198). As I have agrued, I see
this sort of transposition at work in archetypal metaphors throughout the
African American tradition, not only in such metaphors as the Veil, but
also, for example, in Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility, in the various
vernacular metaphors developed by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in the
collection of poems, Sketches of Southern Life, and in Sojourner Truth’s classic
trope, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”
If one examines such “knowing” and “living” figures of language as
they are embedded within the social and intellectual upheavals from which
they emerge, and which they critique and clarify, one may readily see these
metaphors as tropes that function at the level of discourse and that project
being after a manner that is crucial. Ontological metaphors, as they are
deployed within numerous African American texts, regularly do the work
Habitations of the Veil 219
of epistemology and speculative thought that is so unyieldingly demanded

by the social context in which the writer writes. The metaphors I examine
in Souls point out the problem of language encountered by many African
American writers, since the existing lexicons of their societies are often sim-
ply inadequate to the issues and questions they encounter in being—in lived
experience. In response, many of these writers regularly make of ordinary
language a purposive discourse intent upon establishing new meanings, and
this is usually done through metaphorization. They put into play a discourse
capable of conveying their lived experiences: discourses of existence and
metaphor converge in their writings in an extratextual gesture toward the
future, and, therefore, toward future horizons of readership. This chapter
introduces a hermeneutics of these linguistic and textual structures of meta-
phor in Du Bois’s text, and Du Bois’s metaphors, in return, provide a critical
framework for understanding ontological and epistemological figurations as
they persist throughout the African American literary tradition.
In the first section of this chapter, “Incipit and Exipit,” I observe the way in
which Du Bois establishes the groundwork of metaphor in the Forethought
of his text, and the way in which he seeks to set the text in motion, to
move from textuality to being, in the After-Thought of the work. To this
end, I examine in these short, framing sections an anagogical template—
dichotomized, for example, in the metaphorical phrases “bone of the bone
and flesh of the flesh,” and “God the Reader”—as it sets the stage for a
narrative structure that renders metaphor ontological. In the long section
that follows, titled “Poem and Paratext” (which is itself subdivided to provide
a greater sense of organization), I focus on the poetic selections and bars
of music drawn from the Spirituals that preface each essay of the book.
In particular, I focus my attention on the ontological and epistemological
metaphors at work in the paratexts of Souls—the poems and, especially, the
Spirituals that serve as an aesthetic archive of black being. These paratexts,
in collaboration with the essays they punctuate, go a long way toward
documenting the historicity of African Americans as racialized beings, even
as they also document the Negro’s contributions to modern society. In this
way, Souls is of a piece with “The Conservation of Races,” in that it fulfills
that essay’s “Academy Creed” and moves the figure of the American Negro
substantially along the path that leads to Du Bois’s critically amended theory
of universal brotherhood. As I discuss at length in the previous chapter, his
revised humanism does not set aside the question of race in favor of a hurried
and idealistic post-racialism that rejects the idea of race without considering
and deconstructing its ideological content and realities (leaving whiteness
and its powers untheorized and unchallenged). Rather, Du Bois analyzes
racialized being as an object of thought, promulgating a revised notion of the
human. In good measure, he accomplishes this influential critique by taking
recourse to the poetic as a mode of thought and a propaedeutic of action.
I discuss the Spirituals’ and poems’ varying relation to the philosophical,
cultural, and linguistic content of the essays, and I examine the ways in
which Du Bois draws out their historical and literary allusions in a gesture
of contemporaneity that allows him to affirm the historicity of black being
even as he works to protend black being beyond the limits of the text.
Incipit and Excipit
My concern with the relation of metaphor and being in Souls originates

with what I see as the liturgical quality of the Forethought and the After-
Thought of the text, which serve as framing elements that give shape to the
collection as a whole. Certainly, Du Bois, in the Forethought, situates the
groundwork of the text’s ontological metaphorics even as he provides us a
dutifully succinct introduction to the elements of his text, while the After-
Thought concludes the work by insisting upon intersubjective connections
and openings. In this way, the intellectual trajectory of the collection serves
as an example of open-ended, relational poetics where, glossing Édouard
Glissant, being is itself relation and “thought in reality spaces itself out into
the world” (Poetics of Relation 1).
The first line of Du Bois’s Forethought alerts the reader that she is
about to embark upon a metaphorical journey that is at once experiential,
ontological, and epistemological: “Herein lie buried many things which if
read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here
in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without
interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century
is the problem of the color-line” (359). The peculiar stresses of Du Bois’s
phrasing—the shaping of what is, essentially, a philosophical inquiry into
the nature of being black, of black being or existence—is essentially what
lends power to this incipit. I resort to the somewhat abstruse term “incipit”
because it conveys at once the image of a discursive and ontological starting
point (that the text promises to provide a meaning or definition of blackness
that heretofore was lacking), and a narrative genesis (that the full story
of blackness is as yet untold). Further, and perhaps most importantly, the

“incipit” evokes connotations of the liturgical, which is ultimately concerned
with the public exchange of spiritual meaning that obtains in Du Bois’s use
of the Sorrow Songs throughout the book. Thus with the contemporaneity
of the incipit, the text is grounded in the world about it, populated with
souls as yet unknown. It is embedded in the social history and social tangle
that likewise have formed the knot of the problem of the color-line.
In the incantatory lines of the Forethought, Du Bois imagines an
invisible and ideal reader to whom he introduces this problem and these
souls, a gesture that underscores the centrality of ontological concerns in
our reading of The Souls of Black Folk. The practice by which a writer might
address him- or herself to an imagined reader is hardly unconventional.
Indeed, that the readership is unknown and unseen is largely taken as a
given in many forms of fiction and creative non-fiction alike. Yet the quiet
intensity with which Du Bois announces his intent certainly strikes the
reader. The elements of the text that will provide the reader with meaning
related to the problem are somehow buried within the text itself, and thus
require archeological spading and, perhaps, epistemological reconstruction
on the part of the reader. Du Bois requests that the reader “[study his]
words with [him],” “forgive mistake and foible for sake of the faith and
passion” that are in him, and seek diligently “the grain of truth hidden
there.” Presumably, an actual reader who would intuitively address Souls
as Du Bois desired did not exist; thus, Du Bois works to interpellate the
reader for whom he longs. It is with the unseen reader whose powers of
discernment would allow him to enter with interest into the text that Du
Bois wishes to hold a colloquy. There is an aspect of intimacy effected in
the opening pages of the text: the “Gentle Reader” must trust the author;
must peer within the veil at that “spiritual world” which is “sketched” only
in “vague, uncertain outline” (359).
Yet the formulation of the Forethought belies its own sense of
intimacy. What separates Du Bois from a close rapport with his reader—a
generalized white reader, if we are to take into consideration Du Bois’s
own reflections on the authorial intent behind Souls1—is indeed the very
blackness he addresses and claims as his own. And this he reveals not in the
first sentence of the Forethought, but in the last: “And finally, need I add
that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them
that live within the Veil?” (360). Thus Du Bois is the estranged “I” whose
ontological being (metaphorized in his adaptation of Biblical metaphors of
“flesh” and “bone”) consigns him to the Veil, divorces him from conventional
understandings of the Universal, and marks him as one with the Problem
that is his subject.
Du Bois’s use of the rhetorical “I” and his swift introduction of
the metaphors of the color-line and the veil provide us with a paradigm
of the text, even as the concept-metaphor of double consciousness goes
fairly well unaddressed in both the Forethought and the After-Thought.
We might say that although this latter concept lacks direct treatment
in either the Forethought or After-Thought, Du Bois’s rhetorical “I” is
nonetheless indicative of the voice of double consciousness he assumes in
his text. Indeed, as I have mentioned, it is only at the conclusion of the
Forethought that one finds that Du Bois, too, is black. If we linger over the
lines that precede the final one, we find that a certain critical distance has
been assumed in his narrative voice. He speaks obliquely of “ten thousand
thousand Americans” who inhabit the spiritual world he describes. He tells
us that he has dedicated two chapters to describing “what Emancipation
meant to them,” not “us.” He criticizes “candidly the leader who bears the
chief burden of his race,” rather than “my race” or “our race.” Indeed, Du
Bois’s intention of raising the Veil, his movement within and without it, and
his final declaration that his existence is grounded among the multitude of
his subjects, mimics the nature of double consciousness.
If the narrator’s function in the Forethought is to limn the metaphors
of the veil and the color-line while performing the concept-metaphor of
double consciousness, his function in the text’s After-Thought, after having
presented exempla depicting those souls held in oblivion, is to offer us a
model of how to act upon that which we have read and experienced. In
the narrator’s words, the Gentle Reader has taken on the added identity
of “God the Reader” (547), a God with whom the narrator seems to have
established little intimacy, but with whom he contends as an opposing source
of power and of possibility: “Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe
that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there
spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful
deed to reap the harvest wonderful” (547). Du Bois’s comments in the
excipit—the closing liturgy—of his text are quite brief when compared with
the length of the Forethought, yet they present an echo of sorts. Where the
Forethought commences with the phrase “Herein lie,” the After-Thought
begins with the assonant refrain, “Hear my cry.” In response to the narrative
of experience of that which is buried—“Herein lie”—we are called to action
as listeners—“Hear my cry.” The alliteration of the closing sentence of the
Forethought, containing the metaphorical phrase “bone of the bone and
flesh of the flesh” is repeated in elements of the After-Thought: “thought
and thoughtful deed,” “tingle with truth,” “drear day” and “turn the tangle
straight.” The closing emphasis in the Forethought upon a figuration of
racial being—“bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh”—is countered with
the After-Thought’s figures of cognition (“thought and thoughtful deed”),
feeling (“tingle with truth” and “drear day”), and action (“turn the tangle
straight”). Today’s reader may be surprised that Du Bois does not prescribe
specific action in this text, as he had in the “The Conservation of Races.” But
there are equally great moments of meaning to be found, the narrator seems
to say, in the suggestive metaphoric use of repetition in vowels, consonants,
and syllables. And it is clear that Du Bois intended his book to carry out a
worldly existence, to set forth the truth of black being, a task he had begun
in “Conservation,” and to induce the reader to act in light of this truth,
thereby achieving a meaningful change in the socius.
Scholars of Du Bois’s work have long agreed that an aspect of the
power of The Souls of Black Folk lies in its revelatory gesture, in its insistence
upon granting to a largely white readership an imperfect yet indispensable
bird’s-eye view of black life in America, at least in the text’s own time of
publication. But we should also underscore the phenomenology that is at
work in the text and that obtains through metaphors that seek to protend
the consciousness of black beings caught within the veil toward the world
about them. Du Bois not only extends black being across the limits of
writing; he also protends the black world within the veil across horizons
of experience. In Du Bois’s text, the black world worlds.
The relation of the black body and black being is a central concern in
the worlding of Souls. I see Souls as an element of a philosophy of culture
and society that holds as a transitional requirement the disclosure of the
specific, racialized subjectivity of the African American. Yet its ultimate
goal, as with “The Conservation of Races” before it, is the surpassing of
such specificities in favor of a singular ideal: human brotherhood. The
singularity of human brotherhood should not be confused with the ideal
of the universal: what we might call singularity in Du Bois’s work does not
require a Hegelian embrace of the absolute—that is, the erasure of difference
that Hegel deemed necessary to the constitution of the universal. Instead,
the Du Boisian singularity of human brotherhood requires an intellectual
nomadism across what Glissant has called the chaos-world; it requires the
skillful navigation of an immensely differentiated and open-ended totality, an
ability to spar with the chaotic and the absurd (and specifically the absurdity
of racial essentialism), taking comfort in the experience of global relation.
In Souls, Du Bois insists upon the singularity of human brotherhood
at the limits where precept and possibility meet. These limits are perhaps
metaphorized most succinctly in the tropes of the veil and the color-line:
Du Bois casts the veil as the mediation of black otherness through language;
the color-line extends the workings of the veil through its simultaneous
operation upon the plane of the global (the chaos-world) and the local
(which in Souls takes shape in the geography of Tennessee and Georgia—
with its blood-red soil and its legacy of violence and horror). If the veil
delimits embodied black existence on the regional and national planes, the
color-line serves as a trope that deterritorializes black being, as this being
constitutes itself through relation. Existing in isolation within the veil while
struggling within an open dialectic of recognition vis-à-vis the world of
white folk, Du Bois describes black being as simultaneously self-constituent
and co-constituent. Enduring isolation while striving for recognition, in Souls
Du Bois—through metaphor—portrays black being as singularly human, the
creative force behind the medium of its own expression.
Poem and Paratext: The African American Spiritual

and the Strivings of Black Being
The metaphorics of black being that Du Bois expresses through the

ontological and epistemological tropes of the color-line, the veil, and double
consciousness are reinforced in the closing line of the Forethought, where,
as I have mentioned, Du Bois’s self-identification as “bone of the bone and
flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil” reflects the persistent
protension of black being through sound, allegory, allusion, and reference.
As many scholars have noted, “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” is an
alliterative and metaphorical phrase that revises Adam’s words in the Biblical
book of Genesis. Referring to Eve, whom God has just created as Adam’s
companion and “help meet” in the Garden of Eden, in this passage, Adam
proclaims her to be of his own body. Du Bois uses Adam’s determination of
Eve as an elliptical nod toward his own subjectivity and sense of belonging,
and thus embarks upon the beginning of a pervasive use of scriptural and
autobiographical references throughout Souls. It is a way of communicating
to his “ideal reader” the authenticity of his revelatory gesture in lifting the
Veil. It also allows him to align himself with the community of black folk
in the old-time tradition of Canonical allegory. Slave culture exhibited a
tenacious fondness for the tales of the oppressed tribes of Israel, which
constituted a downtrodden and ostracized Hebrew nation.2 Blacks could
readily identify with such suffering, and frequently adapted the tales of the
Hebrews to fit their own circumstances, especially in the Spirituals.
In harking to the metaphorical phrase “bone of the bone and flesh of

the flesh,” Du Bois seems not only to analogize the situations of blacks and
Jews (which he starkly contrasts throughout his economic analyses in Souls)
and to extend the onto-theological metaphorics of Equiano and Harper into
the twentieth century, but also to instantiate a modern African American
mythopoetics that would provide a formative example for such future
writers as Wright and Ellison to follow. That is to say that in drawing upon
myth and poetic discourse through his use of the Spirituals and Biblical
phraseology, Du Bois draws upon concepts of origins, of beginnings, and
this provisional appeal to an originary identity appears to be what permits
Du Bois’s narrating of individual and collective black experience even in
the wake of his dismissal of racial essentialism in “Conservation.” When
we consider that in Souls such an originary identity is strategically and
mimetically reinforced in the bars of music that preface each essay, and that
this identity is explicated and explored in the final chapter on the Sorrow
Songs, we are certainly called to give deeper consideration than before to
the musical and poetic paratexts of Souls.
I will begin with Du Bois’s own exposition of the nature and significance of
the Sorrow Songs in the final chapter of Souls. His thoughts there provide
us a greater understanding of what I see as his editorial intent not simply
in choosing to place an example of these songs at the beginning of “each
thought” (Souls 536), but also in selecting specific songs for their unique
importance in the modern context. Immediately striking at the outset of
“Of the Sorrow Songs” is that Du Bois claims the Spirituals as his own,
that is, as part of his upbringing and his heritage. Our most popular image
of Du Bois’s familiarity with these songs is his description of hearing them
sung in the South at Fisk and, later, Atlanta Universities. Undoubtedly, this
is the image he most often proffers. Yet perhaps because of the migration
of African Americans north to states such as Massachusetts, Du Bois’s
home state, or perhaps due to his own family’s background, he knew them
instinctively. They “came out of the South,” he writes, “and yet at once I
knew them as of me and of mine” (536).
Indeed, the Spirituals are said to have come out of the Carolina Sea
Islands, a region characterized by insular retentions of African culture,
which provided a nearly mythical, originary setting for the development
and preservation of the Sorrow Songs. They date back to at least the
seventeenth century in some instances, but what do the songs mean? Du
Bois asks. And his question resonates squarely with the “strange meaning
of being black” that he sets out as his object of thought at the incipit of
Souls. His answer: that the songs “are the articulate message of the slave
to the world” (538), and in some ways this echoes his insistence, in “Of
Our Spiritual Strivings,” that “Negro blood” (a metaphor that I might,
perhaps precipitously, analogize to black being) “has a message for the
world” (365). The songs provide a “witness” to the life of the slave. They are
not stories of the “careless and happy” servant, Du Bois avers; rather, they
are “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world,
of misty wanderings and hidden ways. The songs are indeed the sifting of
centuries” (538). They are, then, revelatory of black being; more than simple
musical expression, Du Bois calls us to see the songs as ontological and
epistemological in nature.
As an example, Du Bois compares one of these songs of the ages
that stretch toward a “truer world” beyond their own—a song passed down
to him by his grandfather’s grandmother, with its “primitive form and its
intuitive meaning”—with the Spiritual “You May Bury Me in the East.”
Both of these songs are, he writes, expressive of “the voice of exile” (539).
It seems that the abyss of exile and separation are, in Du Bois’s estimation,
at the heart of any reasonable interpretation of these Spirituals:
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one
with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but
glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions
and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father;
fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there
is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains
are well-known, but home is unknown. (542)
Of interest to us, then, in our reading of these paratexts, is Du Bois’s

underscoring of the veiled “inner thoughts of the slaves” and of omission
and silence as constitutive of the musical works. Not only are the songs
the founding texts of the African American poetic—and hence, narrative—
tradition; they also serve as the genesis of America’s musical tradition, Du
Bois argues, the one truly American cultural artifact in song.3 What are we
to say of a tradition built upon a foundation that—with its veils, gaps, and
silences—constructs a foundation less than firm? What is Du Bois saying
more broadly about American culture and identity at the very moment that
he attends to “the strange meaning of being black”?
After a fashion, Du Bois casts us willy-nilly back upon ourselves.

He is not less than his word when he, at the outset of the text, tells his
reader that “Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience,
may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of
the Twentieth Century.” This problem he poses is but an element of a
greater concern, that of the color-line, which he has, throughout Souls, cast
as a question of global proportions. Thus the situatedness of the Negro
problem in its American context is drawn into immediate relation with the
global problem of the color-line. And, by virtue of his conclusion, Du Bois
identifies the Spirituals, collectively, with the problem—or, problematic—of
the color-line.
The task Du Bois gives his ideal reader, then, is that of examining the
nature of the Spirituals he evokes at the beginning of each essay, determining
their collective and singular relation to the problem and to the metaphors
Du Bois uses to convey his message. These, initially, at least, must be
examined in relation to the additional paratextual elements that open the
chapters—excerpts from the work of Lowell, Symons, and others—about
which Du Bois says never a word. (The singular exception to this is the
leading paratext of the final chapter, drawn from the Spiritual “Lay this
Body Down,” about which he does comment in “Of the Sorrow Songs.”)
Du Bois’s silence here, his omission of any commentary on the works of
European and Euro-American poetry and drama from which he draws, is,
its seems, of moment. It is, I would argue, a further metaphor that Du Bois
develops as a judgment on the America he so deftly takes to task through
his use of the Sorrow Songs.
Du Bois’s consideration of the Sorrow Songs as a resource for social and

political critique goes against the ways in which later twentieth-century
commentators of the African American Spiritual generally defined the form.
In the twentieth century, the Spiritual was usually classed as an expression
of musicality, creativity, joy, or sorrow. It was widely described as having
originated through the spontaneous composition of an individual or group
close to nature. Thus our generalized image of the singers of Spirituals is
of an intuitive (by contrast to “thinking,” “thoughtful,” or “critical”) people
whose songs reveal what Nathaniel Dett has called “a religious faith almost
past understanding” (xi), as well as what even Du Bois refers to somewhat
obliquely as the Negro’s “fatalism” (543). Yet it is clear that, at the same time,
Du Bois sees that many complex and intricate operations of belief must
precede spiritual expressions of faith and fatalism, of placing trust, of the

laws of causation. We have names for these sorts of operations: ideological,
value-driven, and propositional. They are considered the underpinnings of
faith, the foundations for adherence to principles or creeds, the motivity
of primary judgment. Yet these are not the usual descriptors we evoke in
speaking of the Spirituals.
Instead, the Spirituals have largely been considered the product of
simple religious fervor, especially those that were created by the African-
descended population of the United States during the age of slavery: more
irrational than rational, more given to an ephemeral amelioration of slavery’s
deplorable conditions than to an articulate worldview. Being essentially
poetry set to unwritten music, they are, deemed largely if not purely
folkloric rather than epistemological. Since the Spirituals speak in doubled
voice (frequently dubbed “primitive” in nature), and thus since they blithely
recount the paradoxical, they seem unsound as epistemological activities
and artifacts.
Thus the relation of these songs to what philosophers call “knowledge”
or “critique” seems, on first approach, an uneasy one. This is the case
not least because of the values that American society (indeed, Western
society in general) has long placed upon distinctions of class, color, gender,
race, and questions of national belonging. In short, because the singers
of the Spirituals were slaves, and because these slaves were “black,” the
foundations of their knowledge were constantly placed into question.4 Laws
that emerged from a culture other than their own governed the science
of epistemology. Although their songs appeared to reflect (even if in the
veiled fashion that Du Bois describes in Souls) their ideas and beliefs
regarding the world they created and inhabited, most accounts of these
songs continue to emphasize the faith, fatalism, and spontaneity that is said
to have guided their birth. The implication here is that the Spirituals are
an unorganized form of expression, an outburst of feeling emerging from
no system of thought or knowledge and therefore providing no possibility
of a science of them.
There have been some exceptions to this convention. Zora Neale
Hurston, whom we have already encountered, performed radical and broad
interpretations of the Spirituals, refusing their label as Sorrow Songs and
giving pointed attention to intonation, expression of feeling, and form. While
she did attend to the metaphorics at work in the songs in her 1934 essay
“Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” she did not pursue an extended discussion
of these metaphorics as either elements of a slave ontology or as aspects
of social critique that approach the level of epistemology. More recently,

Donald H. Matthews, in his well-argued book Honoring the Ancestors
(1998), follows the lead of Du Bois in arguing that the Spirituals function
as expressions of the desire for freedom and, what is more, that they are
“replete with central metaphors that carry the most deeply held beliefs of
the community” (53). Alexander Weheliye reads the Sorrow Songs, and,
specifically, Du Bois’s use of them in Souls, as uncanny textual elements that
present a somewhat “uncrackable” code.5 Weheliye assigns the Spirituals and
their musical notations to a certain illegibility that, nonetheless, “calls upon
the reader to imagine blackness sonically” (“The Grooves of Temporality”
320). Weheliye sees the Spirituals as profitably severed from their origins,
such that they form the basis for our consideration of what he calls “sonic
Afro-Modernity.”
One could cite other critics who write compellingly on the Spirituals,
but whose focus does not lie with the relation of metaphorics and ontology
in the songs. (I am thinking here of the work of such scholars as Erskine
Peters, Sterling Brown, and Jon Michael Spencer.6) Many critics have argued
instead that the bars of music appearing (sans lyrics) in Souls not only
contradict the poetic elements that preface each of Du Bois’s essays, but
also present a barrier to meaning-making in their own time.
I have considered the more or less progressive critical accounts of these
songs: of the latent resistance and rebellion that may be ferreted out from
their double voiced lyrics; of the hidden nature of them (that during slavery,
they were not regularly performed within the hearing of whites); of their
serial nature and their ubiquity (that they were repeatedly improvised, that
they exist in various versions, and that they continued to be created after the
abolition of slavery); of their supposed “primitiveness,” naturalness, naïveté,
and “tropicalness.” I believe that these and other purported characteristics of
the Spirituals (whether or not we agree with them) lead us to say something
more about the thought Du Bois’s chosen songs convey as they plot both
ontology and epistemology. Within these songs, a scene is set wherein we
may observe the generating of meaningful aesthetic forms by a collective
people held captive against their will. I will be paying specific attention to
how the singers order the inner structure of the Spirituals that appear in
Souls to represent metaphorically the way in which the slaves’ experiences
give shape to their conception of existence. And I will consider the ways in
which their metaphorical expressions of existence and consciousness relate
to the central problematic of Du Bois’s text: the “strange meaning of being
black,” or, the peculiar meaning of black being.
Inspiriting Time: The Spiritual and the Ontology of the Slave
The Spirituals that head each essay in Souls aim to bring the temporal into
relation with the atemporal, that which is of this world (what Du Bois calls,
in “Of the Passing of the First Born,” “the narrow Now”) into closer contact
with the world that exists beyond the physical (what he calls, in the same
essay, the “All-life” or the afterlife, a world that is not an abyss, but rather
a “truer world” characterized by prescience and love). The songs seem not to
unfold from the beginning of Souls to its end in a dialectical dénouement
that achieves successively deeper exposition of a range of themes. Rather,
the songs Du Bois chooses seem aimed at an exhaustive record of temporal/
atemporal concerns regarding the slaves’ being. They examine human
experience under the weight of bondage in a way that aspires toward a
breadth of perception: they take comfort in conveying that Christ alone
knows and understands their strivings and troubles; they dwell a great deal
on the dual themes of admonishment and encouragement, blindness and
insight, and bondage and errantry; they forecast the apocalyptic tradition
that pervades African American literature; and they establish the process of
metaphorization that has since lain at the heart of great works of African
American literary and cultural expression.
I will focus upon close readings of the paratexts, both the Spirituals
and the verses of poetry, at times examining their traces throughout the essay
each prefaces. I will conclude by reading the paratexts in relation to one
another collectively and intertextually, positing Du Bois as an editor who
amasses an anthology of meaningful paratextual elements that undertake a
sort of social and philosophical “work.” We might assume, at least in some
preliminary way, that the major criteria for inclusion in the collection is the
ability or potential of each paratext to contribute to Du Bois’s exposition of
“the strange meaning of being black.” That is to say that we might assume
that Du Bois selected each of these paratexts in light of what he perceived
as their relation to an examination of the ontology and epistemology of black
being, black consciousness. Such an approach will permit us to consider the
figura at play in each of these paratexts as existing in relation to the major
questions and problems Du Bois addresses in his text, and in relation to
the major tropes he himself expounds.
One conundrum that has regularly faced today’s readers of Souls is the
bars of music that represent the Spirituals in the text. It seems clear from
Du Bois’s prose that the ideal reader he construed was neither poor nor,
exclusively, African American. Further, and this in spite of the sharp critique
of middle-class money-getting that persists throughout Souls’ pages, Du Bois
certainly addressed himself to the burgeoning American middle-class, both
North and South, and, almost just as certainly, the bars of piano music Du
Bois presented to his reader found a ready audience. In the cultured, middle-
class America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the piano
was not only a symbol of status and success; it also served to satisfy the
middle-class’s need to feel intellectually aware, to feel themselves a part of
civilization. The piano was, as James Parakilas and others argue in Piano
Roles: A New History of the Piano (2000), a central element in this attempt
at cultural interaction: “the piano has always exhibited a unique power to
act as a cultural go-between, as a medium through which social spheres that
stood in opposition to each other could nonetheless nourish each other” (4).
Indeed, pianos were so ubiquitous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century
middle-class households that most genteel American families could boast
ownership of one. Taking the novels of such African American writers as
Sutton Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, and Jessie Fauset (e.g., Imperium in
Imperio [1899], The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man [1912/1927], There
is Confusion [1924], and Plum Bun [1929]), as well as a number of photos
of African American households included by Du Bois in his Exhibit of
American Negroes (at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris), the same may be
said of the genteel African American household. Throughout the country, an
element central to a proper young woman’s upbringing was an ability to play
and sing as part of, say, a family’s activities on a given Sunday afternoon.
Thus any engaged reader might have carried Du Bois’s little book directly
to the piano that occupied the parlor, and request that the lady (or even the
gentleman) of the house pick the notes out, however hesitantly.
Upon first encountering them, what a pianist unfamiliar with the fuller
compositions of the Sorrow Songs might have had trouble placing are the
specific measures that are reproduced in Souls. The bars of music Du Bois
gives are drawn from various points of the Sorrow Songs. They confine
themselves neither to the beginning of the compositions nor to their end,
but appear to draw from that portion of the song that struck Du Bois most
keenly. The curious reader at his or her piano might, of course, be perplexed
in trying to place the notes. However, the music of the Spirituals, made
widely known in the late nineteenth century by the Fisk Jubilee Singers
and the Singers at Hampton Institute most notably, would likely have been
familiar.
The “melody of these slave songs stirred the nation” in the 1830s, Du
Bois writes (537). After the close of the Civil War, significant numbers of the
songs were collected and set to music: Slave Songs of the United States (1867)
by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison,
and J. B. T. Marsh’s The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs (1877), are
among the earliest, most popular tomes that included musical scores. (Thomas
Wentworth Higginson’s well-known memoir Army Life in a Black Regiment,
published in 1867, gave only lyrics to selected songs.) Admittedly, the initial
sales of Slave Songs were slow, yet the book is credited with instilling in
Americans an interest in black culture that seems little abated.7 Marsh’s book
fared far better: it came in the aftermath of the Jubilee Singer’s international
successes in the 1870s, and even capitalized on their popularity, immortalizing
the Jubilee performers through brief biographies of each one as The Story
of the Jubilee Singers underwent multiple printings and editions. The Jubilee
songs, as the Spirituals also came to be known, became elements of late-
nineteenth-century minstrel shows that, though secular, incorporated the
Spirituals’ religious sentiments and jocularized them for popular consumption.
All of this is to say that the Spirituals, and their musical notations, were likely
not as alienating to Du Bois’s intended readership as we at times imagine.
Metaphors of Perceiving, Knowing, and Mourning:

“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” and
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”
The first Spiritual given in Souls, and one of the most widely recognized
Spirituals in the collection, is “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” Du Bois
draws upon the following lines:
Nobody knows the trouble I see

Nobody knows but Jesus
The lyrics of this song include verbs of perception and cognition that
metaphorically draw together the limits of the physical and non-physical
or metaphysical worlds: “seeing” trouble is itself a metaphor, although its
use is so widespread as to occlude its metaphorical nature. Metaphors of
perception and cognition akin to seeing and knowing—two human faculties
ordinarily given as the “higher” senses—reappear as hearing and wakefulness,
or awareness, in “My Lord, What a Mourning,” which prefaces chapter 2
of Souls and includes the following lyrics in the refrain: “You’ll hear the
trumpet sound / To wake the nations underground.” The latter song pays
pointed attention to questions of the apocalypse—and thus, to questions of
revolution—that prevail in the Book of Revelation (to which it refers [8:10]).
Each of these songs is an early exercise in a self-reflexive and self-conscious
poetic art: the composers’ work of representing cognitive perceptions such as

seeing and knowing, stand alongside other representations that characterize
these songs, such as hearing and waking. In both cases, the impression is
given that important intellectual phenomena have been noted, documented
orally and aurally. And in both cases, the singers appear to contest the
division between the faculties of perception as purely physical, and the more
elevated faculties of the intellect and the spirit or soul. The remainder of the
songs Du Bois quotes throughout the book, much like these first excerpts,
works at collapsing notions of the physical and the metaphysical into that
which can only be termed ontological, that which has to do with questions
and transpositions of the meaning of being, or, more specifically, black being,
across categories of human experience.
Black being is thus sublimely represented in the rhythms of the
songs, which, as Nathaniel Dett has pointed out, may be compared to
“that of the human pulse which is a series of throbs all of equal intensity”
(xv). Commentators on the Spiritual from Du Bois to Dett to Johnson to
Hurston have underscored the chromatic nature of the form, its insistence
upon sounding notes in a scale both major and minor, tones and semi-
tones, notes that are accidental and unexpected or abnormal in the scale
in which they appear. Might we also not say, then, that the Spirituals are
concerned with a chromatic form of thought in which the stories that
fill the songs are made up in a way that renders vague their constructive
invention, such that they merely appear instinctual? These songs lay out,
through their chromatic scales, concerns attendant upon the paradox of
living between two worlds—the seen and the unseen, the profane and the
holy—and their lyrics attempt to master this paradox through sounds and
metaphors that draw the two dissimilar realms into a syncretic sphere of
resemblance and harmony.
If the Christ who reigns over the invisible sacred world understands
the troubles of the slaves’ profane “Now” in “Nobody Knows the Trouble
I See,” we are meant to believe that the slaves nonetheless knew a certain
euphonic “rest” that consistently eludes the free narrator of Arthur Symon’s
“The Crying of Water,” the poem that heads chapter 1 along with “Nobody
Knows.” The excerpt Du Bois provides reads thus:
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,

All night long crying with a mournful8 cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand,
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest

Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry
like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
In this mournful poem we find doubled metaphors. The water

is described in terms of an inscrutable voice, thus it is, to some extent,
personified. This image of sound and opacity is carried further in that the
water is the voice of the poet’s heart. Thus when we come to the words
“crying in the sand,” we are no longer clear as to whether the poet is
alluding to the extra-lingual sound of the ocean, which is clearly affecting
him, or the equally extra-lingual sound of his own heart crying inconsolably
within him. The poet himself is confused by the voice, and a weakness of
the poem is that he does not clarify matters for his reader any more than
he does for himself. Further, the syntax generated by the first line of the
first stanza provides no possibility of clarification. We find only images
that are hopelessly muddled and blurred, such that when the poet asks “is
it I, is it I?” we have little idea of the genesis of the question, nor of the
importance of its response. The object of the voice’s query—understanding
and rest—could likely be attained from a benevolent God, but it is not to
the world beyond the physical one that the poet appeals. (The poem may
rightly be called an ode, addressed as it is to the physical but inanimate
water.) The poet sees that his ability to know the source and sense of the
voice crying within and about him is in contention with the very world in
which he lives. He seems powerless to grasp the import of unseen realities.
The distinction between “The Crying of Water” and “Nobody Knows the
Trouble I See” shows us that metaphorical constructions in many of the
paratexts serve to navigate the boundary between two worlds in a fashion
that echoes Du Bois’s own trope of the color-line. Strikingly, the Symons
poem is inadequate to this task in ways that do not beset the majority of
the remainder of the European and Euro-American poems Du Bois chooses.
Moments such as these, which underscore the contingencies of
the temporal while idealizing the image of a world beyond the present,
predominate the paratextual elements of chapter 2, “Of the Dawn of
Freedom.” Du Bois opens the chapter with a stanza of a poem titled “The
Present Crisis,” written by James Russell Lowell in December 1844. Best
known as an abolitionist, Lowell was also a poet, critic, essayist, diplomat,

and editor, between 1876 and 1881, of the Atlantic Monthly. “The Present
Crisis” was included by Du Bois’s former Harvard professor, Albert Bushnell
Hart, in his collection American History Told by Contemporaries (1901). Hart
had earlier included two works by Lowell in his 1899 reader, Source-Book of
American History. He obviously saw Lowell’s work in general and this poem
in particular as quite central to understanding American history and identity.
It is likely that he discussed this poem, which is among the most cited of
Lowell’s works, with Du Bois either through academic work at Harvard
during Du Bois’s time there, or at some point afterwards. (Hart continued
to maintain contact with Du Bois well after Du Bois had completed his
doctorate at Harvard in 1895.)
A long poem of 18 stanzas, “The Present Crisis” is, like Lowell’s later
poem “A Satire on the Mexican War” (1846), framed as a response to
American westward expansion coupled with some overt allusions to American
slavery. Indeed, many anti-slavery agitators saw in the United States’ push to
annex the newly independent state of Texas along with Mexican and British
territories in the west a desire to extend the reach of American slavery. Thus,
Du Bois’s choice of Lowell’s poem resonates with the topic of his own essay,
a critical history of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Essentially, he uses the poem
as an element of his elaboration of the twentieth-century “problem of the
color-line,” which he announces as the fulcrum of his “history from 1861
to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro” (372). He chooses the
eighth stanza:
Careless seems the great Avenger;

History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
‘Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
This stanza—the penultimate stanza of the poem—seems enigmatic, as

it refers to an avenger not mentioned in prior stanzas of the poem. When
we place this element within the context of the larger work and observe
the poem’s ideological evolution, we note that Du Bois’s selection of this

stanza appears to come in response to the Manichaean struggles to which
Lowell exposes the reader throughout the poem. The poem opens with the
idealist themes of freedom and prophecy; the second stanza onward marks
the beginning of the themes of social strife and struggle that punctuate
the remainder of the poem. The imagery initially vacillates between “hut
and palace,” or rich and poor, but ultimately between good and evil, past
and future, truth and falsity. Where manhood is of importance in the
first stanza, the birth of a man-child is central to the second stanza: “glad
Truth’s mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart” (a metaphorical
construction that Du Bois will echo in the essay “Of the Passing of the First
Born”). The orientation the poet encourages is toward the future, when Truth
shall prevail. There is a break between the second stanza and the first, and
some sort of enhanced transition would seem to be in order. Yet Lowell does
continue the imagery of the birth of a new Era, whose circumstances have
yet to be fully revealed in the poem. In this period of change, nation will
question nation, the old systems of the world will be tried and challenged,
and the promise of a powerful new morality is evident.
In the third stanza, Lowell takes us immediately from the promise of
a new age of Truth into the triumph of Evil from “continent to continent.”
Under the forces of Evil, the slave “cowers” and cries helplessly until his very
tears unearth corpses. This sort of striking imagery continues in the fourth
stanza as the poem unfolds: “mankind are one in spirit,” “earth’s electric
circle,” the “swift flash of right or wrong,” and the “ocean-sundered fibres”
of humanity. These redoubtable metaphors are sufficient to ameliorate the
heavily moralistic tone of this stanza, and to render it interesting. Throughout
the poem, Lowell develops the idea that the powers of human perception
in one’s own era are limited and thus deceiving. In spite of this “the soul is
still oracular,” he writes in tones that foreshadow Jean Toomer’s modernist
work, Cane (1923). It is “the Delphic cave within” (stanza nine).
In the final stanza of the poem, the writer asks the reader to take
on, imaginatively, the mantle of the Pilgrim, to undertake a new voyage
of freedom determined by the exigencies of his own day. It is interesting
that he speaks of a “portal” to the future, an image that arguably alludes to
his idea of the soul as “oracular” and “Delphic,” that is, as a metaphorical
and even epistemological counter-concept to the discourse of Manifest
Destiny; indeed, he imagines an alternate path toward the furthering of
civilization by way of crossing borders and encountering foreign cultures
without domination. This final stanza reflects the message of Du Bois’s essay.
In the penultimate stanza given to us by Du Bois in Souls, the poet

concludes that God’s vindication appears, at least, to strike the innocent
along with the guilty, crossing categorical boundaries and transposing moral
meaning. Further, he laments forthrightly that truth is always being tried
and executed, while wrong is praised, exalted, and obeyed. The poet’s use of
“scaffold” draws upon its dual meaning as both a raised platform from which
people were hung or otherwise executed, and as a raised platform used to
erect new structures or to repair or decorate existing ones. Certainly the
image of the scaffold as a platform of execution held some poignant meaning
for Du Bois, as he likely first read this poem either at Fisk or at Harvard
during a period that witnessed more than its share of lynchings. He must
have been equally gratified at Lowell’s doubling of the term, his use of it
in two different lines with different semantic contexts. The second striking
line comes in “One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and
the Word.” The “Word” is a direct simultaneous allusion to Christ and the
Bible, and it is between the Word and the world that the struggle recorded
in man’s history ensues.
“The Present Crisis” is followed by the Spiritual “My Lord What a
Mo(u)rning,” which Du Bois calls “the song of the End and the Beginning”
in “The Sorrow Songs” (540). This is likely because of the alternate spellings
given to “morning” and “mourning” in the song’s title, and also refers to
the lyrics and imagery of the swift cadences of this song. The lyrics to the
measure Du Bois quotes read:
My Lord, What a Mourning!

My Lord, What a Mourning!
When the Stars Begin to Fall!
As with many of Du Bois’s selections, the quotation is drawn from the

song’s refrain. One could interpret the Spiritual as a song of Armageddon,
the final battle foretold in the Book of Revelation (16:14–16). Lowell’s
poem could be read similarly, for if one turns to the scripture referenced
in the Spiritual and reads of the seven vials that hold the last plagues of
the earth, and of how these vials are emptied of their contents by the
angels, bringing destruction to a world inhabited by the saved as well as
the unrepentant, one might wonder about the indiscriminate way in which
God seems to be wreaking havoc on the earth, in the Biblical book and in
Lowell’s poem alike. Yet the Spiritual appears to denote something more.
Its surface rendition of a song of Armageddon and judgment belies what
could be read as a call for revolution. Thus the phrase given in its lyrics,
“To wake the nations underground”: these lyrics are sung not by the chorus,
but by its leader, and could not only refer to the dead buried in the earth
who are to be raised in new life after the world’s final battle, but could
also be related to the black “nation within a nation” that is called upon by
Du Bois, in this text, in “Conservation,” and elsewhere, to stand and be
recognized, to assert itself.
What seems crucial to keep in mind in reading the essay against the
poem is that Du Bois’s stated concern in chapter 2 is to give an account and
critique of American government between “1861 and 1872 so far as it relates
to the American Negro,” and to provide an assessment of the workings of
this government from the Negro’s present point of view. Similarly, Lowell’s
poem is critical of the moral spirit of the nation in relation to its policies
of slavery and war. The song, on the other hand, is concerned with the
spiritual nations of the past/future (for the two are melded in the line
“to wake the nations underground,” a metaphor that presents an image
of leagues of persons held in a sort of interim state from which they will
be revived upon the falling of the stars) in relation to the strife of the
present. The slave singers, in keeping, somewhat, with the moralistic figure
of the slave that prevails in Lowell’s poem, look to the righteous who sit at
“God’s right hand” as the struggle begins. The song’s fearsome metaphors—
morning/mourning, falling stars, God’s right hand, nations underground—
find their parallel movement not least in the conclusion of “Of the Dawn of
Freedom,” where Du Bois images an apocalyptic figure “veiled and bowed,”
the “tainted air” that “broods fear,” and the awesome “duty and deed” of
the new century. What should be underscored here is that each element of
chapter 2 exacts critical judgment in the face of moral dishonesty; indeed,
Du Bois demonstrates the very unfree nature of American democracy as it
concerns not only the Negro, but also whites.
In other Spirituals Du Bois excerpts, we find that metaphor not only
gains mastery over the relation between the physical and metaphysical
worlds, but also conveys a sense of cognitive dominion, the “second-sight”
and power of prophecy Du Bois credits to the Negro race in general.
However, following Du Bois’s reasoning, such knowledge prevails due to
racism, and results in the double-consciousness that forms the major theory
of identity at work in Souls.
The hymn of admonition, “A Great Camp-Meeting in the Promised
Land” (also known under the title “Walk Together, Children”), appears to be
one such Spiritual; it seems to have been chosen for its potential to respond
to the tensions produced through double-consciousness. “A Great Camp-
Meeting” prefaces chapter 3 of Souls, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and

Others.” Du Bois chooses bars ten through sixteen, whose lyrics read thus:
Going to mourn and never tire

Mourn and never tire
Mourn and never tire
This hymn provides a lyrical transition from the chapter it follows; this
is especially apparent in the repetition of the word “mourn,” which appears
in both “A Great Camp-Meeting” and “My Lord, What a Mourning,” yet
carries different connotations. “My Lord, What a Mourning” indicates a new
beginning, with both aspects of mo(u)rning at work: “morning” as indicative
of a new beginning, and “mourning” as indicative of repentance, and hence
a new beginning of a different sort. What the lyrics of “A Great Camp-
Meeting” alone cannot convey, and what sets it apart from “My Lord What
a Mo(u)rning,” is the insistent crescendo of the music, which culminates
in a striking minor cadence that hangs upon the listener’s ear and there
repeats. The clause “O, walk together, children” generates the rest of the song,
which is serially punctuated with the phrase “Don’t you get weary.” Of the
Spirituals Du Bois chooses for Souls, this piece, along with “Bright Sparkles
in the Churchyard” (which prefaces chapter 7, “Of the Black Belt”), is among
the lengthiest. Versions transcribed by Nathaniel Dett (Religious Folk-Songs
of the Negro 26) and John Wesley Work (American Negro Songs and Spirituals
143) both give the line “Don’t you get weary” as the response of the chorus
to the leader’s solo, while the verse that Du Bois selects, “Going to mourn
and never tire,” rendered in a striking flatted seventh chord, is noted as
the repeating refrain. It is to be sung in “crescendo animando” (Dett 26),
rendered in its repetition with increasing force of tone and an expanding
liveliness.
The song’s most salient characteristic—that of the reprise, of repetition
with a difference—is also marked by the peculiarity of its terminology. Work
writes that the “term ‘mourn’ in the Spirituals has a special meaning—a sort
of weird hum, and is applied to one of the features of church worship. The
term ‘mourner’ was given to a sinner attending ‘revivals’ or camp meetings
who anticipated joining the church” (145). In considering what sort of
metaphor “mourn” turns out to be, one ought to consider that Du Bois
excerpts the “mourning” reprise of “A Great Camp-Meeting” not only and
not even specifically as an element of his well-known rebuke of Washington.
It functions more overtly as a rebuke of those duty-bound African American
men he simultaneously extols and takes to task in chapter 3. Washington is
not the only “mourner,” or sinner whose calling bears reprising because it
risks going unheard. Archibald Grimké, Kelly Miller, and a number of other
African American men who, along with Du Bois, had founded the American
Negro Academy (which Washington had declined to join) were themselves
admonished in the Spiritual’s ascendant cadence of doubled metaphor: a
tropological canto of mourning, repetition, and redemption.
Like the other songs we’ve discussed thus far, “A Great Camp-
Meeting” holds certain resonances with the verse it follows. In this instance,
Du Bois chooses from the second canto of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, published in its entirety between 1812 and 1818. The poem, an
autobiographical narrative in which the poet and Harold are, at some points,
hardly distinguishable, renders an unequivocal statement regarding freedom
and manhood, from which Du Bois cites:
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free must themselves strike the blow?
A fuller exposition of the connection between this poetic statement—

specifically the clause “in word, in deed, unmanned!”—and the import of “Of
Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” must await another occasion. What
seems evident at this point is that the Spiritual and the poem alike provide
Du Bois the opportunity to model an idea, seized from a larger frame of
reference and transformed into a concise aphorism on civil liberty and civil
rights. If we limit ourselves simply to the excerpts Du Bois provides, we
can see something important about the relation of this poem and song that
is, in fact, paradigmatic of the majority of poem/song pairings that we see
in Souls. “A Great Camp-Meeting” and the other Spirituals I discuss are
not, as has generally been said of the Spirituals in Souls, contrapuntal to the
poem they follow. Indeed, this Spiritual says not simply something different
but something further. Byron, in Childe Harold II, laments Greece’s loss of
independence, and his mourning, like that of the Spiritual singers, is not
merely aesthetic. His poem narrates his travels in the Balkan Peninsula;
he notes with something akin to horror the varied skin colors of Greece’s
new inhabitants, which include Moors and Nubians as well as Turks. And
he is not above composing a song that mocks the invading soldier, whom
he depicts as lusting after the “fair face” of the Greek maiden whose father
has just been slain (“I love the fair face of the maid in her youth, / Her
caresses shall lull me, her music shall soothe; / Let her bring from the
chamber her many-toned lyre, / And sing us a song on the fall of her
sire.”9) For Byron, the Greek controlled by Ottoman rule is not simply
colonized, but, more pointedly, enslaved. Byron is much aggrieved to see
the seat of “world civilization” held firmly in the hands of a non-Christian
empire of dark peoples. Hence his concluding line of stanza 74, where he
writes with palpable frustration, “From birth till death enslaved; in word,
in deed, unmanned!”
When the poet continues, “Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not / Who
would be free themselves must strike the blow?” it should not escape the
reader’s notice that this line from Childe Harold was used as an epigraph
by Frederick Douglass in Part IV of his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave,10
and thus the poetic excerpt is linked even more closely to the import of
Du Bois’s essay. As I point out in chapter 5, Douglass’s death in 1895 left
a vacuum in leadership among African Americans; importantly, “Of Mr.
Booker T. Washington” undertakes a genealogy of this leadership, and a
staunch critique of the man who assumed the mantle of Douglass’s power
and influence upon Douglass’s death. The response of the Spiritual rings,
then, even more sharply, not in contradiction but in cooperation: “Going
to mourn and never tire.” That the Spiritual singers employ the flatted
seventh in this lyric clause brings it sharply to the attention of the listener.
The word “mourn,” means not only, as I have mentioned, to lament, but to
repent of one’s sins and to live as one redeemed. In the Christian sense, this
means to live, act, talk, and walk in the way of the redeemed who traverse
the earth. In affirmation of the song leader’s call for communal unity and
direction (“O walk together, children”), the choral response is a promise of
unending effort and striving. Du Bois thus uses Byron’s poem as an ironic
and unlikely allegory: the Negro people, colonized, like the Greeks, as a
“nation within a nation,” will not await redress by others, nor will they
conciliate, as Washington had unsatisfactorily suggested. They themselves
will strike the blow; they will “mourn and never tire.”
Metaphors of Journeying and Insight:

“Of the Meaning of Progress,” “Of the Wings of Atalanta,”
and “Of the Training of Black Men”
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Souls are each concerned with the quest for self-
edification through education and life experience. In the paratexts to chapter
4, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” Du Bois continues to lay stress on the
imperative of casting off oppression. He cites a passage, given below, from
Friedrich von Schiller’s, The Maid of Orleans (1801), a play that revised Jeanne
d’Arc’s story with great empathy, with the sort of feeling of humanness
that seems innate to the poets and thinkers of German romanticism. It
is undoubtedly an early example of the use of drama in exploring the
human psyche. In the excerpt Du Bois presents, Jeanne (whom Schiller
renames Johanna) agonizes over her decision to allow a military foe to
live. This passage gives evidence of Johanna’s ambivalence regarding her
own humanity, as manifested in her sudden “love” for Lionel, the English
opponent whom she cannot slay even as she bests him during their combat,
and her divinity, which comes from the angelic presence that has visited her.
She concludes that she was much happier as a simple shepherdess; indeed,
that she was much better suited to the pasture than to the palace. In her
stead she surmises that God should have chosen one of his cherubim, whose
immortality would keep it from all sentimentality. In stark opposition, she
paints herself as a “tender woman,” with “the frail soul of [a] shepherd maid”
(410), who is hardly fit for the field of battle:
Wouldst thou proclaim thy high command

Make choice of those who, free from sin,
In thy eternal mansions stand;
Send forth thy flaming cherubim!
Immortal ones, thy law they keep,
They do not feel, they do not weep!
Choose not a tender woman’s aid,
Not the frail soul of shepherd maid! (410)
This passage marks the beginning, not the culmination, of Johanna’s

crisis: the critical point in the play actually comes later when her father
denounces her as a witch before the king and his court (Act 5 Sc 1).
Johanna does not speak in her own defense when this accusation is made,
and is thus banished from the court that had shortly before showered her
with praise. As she subsequently tells Raimond, her erstwhile suitor, she
believed that God had spoken to the court through her father’s voice, and
sees herself as justly vulnerable to attack precisely because of her human
fallibility, that is, her love for Lionel. She thus resigns herself to death as
she is taken captive by the English. The play ends with Johanna having
been vindicated: she escapes from her captors by heroically and mysteriously
rending asunder the chains that bind her, and leads the victorious battle
against the oppressor. Yet in spite of this, her death is the apotheosis of the
play. In Schiller’s revision, she dies not in the flame of the heretic’s stake,
but on the field of war.
By choosing this excerpt and coupling it with the Spiritual “My Way’s
Cloudy,” Du Bois underscores to the reader that the thrust of his essay
concerns the woman’s ordeal in society, how she might insightfully take
her place and define her role, how she might contribute to the uplift of
the Negro race. The historical Jeanne d’Arc seems a bit far from Schiller’s
imagination, yet it is clear that he wished to refashion her memory into one
wherein she would die the death of a national heroine—a woman warrior—
rather than an apostate. At the same time there exist resonances between
the Spiritual Du Bois chooses and the play he excerpts: the Spiritual singers,
like Johanna, called upon the angels in times of spiritual blindness; and the
collective singers and the singular Johanna alike raised prayers in the service
of national salvation. Moreover, the trajectory of each piece is a teleological
journey of moral enlightenment. Indeed, the focus in the Spiritual is on
the way, the metaphysical journey through Christ to the all-knowing and
all-powerful God, and thus, one might say more obliquely, the focus in
these two paratexts, as Du Bois makes clear in his title of chapter 4, is
upon “Progress.”
The Spiritual and the play provide meaning cooperatively through
progressive symbols and broad metaphors, yet they also, in their excerpted
fragments, point up the incompleteness that is often a casualty of theories
and discourses on the meaning of progress. In the Schiller fragment, we find
that Johanna is lost in contemplation of the contention that exists between
feminine love and moral duty. The excerpt of “My Way’s Cloudy” opens
with the cry “O brethren, my way,” and trails off in the midst of the refrain:
“my way’s cloudy, my way. . . .” Here, the aphoristic character of earlier
paratextual pairings (“The Crying of Water” / “Nobody Knows,” “The Present
Crisis” / “My Lord, What a Mourning,” and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage /
“Walk Together, Children”) seems lost. The excerpts of chapter 4 do not
produce concise axioms of knowing and seeing, hearing and awareness, or
freedom and perseverance. Du Bois has actually trimmed away the portions
of the chapter’s paratexts that grant allusions to these epistemological tags:
he shows Johanna in her weakness rather than in her strength; he allows
the singers’ music to trail off into incertitude rather than demonstrate its
complete belief in the metaphors of the “promised land” and “the fire in
the East” that characterize the symbolism of the song. I believe that this
purposeful incompleteness serves to complement the thrust of the motive
behind Du Bois’s essay, the meaning and “measure” (414) of progress, while
at the same time serving to underscore the motivity of Souls as a textual
whole: the openness and lack of totality characterizing the “strange meaning
of being black.” (This seems certainly the case when one reads the closing
lines of this chapter—“Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim
Crow car” [414]—and again those coming in the midst of chapter 6 of Dusk
of Dawn—“I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black
man is a person who must ride “Jim Crow” in Georgia” [666]—in light of
Du Bois’s contention in “Conservation” that race is “the vastest and most
ingenious invention for human progress” [817].)
This incertitude and contingency serve as a transitional introduction to
the chapters and paratexts that follow. “Howard at Atlanta,” the poem that
prefaces chapter 5, “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” returns to the axiomatic
and aphoristic qualities that the quotation from Schiller lacks. It seems most
obviously suited to the essay it accompanies in its reference to the city of
Atlanta. And upon first reading and hearing, the accompanying Spiritual,
“Oh, The Rocks and the Mountains,” seems related mainly to the essay, not
at all to the poem. However, on closer examination, the relationship of the
two comes clearer.
Whittier’s idea in “Howard at Atlanta” is to comment upon the moral
fitness of the newly freed slaves for citizenry. He composed the poem in
1869, after the end of the Civil War but before the end of Reconstruction.
The poem’s true hero is not the man of its title—Union Army General O.
O. Howard—but the little black boy elegized in stanza seven of the poem,
which Du Bois chooses as his paratext. By the time Souls was written,
the historical “black boy of Atlanta” was well known to Du Bois: he was
the former slave Richard Robert Wright, Sr., who lived between 1855 and
1947. Wright became famous once General Howard’s enthusiasm for and
appreciation of his spirited response to Howard’s inquiries became widely
known. Whittier’s encomium immortalized Wright, though it left him
unnamed. As the poem is fairly short, we may quote it in full:
Right in the track where Sherman

Ploughed his red furrow,
Out of the narrow cabin,
Up from the cellar’s burrow,
Gathered the little black people,
With freedom newly dowered,
Where, beside their Northern teacher,
Stood the soldier, Howard.
He listened and heard the children

Of the poor and long-enslavëd
Reading the words of Jesus,
Singing the songs of David.
Behold!—the dumb lips speaking,

The blind eyes seeing!
Bones of the Prophet’s vision
Warmed into being!
Transformed he saw them passing

Their new life’s portal!
Almost it seemed the mortal
Put on the immortal.
No more with the beasts of burden,
No more with stone and clod,
But crowned with glory and honor
In the image of God!
There was the human chattel

Its manhood taking;
There, in each dark, bronze statue,
A soul was waking!
The man of many battles,
With tears his eyelids pressing,
Stretched over those dusky foreheads
His one-armed blessing.
And he said: “Who hears can never

Fear for or doubt you;
What shall I tell the children
Up North about you?”
Then ran around a whisper, a murmur,
Some answer devising;
And a little boy stood up: “General,
Tell ‘em we’re rising!”
O black boy of Atlanta!

But half was spoken:
The slave’s chains and the master’s
Alike are broken.
The one curse of the races
Held both in tether:
They are rising,—all are rising,
The black and white together!
O brave men and fair women!

Ill comes of hate and scorning:
Shall the dark faces only
Be turned to morning?—
Make Time your sole avenger,
All healing, all redressing;
Meet Fate half-way, and make it
A joy and blessing!
After emancipation, and profiting from his unexpected fame, Wright

went on to graduate from Atlanta University (from which he also earned a
master’s degree). As a graduate, he frequently accompanied the university’s
president, Edmund Asa Ware, on fundraising trips, during which he was
billed as “the black boy of Atlanta” (The Booker T. Washington Papers 114).
An adherent to the thought and policies of Booker T. Washington, Wright
went on to become, in 1889, the first president of Georgia State Industrial
College in Savannah. He was active in the Republican Party, which at that
time in history was the party of most African American voters, as it was
the party of the “great emancipator” Abraham Lincoln, and was at that
historical moment more amenable than the Democratic Party to African
Americans’ desire for social parity and civil rights. Wright often made his
political thoughts known through a newspaper he purchased and published
in Augusta, Georgia, which he ironically called The States Rights Sentinel.11
Wright’s visibility, and his friendship with Washington, brought him
to the attention of President McKinley, who sought to appoint him to the
post of minister to Liberia in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War.
Wright declined the offer. However, his political and social prominence
would nonetheless bring him to Du Bois’s attention, especially as Du Bois
later became a friend to and collaborator with Wright’s son, Richard R.
Wright, Jr., a young sociologist, in 1906. (Wright Jr.’s dissertation, The Negro
in Pennsylvania: A Study in Economic History, was completed in 1911 at the
University of Pennsylvania, and was published in 1912 by the A.M.E. Book
Concern. It seems certain that this study was fundamentally influenced by
Du Bois’s pioneering 1899 work of urban sociology, The Philadelphia Negro.)
In light of this, “Howard at Atlanta” was no simple poem for Du Bois.
Though Whittier, a well-known abolitionist and Quaker, had dedicated much
of his poetic output to such themes as the plight of the Negro, the labor
question, and social reform, his prosody in this piece is neither regular nor
remarkable. Indeed, the poem’s rhythm, when read aloud, emerges as uneven
and awkward. And to the twenty-first-century ear, such lines as “the little
black people” and “those dusky foreheads” sound, at best, condescending.

The poet’s effusion over their “dumb lips speaking” and their “blind eyes
seeing” lessen the reader’s conviction that Whittier had full confidence in the
humanity and social equality of his subjects. This doubt is only reinforced
by the lines of stanza five: “There was the human chattel / Its manhood
taking; / There, in each dark, bronze statue, / A soul was waking.” The
poet seems convinced that the gift of Lincoln—coming through the act
of Emancipation—had “transformed” the slaves from “beasts of burden” to
beings “. . . crowned with glory and honor / In the image of God!” (stanza
four), that they possessed little humanity before that “transformational”
moment. In fact, Whittier’s poem as a whole focuses not on Wright’s reply
to Howard—“General, / Tell ’em we’re rising”—a remark that is replete with
black agency, but on the white poet’s more inclusive reply to his reader:
“They are rising—all are rising— / The black and white together.” Similarly,
the child’s optimistic remarks are not among the lines Du Bois cites in his
paratext.12 Instead, he evokes the voice of the white poet, whose tone is
moralistic and corrective:
O black boy of Atlanta!

But half was spoken:
The slave’s chains and the master’s
Alike are broken.
The one curse of the races
Held both in tether:
They are rising,—all are rising,
The black and white together!
We must then consider a number of points: the fame of Whittier’s

poem must be coupled with Wright’s own fame, which was assured by the
time of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. It seems evident that
for Du Bois, the absent and unnamed figure of Wright, known to many
of his readers, black and white alike, would serve as an apt and symbolic
central figure of a moralistic tale of the South, rendered through the myth
of the hunter Atalanta. Wright’s adherence to the policies of Washington,13
whom Du Bois takes to task in good measure in chapter 3 of Souls, also
lends another contextual layer to our reading of the poetic excerpt. Du Bois
continues beyond chapter 3 to address Washington’s program of vocational
education and material prosperity in his critique of the city of Atlanta,
employing terms that evoke Marxian sociology. Ultimately in “Of the Wings
of Atalanta,” Du Bois calls for the imagining of a new day, a future wherein
wealth (such as that preached by Washington and secured by Wright) would

be neither “the end and aim of politics,” nor “the legal tender for law
and order,” nor “the ideal of the Public School” (417). “Of the Wings of
Atalanta” is among the briefest chapters of Souls, yet its economic analysis
of the South is among the most pointed and concise.
As with other chapters, chapter 5 negotiates critically the actual and
the notional, and this mediation is metaphorically reinforced by the Spiritual
that heads the chapter, “Oh, The Rocks and the Mountains.” The refrain
goes as follows:
O the rocks and the mountains shall all flee away

And you shall have a new hiding place that day.
This part is sung by a duet:
Sinner, sinner, give up your heart to God
And the chorus joins in on the final line:
And you shall have a new hiding place that day.
Du Bois’s excerpt gives the reader only measures four, five, and six,
whose lyrics are elements of the refrain: “And you shall have a new hiding
place that day.” In his essay, Du Bois argues that the panacea of wealth will
no longer hold the imagination of the South—black or white (and this in
accord with the last two lines of the excerpt he provides from Whittier’s
“Howard at Atlanta”). The “new hiding place” of the Spiritual will be attained
only by “founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered
search for Truth” (423). It seems also to refer to the “coming wings” of the
South (Souls 421), by which Du Bois means to signify the proper higher
education of the rising black middle class—an education that focuses upon
their humanity rather than their purses. The Spiritual resonates with the
metaphor of the veil in its use of a Biblical passage from the book of Isaiah
that speaks of wings of the Seraphim that veil the angel’s face and provide
a hiding place and a path away from the ills of the world (Isaiah 6:2).
As prefatory material for chapter 6, “Of the Training of Black Men,”
which expands the critique of political economy and the educational and
moral philosophy of chapter 5, Du Bois draws upon the opening bars of the
Spiritual “March On,” the lyrical excerpt from which reads, “Way over in
Egypt land, you shall gain the victory.” Unlike many of his other Spiritual
excerpts, this line alternates between the leader and the chorus, with the
leader singing the first clause (“Way over in Egypt land”), and the chorus
picking up the second (“you shall gain the victory”). The lyrics refer to
Egypt, also known as the land of Ham, Noah’s son and father of Canaan.
In pro-slavery discourse, the “peculiar institution” was regularly justified by
deeming it a result of the “curse of Canaan,” which came about after Ham
had witnessed his father Noah’s inebriated nakedness. When Noah emerged
from his drunken stupor to discover that his son had seen him unclothed,
he imprecated Ham’s son Canaan: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:25).
Of course, there was much wrong in the logic of slavery’s adherents:
Noah specifically cursed Canaan in retribution for his father’s sin; he made
no mention of Canaan’s offspring. Even if he had, the genealogy presented
in the Bible gives Canaan as the father of the ancient Palestinians,14 who
themselves later fell under the domination of the invading Israelites, to
whom the land of Canaan had been promised by God, and then again under
the control of the Egyptians during the late Bronze Age, around 1500 BC.
Thus, there existed some confusion in the thought of pro-slavery Christians,
who confounded Canaan’s curse and Ham’s standing as progenitor of the
darker races. For in addition to Canaan, Ham had also fathered Cush (the
forefather of Ethiopia), Mizraim (the ancestor of Egypt) and Phut (the
forebear of Sudan). Logically, if one wishes to read Noah’s anger against
Ham as a support for American (rather than Hebrew) slavery, then the
Bible would have had to document a curse against one of these African
primogenitors, not the Semitic one. The singers of “March On” appear to
ignore this fact in order to strengthen analogies between their own situation
of enslavement and that of the Israelites under Egypt.
The Spiritual is preceded by an excerpt from The Rubaiyat, written by
the Persian poet Omar Khayyam and translated by Edward FitzGerald. It
was first published anonymously in 1859, and remains a widely cited work
in English poetry. The quatrain proclaims the freedom of the soul in the
face of the body’s earthly shackles; its lines build upon the lyrical foundation
of “March On”:
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,

And Naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
Just as the poet encourages the disembodied human soul to ride naked
“on the Air of Heaven,” the embattled slave is buoyed by the Spiritual singers
with the encouragement to “march on” through the dust of a land that has,
in the history of the Israelite and the slave in their differing circumstances,
become synonymous with harsh bondage and the daily toil of life. Du
Bois returns to this imagery in the final paragraph of the essay, where he
maintains that his place of intellectual and social dwelling is “above the Veil,”
upon a “high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite” (438). The Biblical
metaphors here are multiple: it was Moses, son of an enslaved Israelite and
husband to an Ethiopian woman, who sighted the Promised Land from
the heights of Pisgah once he had led the Israelites to safety. Du Bois, in
marking his habitation as being above the Veil and in drawing the metaphor
of the Veil into relation with the Biblical symbol of the mount of Pisgah,
claims for himself the insight of the prophet. Further, in posing a challenge
to his reader, he conveys once more his solidarity with the mass of black
folk, who, like him, possess the power of prescience: “Are you so afraid lest
peering from this high Pisgah . . . we sight the Promised Land?” (438).
Metaphors of the Temporal and the Atemporal:

“Of the Black Belt,” “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,”
and “Of the Sons of Master and Man”
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are the most sociological chapters in Souls, and concern
themselves, in part at least, with the relation of the temporal world (a world
that can be observed and categorized by way of a critical, scientific gaze),
and the world that exists beyond the physical one in which human beings
live (a world constructed and attained through the imagination). There is
more to say about the paratexts from chapter 6 in relation to the one that
heralds “Of the Black Belt.” There, for the first time in Souls, the incipient
poetic paratext is not drawn from the poetry of Europe or America, but
from the poetry of the Bible, to which Du Bois alludes throughout Souls
in his own use of Biblical metaphors in the Forethought and the After-
Thought, as well as in his citations from the Spirituals. He chooses for his
first Biblical paratext one of the most confounding texts in the Bible, the
Song of Solomon, also referred to as the Canticle of Canticles. Biblical
scholars are often bemused by this book because of its subject matter. It is
quite obviously a love poem, erotic in some aspects and sensuous throughout.
Thus scholars have struggled to make sense of its place not only in the King
James Version of the Bible, but also in the arrangement of the Megillot.
In the Hebrew Bible, the Megillot is composed of five scrolls: the
Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Historically,
each scroll has been read in liturgies celebrating annual Jewish festivals. The
festal scroll for Passover, Song of Solomon, is also a metaphorical song of

liberation: it memorializes the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under the
guidance of Moses (thereby linking the passage from Song of Solomon
to the previous essay in a way that is not immediately obvious); and it
commemorates the sparing of their first born on the eve of the exodus.
Most interpretations of the Song of Solomon have read it as allegorical
and dramatic: the apparent love story given in a dialogue between a man
and a woman is seen as an allegory of and testament to God’s love for the
Hebrews, to whom the slaves regularly analogized their own situation of
bondage. In Christian thought, the book is understood as an allegory of
Christ’s love for the church.
When Du Bois gives a passage from Song of Solomon as an
introductory paratext to “Of the Black Belt,” we are immediately reminded
of those paratextual elements that introduce chapter 6, “Of the Training
of Black Men.” The Spiritual “March On” especially relates to the exodus
of the Jews and the securing of their freedom from enslavement; and the
culmination of that chapter, where Du Bois metaphorically evokes the last
days of Moses as God shows him the Promised Land from the heights of
Pisgah, links the eve of the exodus, elicited by the reading of the Song of
Solomon, with its apogee in God’s unveiling of Canaan. All of this is related
specifically to Du Bois’s own metaphor of the Veil, with its implications
of insight, prophecy, and knowledge, and its direct relation to the texts of
Moses.
These seem in clear ways concomitant of the Spiritual that accompanies
the poem from the Canticles, “Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard.” “Bright
Sparkles” is among the most complex of the spiritual compositions Du Bois
cites: it calls for parts sung by a duo of soprano and tenor, by a trio of first
and second sopranos along with an alto, by a quartet, and by a chorus. Du
Bois describes it as a “maze-like medley” (540); he seems to have seen the
song as a musical miscellany, and indeed it appears so. The song puts forward
a movement of themes: it begins with both a wish and an affirmation of
the wish’s fulfillment:
May the Lord—He will be glad of me

In-a heaven, He’ll rejoice
From this verse and a related refrain, both of which are sung
antiphonally, the song moves to a duo of soprano and tenor. Here the
lyrics give the impression of being unrelated to those of the first verse. The
unison and harmony with which this verse is expressed is expanded as it
is repeated by a quartet:
Bright sparkles in the churchyard

Give light unto the tomb
Bright summer, spring’s over
Sweet flowers in their bloom
“Bright Sparkles” is sung at Easter time, which generally coincides with

Passover. Thus, there is a sort of synergy created by the pairing of the Biblical
verse from Song of Solomon and the Spiritual in relation to the sociological
essay Du Bois pens. His essay on Georgia—“the black belt”—names the area
as “historic ground” (439). It stands as the “centre of the Negro problem”
that so vexed sociologists, including Du Bois himself. Dougherty County,
which was the subject of an earlier sociological study by Du Bois, stands
at the west end of the black belt, and was once called the “Egypt of the
Confederacy” (Souls 449). Yet the imagery here is reversed. In Du Bois’s
analysis of the Egypt of the South, the Jew is no longer slave, but legatee of
the former slave system. Jews are, in a twist of irony, the beneficiaries of the
New World Egypt which has, in turn, become their land of promise: “The
Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty; and as we ride westward,
by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we
see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan” (450).
Each of these poetic and musical paratexts appears to weave a tapestry
of meaning, and Du Bois extends this intertwining in chapter 8, “Of the
Quest of the Golden Fleece,” returning once again to the apocalyptic scene
of the Book of Revelation and underscoring that somehow, chapters 6, 7,
and 8 are of a piece. The poem “The Brute” (1901), which prefaces chapter
8 and accompanies the elusive Spiritual “Children, You’ll be Called On” (a
song that is not widely anthologized), is an imagistic and allegorical poem
about the pitfalls of industrialism in the modern age. In this way, the poem
again takes up the concerns Du Bois addresses in chapter 5, “Of the Wings
of Atalanta.” As Du Bois does in that chapter, the poem’s author, William
Vaughn Moody, eventually ends on a positive note, with a strident hope in
the future that is tempered by an undertone of wariness and circumspection.
And like Du Bois’s 1911 novel that bears a similar name—The Quest of the
Silver Fleece—chapter 8 is a reflection upon both the political economy of the
southern American context, as well as the sociological practice Du Bois felt
sure would render apparent the elemental features and effects of that political
economy. For this, he argues, real contact with the people of the South is
required. As in the essay, “Sociology Hesitant” (c. 1904), Du Bois asserts at
length that wholesale arguments and generalizations about black society and
culture are not simply feckless, but also counterproductive. What is demanded
is a redressal of the havoc that had been wreaked by the South’s industrial
modern economy, which was responsible for many ills that abounded in the
African American community, including the destabilization of the African
American family. The undermining of the black family in fact meant the
erosion of the sort of national group that Du Bois (in “Conservation” and
elsewhere) deemed necessary for the progress and elevation of black folk.
Throughout this chapter and permeating Souls in general is Du
Bois’s underscoring of the southern merchant as a thorn that exasperates
the so-called Negro Problem. The rise of the southern merchant after the
feudalism of American slavery introduced in the South—just as it had in
modern Europe—a new and different type of slavery. For modern Europe,
the problem was encapsulated in what Karl Marx defined as “wage slavery.”
For the American South, the problem was concisely stipulated by Du Bois
as the “slavery of debt” (466). The images Du Bois found in Moody’s poem
fold neatly into the sociological work of “Of the Quest of the Golden
Fleece,” and here we must consider the function Du Bois was convinced
sociology should carry out. For Du Bois, the value in sociological work
lay in its concern with political economy, from which the more significant
sociological studies descended.15 Thus for him, any consideration of the
state of society in which African Americans found themselves in the early
twentieth century had to be concerned also with the state of the economy.
Moody’s poem serves these ends. Du Bois’s excerpt of it reads:
But the Brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind have ceased,
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!
On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know;
They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.”
With poetry such as this, Moody is said to have anticipated the

generation of modernist poets who came after him, including T. S. Eliot.
Moody was doubtlessly in Du Bois’s general acquaintance, as he graduated

from Harvard in 1893 (two years before Du Bois would) and was, until
a few years later, an instructor of English there. Robert Morss Lovett, a
classmate whom Du Bois deemed to be “perhaps the closest white student
friend [he] made at Harvard” (Autobiography 288), wrote of Moody as
an intellectually powerful and aesthetically gifted poet whose “reputation
[passed] into eclipse” (Lovett 463) through a brain tumor that struck him
down in 1910 at the age of 41. Eliot entered Harvard in 1906; Moody
had, by this time, left Harvard for the University of Chicago, where he and
Lovett both served on the English faculty. By 1906, Moody was nationally
noted for his poetry, and his most popular work—a prose play entitled
The Great Divide—was published during Eliot’s freshman year. Eliot’s The
Waste Land, which appeared in 1922, featured a sweeping, desolate urban
landscape marred by the ravages of world war. Similarly, Moody’s poem,
from which Eliot’s prosody profits, might be called a millenarian anti-
encomium expressing hesitant hope in what was often a brutish modern
economic and social terrain. Yet, as a poet expressing himself well before
the Great War, he evinced a good deal more faith in the potential of the
modern industrial era than did Eliot. Of the two, Eliot emerges by far as
the more quixotic, trusting in the emancipatory gospel of poetry even as he
disparaged modern industry in song.
Although himself a poet, Du Bois could little afford to trust so
singularly in the power of poetry. Well before Eliot’s interests turned to
sociology during the 1930s, Du Bois assiduously advanced a theory of
society that drew upon sociology, anagogy, and political economy as well
as the poetic. Moody’s hesitant optimism, his feral poetic imagery, and his
ultimate faith in the moral rectitude of men16 suited well Du Bois’s insistence
upon holding the protagonists of power to the test of fire. There is a way
in which the image of the Brute portrayed by Moody may be likened to
the Beast that wreaks havoc in the final book of the Bible, Revelation—a
text to which Du Bois repeatedly alludes in Souls as well as in a number
of his other creative writings. (See, for example, the apocalyptic themes at
work in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920); “The Revelation of
Saint Orgne the Damned” (1938); and the dénouement of Dark Princess: A
Romance, published in 1928.) Both creatures are emblematic of systemic evil
or oppression: the Biblical beast is taken by some as symbolic of Roman
tyranny against Christians; and the monster conjured by Moody takes the
shape of a creative/destructive modern force not unlike that which populated
the imagination of Friedrich Nietzsche.
In fact, if we take the thrust of “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece”
as a guide to our analysis, we see that it is precisely the humanistic potential
that lay underutilized and half dormant in modern political economy that
appealed to Du Bois. In addition to his commentary on modern sociology,
there are three other threads of thought that suffuse the essay: the black
family, the white Southern merchant, and what Du Bois characterizes as
the widening schism between “master and man,” which reached its nadir in
the Sam Hose affair of 1899. Du Bois wrote early on that the instability
of the black family unit was indubitably the legacy of slavery (460–461).
It is, he avers, economic in cause (461). Thus, the challenges faced by the
black family had much to do with the problem of the white merchant, who
filled the vacuum of power left by the Southern “aristocrat” after the fall of
the South. The white merchant ushered in a different kind of slavery, which
took the shape of peonage and “lawless oppression” (468) against African
American families.
One might read in the intersection between the Jubilee evoked in the
Spiritual, the apocalypse implicit in Moody’s poem, and the chasm between
the burgeoning white middle class and a black underclass the image of an
afterlife, an “all-life,” as Du Bois puts it in “Of the Passing of the First
Born.” The apocalyptic tones of Moody’s poem, in as much as they allude
to the Book of Revelation, have to do not simply with the world’s end,
but also with the making of life anew. Thus its verses are apt as allusions
to the modern forces of creation and destruction. At the end of the Book
of Revelation, the earth is harvested of all non-believers, and their blood
courses through the city in an image of vines pulverized in a winepress.
It is as though city and country are melded; indeed, Du Bois’s imagery in
chapter 8 begins with a rural field of golden cotton likened to the prized
fleece sought by Jason, and it ends with an admonition to urban planners
that the antidote for their ills might well lie beyond the city walls in the
fields from which the dragons of peonage and oppression spring (474).
Such metaphors are evocative of the Spiritual, “Children, You’ll be
Called On,” with its references to marching in the field of battle, rejoicing
in the Jubilee, and the prospects of an after-life or after-world that has seen
the end of earthly warfare. Etymologically descending from the Hebrew,
the word Jubilee originally referred to a ram’s horn with which good news
was announced by a sounding; its sense later came to be associated with a
wild cry or shout proclaiming freedom and restoration. The Spiritual also
resonates with the Book of Jubilees, a set of fragments found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls; though originally written in Biblical Hebrew, the book is
preserved in an Ethiopic (classical Ge’ez) translation, and retells the history

of Israel from the creation until Moses’s ascent to Mt. Sinai (well before his
viewing of the Promised Land from Mt. Pisgah). Thus “Children, You’ll be
Called On” might be seen—like Moody’s poem—to allude to destruction in
the face of evil. And, complementing “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,”
it evokes images of re-creation in its hope for the future, temporal as well
as non-temporal.
Du Bois’s probing of the soft underbelly of Southern politics,
economics, and the widening chasm these discourses produced continues
in chapter 9 of Souls, “Of the Sons of Master and Man.” Here the chasm
made apparent in the previous chapter is explored with the intent of blurring
its edges. This is the argument Du Bois announces to the reader through the
paratext drawn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s mid-nineteenth-century
poem, “A Vision of Poets.” A bit of background on this poem will help us
see the place Barrett Browning’s work in general, and this poem in particular,
holds in Du Bois’s thought, for the poetry of Barrett Browning, like that
of Tennyson, appears frequently as paratexts throughout Du Bois’s oeuvre.
“A Vision of Poets” (1844) was published at a time when Lowell,
Whittier, Tennyson, and other poets included in Souls were at the height
of their profession. By the mid-nineteenth century, Barrett Browning was
likewise considered to be among the foremost poets living and writing.
Undoubtedly, Du Bois was quite familiar with her work, and this is evident
in his choice to cite two of her poems as epigraphs to chapters 9 and 13 in
Souls. “A Vision of Poets” combines the traditions of nineteenth-century lyric
and narrative poetry in its depiction of an unlauded pilgrim-poet disaffected
by a society that does not appreciate or recognize the worth of his gift. In
a poem of 1005 lines and 335 triplets, Barrett Browning guides her poet
through a nocturnal journey of dream-induced enlightenment. The insight
of truth that the poet gains comes by transgressing a number of boundaries:
life and death, symbolized in the poem by the juxtaposition of sleeping
and waking; good and evil; light and darkness; ascent and descent; and
temporal existence and its atemporal counterpart. As the angels of the poem
aver, truth is known only through an experiential knowledge of suffering.
Similarly and equally ironic, Barrett Browning writes unsparingly, “life is
perfected by death” (stanzas 309 and 335).
The sufferings of the poet are described in salvific terms: his drinking
from the pools of water are described in the poem as a “baptism” (l. 551),
depicting the poet’s journey not only as Christ-like but also as a process of
renewal and rebirth. It is thus a bit surprising when we find—years later in
the poem’s narrative time—that the poet has died of his social, psychic, and
emotional wounds. We witness, then, the martyrdom of the truth seeker, a

trope that is wholly striking in light of the peregrinations of the narrator
of Souls, Du Bois’s poet-pilgrim/poet-prophet, who traverses the leaves of
the text and dialectically situates himself simultaneously within the spheres
of the temporal and atemporal worlds in varied human form (narrating the
lives of John, Burghardt, Crummell, Josie, and Du Bois himself ).
This sort of rupturing of narrative frames, where the various essays of
Souls form a set of concentric rings whose theme is, after all, a quest and
search for meaning, what Du Bois refers to as the “strivings” of the souls
of black folk, effects an openness that is operant through the book. It is an
openness that functions morally, for it is at base an insistence upon freedom,
democratic freedom and the possibilities that emerge from what Du Bois
refers to, in “Sociology Hesitant” as “chance.”
It is through this insight that Barrett Browning advises the pilgrim-
poet and all others who submit themselves to the vicissitudes of the demiurge,
that the separation of the two spheres of understanding—the conscious and
the unconscious—establishes a false limit of knowledge thanks to which
we pretend to grasp fully the import of this or that. The limits of the two
spheres must be transgressed in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, she
insists. This point Barrett Browning makes clearly in the first triplet of the
“Conclusion” to “A Vision of Poets,” and it is this triplet that Du Bois
chooses for his epigraph to chapter 9, “Of the Sons of Masters and Man”:
Life treads on life, and heart on heart

We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart
Here Barrett Browning’s poet extols the idea of “chance” that Du

Bois discusses at length in “Sociology Hesitant”: the chance, or possibilities,
that emerge from the contact of social groups. In “Of the Sons of Master
and Man,” Du Bois describes this social intercourse as the “world-old
phenomenon” of the global contact of “diverse races of men” (475). Such a
widespread occurrence may be beneficially studied in the American South,
Du Bois insists, and, after a fashion, such is the thrust of The Souls of Black
Folk: the situating of the Negro not simply within the American social plane,
but, more importantly, within the plane of the global. Thus in the poetic
excerpt, he at once announces his intent to effect a rapprochement of the
global and the local. Much of what he sets about arguing here emerges from
what he sees as the reciprocity of racism and socioeconomic disparities. The
color-line is produced by this reciprocity; racism and class discrimination
act as structural agents that produce “race,” which, as we have seen, Du

Bois defines in “The Conservation of Races” (1897) as a “most ingenious
invention” for the effecting of progress.
When we consider the lines of the “Conclusion” in light of these points
as well as those lines that close the poem—“Knowledge by suffering entereth
/ And Life is perfected by Death”—we gain the clear sense that Barrett
Browning is intent upon blurring the boundaries of knowledge, even at the
cost of the alienation the creative individual may inevitably experience. In
this case, such alienation is endured by the poet-pilgrim, who determines
to know and to be known.
The Spiritual Du Bois chooses to preface chapter 9, entitled “I’m a
Rolling,” echoes the alienation of the poet-pilgrim who figures prominently
in Barrett Browning’s poem, and who calls out—in anguish—for the comfort
of community and recognition. The singer of the Spiritual does likewise:
I’m a rolling, I’m a rolling

I’m a rolling thro’ an unfriendly world
I’m a rolling, I’m a rolling thro’ an unfriendly world
O brothers, wont you help me,

O brothers, wont you help me to pray?
O brothers wont you help me
Wont you help me in the service of the Lord?
It is the final line of the song, and its return to the song’s beginning
in exact time, that Du Bois cites as a musical paratext to the essay:
Wont you help me in the service of the Lord?

I’m a rolling, I’m a rolling
Du Bois seems also to place the excerpt from the Spiritual into relation
with the poetic lines that close chapter 9, which are drawn from Tennyson’s
famous poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.” (1850), a poem that Du Bois cites
in a number of his works. It hardly seems pure coincidence that Barrett
Browning likewise uses Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” as an epigraph for “A
Vision of Poets”:
That mind and soul according well,

May make one music as before,
But vaster.
In Tennyson’s verse, where the poet mourns the loss of his friend,
ponders the values of the temporal, and imagines the mysteries of the
non-material world, there is a transgression of boundaries that echoes the
Spiritual’s, Du Bois’s, and Barrett Browning’s gestures of contravening the
categories of human knowing through experience, melding or blurring, for
instance, body and mind, or mind and soul (that is, reasoning and thought
vs. spirituality and intuition). There is much of this at work in the poem;
and this sort of working draws this poetic paratext into relation with the
poem from Browning as well as the Spiritual.
The Fundamental Mythopoetics of Metaphor in

African American Religion: “Of the Faith of the Fathers”
Chapter 10 of Souls, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” appears to be a

transitional chapter between the section it follows and that which it prefaces.
In poetic terms, it might be seen as an enjambement: it has the mixed
effect of broaching a new topic—African American religious practice—at
the same time that it pushes forward its exposition of the radical newness
of black being in the modern era. This is accomplished in two ways in this
chapter. First, Du Bois presents the reader with a popular poem drawn
from a poetic stage play by William Sharp (writing under the pseudonym
Fiona Macleod); and then he presents the reader with an archetypal Negro
Spiritual, “Steal Away,” thereby signaling the central importance of this
chapter and its paratexts. In terms of the structure of Souls, chapter 10
serves as prefatory material for the three chapters that follow it, and provides
a critical framework for what would prove to be Du Bois’s longstanding
practice of coupling anagogy (a specialized form of allegorical representation
that allows a reader to interpret spiritual and even eschatological meanings
in a text) and auto/biography (whereby the authorial self and a discursive
other are represented through narrative allegory—the authorial “I” regularly
posits an other, whose life circumstances permit the author to expound upon
a set of problems that are social, political, racial in nature). A life story is
thus set up for critical discussion and analysis; often in Du Bois’s writing
practice, the biographical self and the authorial self merge in ways that may
be described as at once anagogical and metaphysical (or, onto-theological, as
with Equiano and Harper). A discussion of the background for this chapter
may help us better understand its import, for it would seem that this is
the best way to explicate the oddest choice of the poetic paratexts Du Bois
chooses, “Dim Face of Beauty.”
Three years before “Of the Faith of the Fathers” appeared as part of The
Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois traveled by transatlantic steamship to
Paris, France in June, 1900. There, he oversaw the installation of his decidedly
successful Exhibit on American Negroes at the Exposition Universelle, that
year’s world’s fair. Du Bois would write very little about his time in Paris,17
yet it is clear that the event held a good deal of significance for him, for it
provided him—and American Negroes as a group—an international stage
upon which to demonstrate the advances and development of their culture,
education, social customs and structure, intellectual output, and, indeed, the
very diversity of what was called the Negro “type.”
The success of the Exposition buoyed Du Bois as he left Paris for
London, where the July 1900 Pan-African Conference, organized by the
Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams and of which Du Bois
himself served as secretary, would take place. As biographer David Levering
Lewis puts it, Du Bois finally found himself within a broad international
circle of the black intellectual elite. Among the elite in attendance at the
Conference was one of the most celebrated men of African descent in
England, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Due to the widespread
success of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s early work in the 1890s, Du Bois
knew well of Coleridge-Taylor’s intellectual and creative output, and made
his initial acquaintance during the Pan-African Conference. Subsequently,
Coleridge-Taylor and his wife, Jessie, befriended the prominent African
American scholar, who was, as was so often his wont, traveling without
his own wife. They enjoyed his company on a number of occasions, and
invited him to their home, where they made him comfortable and prepared
him a meal. Together, the three were in attendance at the Crystal Palace,
where Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted the full Hiawatha suite, which
had premiered, in its entirety, earlier that year.18 Du Bois tells the story of
the Crystal Palace performance and of his time with the Coleridge-Taylors
in his essay, “The Immortal Child,” a critical biography of Coleridge-Taylor
that Du Bois uses to extol the absolute necessity of black progeny. It was
published in the 1920 collection of essays, short stories, and poetry entitled
Darkwater.
Du Bois’s interest in Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha helps explain his
choice of “Dim Face of Beauty” as a paratext in Souls. Based on Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s book-length poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855),
a legend-based folk epic that held great appeal for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(as it certainly did for Antonín Dvorak), yet frustrated earlier composers
who had sought to put it to music, Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha trilogy
holds some affinity with other epic-like musical performances of its time,
including—importantly, I will argue—William Sharp’s poetic-drama, The

House of Usna (1900). It is from Sharp’s work, which I see as an indirect
allusion to the creativity of Coleridge-Taylor, that Du Bois draws the poetic
paratext for chapter 10, “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” Du Bois uses a poem
set to music and performed in the second scene of Sharp’s one-act play. Its
title is “Dim Face of Beauty”:
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,

“Fair face of Beauty” all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,—
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be,
...................
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
Of Ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
Though Samuel Coleridge-Taylor would not visit America until the

year after Du Bois’s Souls appeared in print, William Sharp visited the
United States in 1889 and 1890, during Du Bois’s undergraduate years at
Harvard. New York served as his home base; there he was the guest of
the poet and critic Edmund C. Stedman and his wife. He spent time with
W. D. Howells, a certain Professor Wright of Harvard University, and a
historian by the last name of Windsor (Memoir 153). He also spent time
with Arthur Sherburne Hardy, author of Passe Rose,19 and he met with a
number of editors: Richard W. Gilder, poet and editor of Century Magazine;
Henry Mills Alden of Harpers Magazine; and the poet-critic Richard Henry
Stoddard. During his time in the States, Sharp was elected an honorary
member of the Century Club and the Players Club. He made a lasting
impression upon the students at Harvard, who would dedicate an issue of
the Harvard Monthly to his work in 1903. And while he was in the United
States, he made the acquaintance of Thomas A. Janvier, author of Colour
Studies (1885), a collection of sketches of life in Mexico and Greenwich
Village.
On first glance, the excerpt from Sharp’s work and the Spiritual, “Steal
Away,” which serves as the second paratext of the chapter, have little in
common; they certainly seem distant from any consideration of the creativity
of Coleridge-Taylor. Indeed, there is little in “Dim Face of Beauty” that
makes it appear immediately significant to Du Bois’s essay, “Of the Faith

of the Fathers,” in any way. Yet the number of historical events that place
Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha trilogy into some relation with The House of
Usna, coupled with the fact that Du Bois, seemingly intent upon choosing
poetry from the Euro-American tradition as paratexts for all but the final
chapter of Souls, pairs this poem with one of the most important Spirituals
in the African American canon, compel the attention of the reader. This
becomes even more apparent through an examination of the relation—
historical, intellectual, and artistic—between Sharp and Coleridge-Taylor.
The two men are, of course, of the same historical moment. More than this,
though, they were members of intellectual and artistic circles that frequently
intersected and overlapped. Both men, for example, were close friends of the
poet Alfred Noyes, who would, ironically, pen eulogies to each man upon his
death. (Noyes’s elegy to Coleridge-Taylor is engraved on his elaborate marble
headstone at Bandon Hill Cemetery in the London Borough of Sutton.)
Both men were also acquaintances of the poet Robert Browning, husband
to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is cited, intertextually, twice in Souls;
although it was rumored in Browning’s own time that he was a Jew (such a
belief was explored and then dismissed by William Sharp, who nonetheless
noted in Browning’s mannerism idiosyncrasies that he generalized to Jews
as a group20), Browning was partly of African descent, his grandmother
having been a Creole from the West Indies. And, finally, the closeness of
the dates on which the two works debuted is striking: the full Hiawatha
trilogy debuted to critical praise on March 22, 1900, while The House of
Usna premiered during the following month.
These are not the only coincidences that obtain in the lives and work
of these two men. Like the Hiawatha trilogy, The House of Usna draws upon
myth and legend in order not only to speak the national narrative of a
people, but also to give voice to a people’s collective desire. A one-act play in
three scenes, The House of Usna was first performed by The Stage Society, of
which William Sharp himself was president. It was published under Sharp’s
pen name, Fiona Macleod, first by the Fortnightly Review in the months
following its premier, and later in book form by Heinemann of London in
1900. The House of Usna was intended to form a part of a series of plays
that Sharp would title The Theatre of the Soul or The Psychic Drama.21 Only
in 1903 did the play appear in book form in the United States, a bit too
late for it to be of influence in Du Bois’s writing of the Souls of Black Folk,
but its earlier run in the Fortnightly Review or the 1900 Heineman edition
might have been of some importance to the initial version of “Of the Faith
of the Fathers,” which was published as “The Religion of the American
Negro” in 1900 in the December issue of the periodical New World.22 It is

likely that Du Bois became acquainted with this play and with the excerpt
he quotes in Souls during his time in London in June of 1900, when he met
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and attended the Pan-African Conference during
the months prior to publishing “The Religion of the American Negro.”23 It
is also likely that the subject matter of the Hiawatha trilogy, steeped deeply
as it was in lore and legend, made feasible for Du Bois his use of The House
of Usna as a paratext for chapter 10.
Now that we understand a bit better the import of the play and its
possible attraction for Du Bois, let us focus on elements of the play in
order to situate properly the excerpt Du Bois chooses and determine its
relation to the essay and the Spiritual. For our purposes, we may limit
our discussion to the primary characters of the play: Concobar Macnessa,
the king of Ulster and founder of the “Red Branch” (a forerunner of the
Arthurian legend that grounds yet another paratext of Souls, Idylls of the
King, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which prefaces chapter 12, “Of Alexander
Crummell”); and Deirdre, the great object of Concobar’s affection, reputed
to be the greatest beauty in all of Ireland. Deirdre did not return Concobar’s
love, and instead rebuffed him openly and eloped with her lover, Naysha,
one of the sons of the House of Usna and Concobar’s nephew. Deirdre,
Naysha, and his two brothers ran away to the Scottish wilderness to escape
Concobar’s vengeance. Sharp’s drama is set in the year following the exaction
of Concobar’s murderous revenge against Naysha and his brothers. Concobar
had long schemed to rid himself of the sons of Usna and had imagined
that doing so would permit him to secure Deirdre’s affections. However,
upon learning of Naysha’s death, Deirdre, too, dies (differing versions of
the legend tell of her suicide by various means, or of her willing herself to
death through grief ).
Herbert Fackler sees the play as focusing upon “the effects of
Concobar’s treachery . . . and the repetition of a cycle of love and death in
which Concobar has participated” (187). Fackler also points out that there
are at least two levels of meaning at work in the play. On the first level,
we find “a dream of the effects of love, revenge, remorse, and loss of the
object of desire on a number of noble characters.” And on the second level,
we encounter “a universal pattern re-created in a cyclical manner, indicating
the extent to which the action portrayed may be interpreted as a cultural
archetype” (187).
The archetypal aspects of the play may explain its widespread appeal.
A number of its poetic elements, including “Dim Face of Beauty,” were
reprinted in later collections of Sharp’s works, and give evidence of the
popularity of this poem, which, in the play, is rendered as a song. Thus,

“Dim Face of Beauty,” sung in the second scene of The House of Usna
by Mainé, a Norse prince and part of Concobar’s retinue, might be read
critically alongside the “master-song,” “Steal Away,” which serves as the
second paratext to chapter 10.
At issue in “Of the Faith of the Fathers” is Du Bois’s argument that
black religion is at a critical stage at the turn of the twentieth century.24 This
is due not least to the times in which he wrote. The anarchical atmosphere
that I discuss at length in the preceding chapter still tinged the era in which
Souls appeared.25 Further, there was the so-called “Negro Problem” of which
Du Bois would write extensively in his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,”26
and which occupied a good deal of his attention in Souls and elsewhere.
American Negroes, Du Bois tells us, are compelled constantly to “discuss the
‘Negro Problem,’—must live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret
all else in its light or darkness” (my italics 501–502). The “problem,” rendered
as an ontological metaphor here and elsewhere in Du Bois’s writings (“ ‘How
does it feel to be a problem?’ Du Bois writes rhetorically in the opening
paragraph of Souls), touched upon their innermost lives, including their
religious beliefs, which prescribed, in good measure, their interpretation of
the world in which they lived. The constraints of the Negro Problem served
as the founding condition of double-consciousness, Du Bois argues. He
describes the Negro’s double-consciousness not only in racial and national
terms in this essay, but also in historical terms that recall his definition of
race in “The Conservation of Races.” He writes:
From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro
and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth
while struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century—from
this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid
sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to
self-confidence. (502)
The reference to the fifteenth century in this citation is surely a

reference to the early time of the Middle Passage, an event situated in
the episteme of the early modern period. Compare this point to Du Bois’s
mention (in chapter 12, “Of Alexander Crummell”) of the nineteenth
century as the first century in which “we began to descry in others that
transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself ” (514), that is, when
anagogical interpretation merged with modern views of selfhood to produce
what we today call individual subjectivity. Selfhood, self-consciousness, and
being are all of signal importance to the crux of this essay. How, then, might
we see such concepts at work in the essay’s paratexts?
As to the relation of the essay’s concepts to its paratexts, one should
note the dichotomy Du Bois sketches between the northern and southern
Negroes, and their respective religious practices. Life in the South has
rendered a Negro group that is pretentious and hypocritical in nature, and
overly eager to compromise, Du Bois argues in tones that recall his criticism
of Booker T. Washington; opposed to them are the northern Negroes, whom
Du Bois deems to be of rebellious and radical character. Such a dichotomy
may readily reflect upon the divergent characters at play in both the drama
and the song that introduce chapter 10. “Dim Face of Beauty” bespeaks a
tragedy of madness and radicalism, all played out against the backdrop of
Irish national desire and a battle for supreme power. “Steal Away” speaks
to the influence of black abolitionism that Du Bois considers formative of
the thought of the slave (500–501). While “Dim Face of Beauty” is sung
in the aftermath of horrific murders and the senseless death of a nation’s
beauty, “Steal Away” may be sung either as an act of spiritual submission and
fatalism (the song could be read as a paean to death), or as an act of social
and political defiance, a radical denial of the institution of slavery and a
recognition of burgeoning modern self-consciousness (the song was regularly
sung in advance of slave escapes). This point appears to reflect what Du
Bois implies earlier in the book: that black being is at once resurgent and
under threat of social erasure, and that this dualism is, in part, constitutive
of the problem of double-consciousness.
In fact, “Steal Away” appears to characterize the shift in black
consciousness that Du Bois sees taking place between two songs he cites
in “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” For the first, he gives the following lines,
sung by slave “bards” (500) in prophetic tones:
Children, we all shall be free

When the Lord shall appear!
These lines indicate for Du Bois a “deep religious fatalism” that

developed side by side with the sensibilities of “the martyr” (500), practically
a stance of submission that is countered by what he sees as the more daring,
abolitionist nature of the song “O Freedom,” a Spiritual that is well known
to today’s reader:
O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!

Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave

And go home to my Lord
And be free. (501)
Unlike the lines from the prior song, this latter indicates for Du Bois
the extent to which “Negro religion” transformed itself from a “fatalistic
faith” (500) that led to a lack of subjectivity, to a radical “dream of Abolition”
(501) whose insistence upon freedom provides the basis for modern black
being. Du Bois would later revise his stance on the early passiveness of
the slave in the face of a battle for his or her own emancipation.27 Yet it
is clear that in 1900 and 1903, he saw the dialectical aspects between the
fatalism of early black religion and the radicalism of nineteenth-century
abolition as productive of a crisis in black religion in his own time. This
crisis had to do with the modernity of black life, which was, as Du Bois
saw it, a double, contradictory, and conflicted life. After a fashion, Du Bois
would argue, the dilemma of the American Negro is no more and no less
a quintessentially modern dilemma, shaped by anarchist and radical thought
coupled with social upheaval. It is “simply the writhing of the age translated
into black,—the triumph of the Lie which to-day, with its false culture, faces
the hideousness of the anarchist assassin” (503).
The northern Negro, arguably in closer touch with the “soul-life” of
the “great modern nation” (501) than the Negro of the South, was thus
also much more prone to radicalism than his or her southern counterpart.
Yet the southern Negro does not escape Du Bois’s judgment either, for
s/he is prone to sycophancy, to “hypocritical compromise” (503). Even so,
the black southern “proletariat,” as Du Bois strikingly calls them (and thus,
acknowledges their own revolutionary potential in spite of their fatalism and
lack of subjectivity), are also prone to use deception against their conquerors,
much as the rebellious South worked to deceive its stronger counterpart,
the North. It is reflective of the global situation or condition of persons
of African descent: “Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United
States—is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have
gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie” (504).
If the price of culture is a lie, then so is the price of modern civilization,
and, indeed, of the modern-nation state itself, given the processes of memory
and forgetting—that is, revisionist historicism—that must be marshaled and
engaged for nation formation to take place. Modern nationalism requires
the forgetting of disparate histories in order to effect the coherence of a
national people. Such “cohesion” rarely, in fact, bonds a people together, and
it is the schisms in this union that Du Bois seems determined to expose.
If the northern Negro has been labeled a radical, it is, in part, Du

Bois intimates, because s/he has been driven from the land s/he considers
to be home, the South of his or her “birthright” (504), with all the images
and implications that follow and pertain to such a term. (Consider the
title “Steal Away” in this light—that not only are slaves taking their own
freedom by force, but they are commenting—critically and sardonically—on
the fact that they must “take” their freedom by “stealing” their own bodies
and heading North.) Intellectually awakened to “new-found freedom” (504),
a freedom that Du Bois appears to deem undemocratic because it is, in
some way, forced, the northern Negro thus finds him/herself as unfree as
his or her southern counterpart. These two extremes, and the proletarian
“mass of millions” that fall between them, will, one day, sweep out of their
refashioned chains, Du Bois cautions, leaving their irons broken in the dust
as they move, en masse, in terrifying splendor, toward the goal of freedom.
Of course, this sort of interpretation may elicit a number of responses.
Certainly we might see in this dichotomy of sycophancy and radicalism a
reflection of the dichotomy of reason (North and South) Du Bois takes such
great pains to explicate in “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” It should not be
lost on the reader that the Celtic legend that is crystallized in “Dim Face
of Beauty” is akin to the theological mythopoetics that structures many
of the Spirituals, whose beauty Du Bois describes in the opening lines
of chapter 10 as coming to him “dimly across the fields” in a “cadence of
song,—soft, thrilling, powerful” (emphasis added, 493). Such a background
lends itself to the power the songs exert as regards the nationalism of black
people in America. (And I mean by such “nationalism” a fragile cultural
cohesion as that described by Du Bois in this chapter, one delicately but
purposely forged by slaves who descended from disparate ethno-linguistic
groups (mainly) in West Africa. We might say that the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century subjectivities fashioned by American Negroes were
birthed by the eddying waters of the Middle Passage, which Du Bois also
references in “Of the Faith of the Fathers.”) Certainly the radicalness of
Concobar Macnessa, whose vengeance upon his lost love, Deirdre, resulted
not only in her death but also in his own unending remorse, is meant to
reflect upon the radicalness of the Northern Negro Du Bois describes in
less than flattering terms in the essay, whose rash actions surely result in
loss and contrition. On the other hand, the spiritual, reflective nature of
the Southern Negro, who, through an agency that Du Bois nonetheless
characterizes as deceitful and tactical, “steals” him or herself away from
the plantation and indeed, from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South,
which, even in Du Bois’s time of writing, serves as a prison and a place of
violence. We might also say, given Du Bois’s naming of “Steal Away” as an

archetypal musico-narrative, that he too sees that the song has much to do
with the wrenching of subjectivity from the dehumanizing conditions of
slavery, the snatching of one’s own being from the grip of social death, and,
thus, an insistence upon life by the slave him or herself. Therefore, “Steal
Away,” the archetypal musico-narrative of the black American experience,
symbolizes the willful forging of identity out of ignominy (in the Latin sense
of this word, indicating namelessness and anonymity). It is the insistence
upon self-determination, upon the condition of being even as non-being has
been imposed, in an over-determined fashion, from without.
The Soul’s Biography: Metaphors of Transition and Transcendence

in “Of the Passing of the First Born,” “Of Alexander Crummell,”
and “Of the Coming of John”
“Dim Face of Beauty,” and “Steal Away” also resonate with paratexts that
preface chapters 11, 12, and 13 of Souls, for the flight of black souls from
the world of the living into the eternity of the after life assumes the focus
of these chapters. In 1905, William Sharp, author of “Dim Face of Beauty,”
edited a collection of poetry by Charles Algernon Swinburne. He included
in this collection the 1864 poem, “Itylus,” the poetic paratext to chapter
11 of Souls, “Of the Passing of the First Born.” Du Bois’s use of the poem
works in accord with the meditative posture generally demanded of readers
of lyric poetry; indeed, Swinburne’s melding of the dramatic monologue
with lyric qualities in this poem provides Du Bois a language in which
to eulogize his son, Burghardt, who died of dysentery in 1899. Though
today’s critical readers often castigate Du Bois for what they consider his
insensitivity in neglecting, for example, to focus upon his wife’s grief rather
than his own (Du Bois does not even name his wife, Nina, in the essay,
but neither does he mention his son’s name, a point most critics overlook),
“Of the Passing of the First Born”—at times rendered as an extended prose
poem, a dramatic monologue of sorts—establishes a window through which
we, along with Du Bois’s contemporary reader, gaze in upon the scene of
his contemplative grief and come to know a further, angst-ridden aspect of
black being at the turn of the century.
Swinburne, an associate of Dante Gabriel Rosetti during his college
days, won early praise from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (another of Du Bois’s
favorite poets) for his 1865 drama Atalanta in Calydon, with which Du Bois
was likely familiar, since it echoed his own interest in the figure of Atalanta
(as we see in chapter 5 of Souls). “Itylus” is one of Swinburne’s best poems,

though in his time he was criticized for the piece’s anti-theism. There are
at least two versions of the Itylus story that Swinburne might have used
as a basis for his poem, and that thus indirectly impact the meaning at
work in Du Bois’s text. The first comes from the Greek myth of Aedon,
the daughter of Padareus, and wife of Zethus. Aedon envied her sister-
in-law Niobe for her many children and plotted to kill one of them. By
mistake, she slew her own child, Itylus, and mourned for him in such an
awful way that the gods transformed her into a nightingale. This story is
to be compared with that of Procne and Philomela. Ovid’s version of this
myth comes in Book Six of the Metamorphosis. After marrying Tereus, the
King of Thrace and a descendant of Mars, Procne, the princess of Athens,
soon gave birth to their first child, Itylus. She longed for the company
of her sister, Philomela, and sent Tereus to Athens to fetch her. Tereus,
lustful, was immediately taken with Philomela, so much so that as soon
as they returned to Thrace, he imprisoned and raped her, cutting out her
tongue afterwards to keep his misdeed a secret. Tereus convinced Procne
that her sister had died during the return voyage, and a year passed before
Philomela managed to get a message to Procne that she was alive and held
captive. Procne, filled with rage, liberated her sister during the carnival
season. To avenge her, Procne determined to slay Itylus, whose innocent
and youthful face seemed to her filled with the omen of his father’s vile
behavior. After Procne ran her dagger through the boy’s heart, Philomela,
mute, drew a cutlass across his throat. The women together cut the boy to
bits, and served him to his father, who unknowingly consumed him during
a ritual feast. Upon learning of the source of his repast, and sick that his
body now served as Itylus’s “sepulchral tomb” (Metamorphosis 1021), Tereus
pursued both sisters, intending to kill them, and they were changed by the
gods into birds—Procne a swallow, and Philomela a nightingale—to aid
their escape. (Others argue that the metamorphoses were reversed: Procne
a nightingale, and Philomela a swallow.) Tereus was likewise transformed.
In some legends he became a harpoo; in others, a hawk.
Swinburne appears closer to the story of Procne than that of Aedon, for
Procne’s tale is much more sinister. Yet he absolves one sister—Philomela—at
the expense of Procne, when both sisters acted murderously in Ovid’s tale. The
maternal violence of Itylus’s sacrifice is subsumed in Swinburne’s poem, and
instead of a lamentation of a regrettable marriage and infanticide, the poem
turns into a mournful elegy on the death of Itylus. Du Bois excerpts the final
stanza of the poem as an element of his own elegy to Burghardt, leaving aside
any hints of the mother’s culpability. The excerpt he give reads as follows:
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,

The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
In the excerpt, which deals not with Itylus’s murder but with its
aftermath, Procne would be the forgetful swallow, and Philomela the
moralistic, self-aware nightingale. In any case, the import of the full poem,
with its sedimented references to Tereus’s carnal feast and Procne and
Philomela’s infanticide, would be ill-matched to the meaning at work in Du
Bois’s essay. It is more so the mournful qualities of the single stanza of the
poem Du Bois chooses, full of sonic import conveyed by way of repetition,
alliteration, complex metaphorical phrases, and grief-ridden imagery, about
which I will say more shortly, that powerfully complement his elegy of his
son. No aspect of Procne’s maternal guilt should be taken to reflect upon
Du Bois’s wife, Nina, since the essay clearly portrays her as the most perfect
of mothers, devoting herself fully to the child’s life and mourning piteously
his death.
Nina is, in fact, emblematic of the ideal maternal figure referenced in
Du Bois’s use of the Spiritual, “I Hope My Mother Will Be There.” This
composition, Du Bois tells us in “The Sorrow Songs,” developed later in
the history of the Jubilee songs. He provides bars from the first two lines
of the Spiritual as a paratext: “I hope my mother will be there / In that
beautiful world on high.” The lyrics portray the mother as the child’s greatest
hope in the afterlife: the desire to see her “in that beautiful world on high”
assuages the earthly pain of young slaves grown old, many of whom had
been separated from their mothers as children.
In Du Bois’s text, the lyrics of the song are not the living child’s
address to the absent mother, but the deceased child’s address to the mother
tragically left behind, whose eventual passage to the world beyond the present
is likened, by way of metaphor, to a salvific transformation of being in the
full lyrics to the song: “With palms of victory / crowns of glory you shall
wear / In that beautiful world on high.” The metaphor “palms of victory”
alludes to the victorious entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem, an
event noted by each of the writers of the Gospels. Three of the four Gospels
refer to branches of trees laid before Christ as he made his way into the
city on the back of a donkey: John alone specifies that the branches were
from palm trees (12:13). Similarly, the metaphor “crowns of glory” carries
deep signification. Not only was a crown of thorns placed upon Christ’s
head at his crucifixion, to ridicule him for proclaiming himself the son of
God even as he was proven mortal through his crucifixion; a crown, as part
of the raiment of a king or queen, would be bestowed upon each of the
righteous in the afterlife, according to the slaves’ theology (a notion also
reflected in the song “I Shall Wear a Golden Crown”). The “crowns of glory”
referred to in this Spiritual thus allude not only to the rewards of life after
trials upon the earth, but also to the transfigured existence in which “glory”
itself is set to culminate, “the changing of the bodies of the saints to the
likeness of their glorified Lord,” as given in Philippians 3:20–21: “For our
conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord
Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like
unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even
to subdue all things unto himself.”
Through the Spiritual and the poem alike, the body of Burghardt
emerges as central to the metaphorics of the essay, in that the racialized
black body of Du Bois’s infant child serves to critique the processes of the
color-line that, in effect, brought about his death. Du Bois presages the
terrible outcomes of these processes through the intimate discourse of a
father’s fears for his child soon after he is born:
I held him in my arms after we had sped far away to our Southern
home,—held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and
the breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest.
Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden
hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out
and killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his
father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw,
as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. (507)
The “evil omen” of “golden hair” (which resonates interestingly with

the evil omen that Itylus’s mother read in his smooth, seemingly innocent
face); the potential of brown eyes to crush out and kill the blue; the color-
line falling ominously across his baby—all constitute bodily metaphors—
subsumed under the master concept-metaphor of “the Veil”—that allow Du
Bois to intensify his understanding of the power always at work in racist
contexts. Set alongside geographical metaphors such as “the hot red soil of
Georgia” and “the breathless city of a hundred hills,” Du Bois demonstrates
to his reader that what lies beneath the smooth surface of such metaphors is
the truth of reality as men and women of color live it daily, across class and
gender differences. He gives us to know that it is the post-Reconstruction

social context—with its violent racism and Jim Crow social policies—that
kills Burghardt, as violently and as mercilessly as if the child had been taken
forcibly from his bed and lynched.
Du Bois’s use of biography to critique the color-line and the processes
of double-consciousness continues in chapter 12, “Of Alexander Crummell,”
which draws its poetic paratext from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in Twelve
Books (1859–1885). Du Bois cites lines 457–461:
Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint

As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.
This stanza is accompanied by bars from yet another archetypal

Spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Du Bois chooses bars of music
accompanying these lines:
Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot . . .
We shall turn first to the Spiritual before giving our attention to

Tennyson’s poem. Harry Burleigh writes that the lines of the Spiritual refer
to the “translation” of the prophet Elijah into heaven, depicted in 2 Kings
2:11 of the King James Version of the Bible: “And it came to pass, as they
still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and
horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a
whirlwind into heaven.” Elijah, the Old Testament prophet, was a defender
of the supreme God against competing Canaanite and Phoenician cults. In
fact, Elijah emerges as one of the most important of the major prophets:
in the time of the New Testament, John the Baptist took pains to clarify
to the people that he was neither the Messiah, Elijah, nor “the Prophet,”28
for Elijah was expected to return to the earth, and is said, in the Gospel
of Mark, to have witnessed the transfiguration of Jesus along with Moses.29
Du Bois, who takes Crummell as his biographical subject in this
chapter, immediately draws the image of Crummell as analogous to that of
the Biblical prophet Elijah as well as the Arthurian legend of King Arthur.
His reference to Elijah in a paratext to his brief biography of Crummell
underscores the luminosity of Crummell’s character and legacy to Du Bois’s

mind; and the fact that Elijah was expected to return to earth and continue
his work as a prophet lends added longevity to the legacy of Crummell,
whose soul, upon his death, “fled like a flame across the Seas” (520).
The Tennyson paratext Du Bois uses is drawn from the section of Idylls
of the King known as “The Passing of Arthur,” whose title resonates with “Of
the Passing of the First Born.” Arthur was a legendary king of Britain, and
stories of his life and the Round Table of knights he formed were written by
Crétien de Troye, Malory, and other medieval writers. Tennyson, whose Idylls
spearheaded the revival of interest in the Arthurian legend in the nineteenth
century and was itself enormously popular, also developed the form known as
the “English Idyl” (spelled with one “l”), in which luxurious vignettes of the
English countryside and landscape were combined with “relaxed debate” of
current social issues. Indeed, Idylls, which was both prefaced by and concluded
with poems addressed to Queen Victoria, served to reinforce an image of a
perfect monarchy that ruled over an ever-expanding British empire. Beyond
the political, as Tennyson put it, “My meaning was spiritual. I only took the
legendary stories of the Round Table as illustrations. Arthur was allegorical
to me. I intended him to represent the Ideal in the Soul of Man coming
into contact with the warring elements of the flesh.”30 In this way, we should
readily see Tennyson’s poetic paratext as one of a piece with that of William
Sharp, another commentator on the temperament of the monarchy, the value
of Scottish and Irish heritage, and the perfection of ideals.
Tennyson was hailed as the successor to Keats and Shelley, and his
work anticipated the themes of the French Symbolists of the 1880s as well
as the symbolism of Arthur Symons, whose poem, “The Crying of Water”
prefaces chapter 1 of Souls. He and Robert Browning are credited with
developing a use of the “dramatic monologue” in their poetry, which grants
the poem a polyphonic quality by revealing not only the thought of the
poet but also the viewpoint of the impersonated character. This technique
likely draws its influence from Shakespeare and evolves out of the soliloquy,
of which Du Bois gives an example when he cites, in this same chapter,
the soliloquy from Hamlet (iii.i 69–73). The scene ends more militantly (or
perhaps, more melancholically) than an isolated reading of Du Bois’s excerpt
shows. Du Bois chooses to fold a fragment of the soliloquy into his own
prose, rendering it dialogic: as he recounts Crummell’s sense of dejection
when suffering one of the many scenes of humiliation he endured as a young
man of color seeking to undertake meaningful work in modern society. The
Hamlet fragment flows out of Du Bois’s description of Crummell’s state
of mind in the wake of Bishop Onderdonk’s rejection of him (517–518):
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls
wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding
on through life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,—here,
the Valley of Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. And I know not which be darker,—no, not I. But this
I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble stand to-day a million
swarthy men, who willingly would
“. . . bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, . . .”
The passage from Hamlet ends with lines Du Bois chooses not to quote:
When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?
Whether one reads the tone of the passage as militant or melancholic

(suicidal), the echoes of death that resound through this passage likewise
echo in the paratext from Tennyson, in the essay’s repeated references to the
“Valley of the Shadow of Death,” in “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and in
the very trajectory of Crummell’s life. When the Episcopal priest Crummell
is denied full entrée to Bishop Onderdonk’s diocese, he faces the Valley of
Humiliation (to which Du Bois also refers more obliquely as the “Vale of the
Humble”—these two monikers are etymologically related to one another;
they come from the Latin “humil-,” meaning “low” or “lowly”). Du Bois
writes: “You might have noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame
and hacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death than that” (518), that
is, yet another valley through which Crummell was to pass.
The reference recalls distinctly Tennyson’s depiction of King Arthur’s
slow course to death, the long durée of his passing away. Indeed, the three
chapters that precede the final essay on the Sorrow Songs are each about
such moral rectitude as Arthur’s folding violently in the face of the world’s
harshness and misrecognition. Burghardt loved innocently and without
regard to color before the constraints of the color-line itself brought about
his death. John Jones of chapter 13 not only seeks to edify his community
in the face of severe social constraints, but also to defend his sister valiantly
against rape by a white man. Alexander Crummell, an upstanding, moral
young priest, is bewildered in the shadows of the world’s racial vicissitudes,

which dimmed his emerging hopes and left in their stead what Du Bois
describes as three dismal temptations: Hate, Death, and Doubt. These and the
“Sacrifice of Humiliation” brought Crummell near to dying more than once.
But, Du Bois writes, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” gave Crummell
back to the world, as it gives back only a few of its wanderers—sage prophets
or knights errant, we might say, with a nod toward the Spiritual singers
in their evocation of the prophet Elijah, and to Tennyson in his allegorical
depiction of King Arthur. Du Bois uses a number of metaphorical images
to underscore this movement between life and death: there is the figure of
the gate in the Spiritual, in the Arthurian epic, as well as in the essay’s
conclusion; and there is also the figure of the whirling wind, which moves
from West to East.
The link between the whirl of life and the valley of death intimated in
the biography of Crummell is articulated explicitly by the Spiritual singers,
who, in evoking Elijah’s translation into heaven by a whirlwind, aid Du
Bois’s metaphorical allusions in the final lines of the essay. There, he depicts
Crummell sitting beside a gate whose hinges are rusty and will not hold.
The word “gate” appears only twice in “Of Alexander Crummell,” both times
at the culmination of the chapter, but in Biblical phraseology the gateway
to a city was generally the site of judgment by a king or a judicial body.
In Greek legends, which influence Arthurian literature such as Tennyson’s,
the gate metaphor was evoked as an imagistic conduit of true and false
dreams. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a gate as a way, path, or road,
and underscores that the word often alludes metaphorically to a journey or
course of action. Thus, we might also speak of the journey metaphor as it
gives shape to the Burghardt, Crummell, and John essays (and even to The
Souls of Black Folk as a whole): each essay chronicles a life from beginning
to end, marking its innocence, its knowing (a loss of innocence), and its
tragedy, actions, and hope.
Such imagery holds a clear connection with the metaphor of the gate
as portal, and the analogous motif of the journey: Crummell is depicted as
a pilgrim, a wayfarer in the world, one who is simply passing through and
whose nature it is, or so it seems at least, to feel quite alone and without
home in this world. In some way, Du Bois brings this motif to fruition in
the final chapter of Souls, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” when he writes of exile,
of weary travelers, of the foreign tongue of his great-grandmother, and of
the hidden and at times esoteric epistemology of the slave. For “Swing
Low, Sweet Chariot,” the musical paratext of “Of Alexander Crummell,”
likewise conveys images of air, portals, and bodies of water; its figurative
language hearkens to broad metaphors of transition that serve to categorize

the narrower figures of wind, gates, and the sea. The wind, the gate, and
the sea each provide imagery that evokes ideas of transformation and
progression. None of them indicates stasis; rather, each alerts the reader to
the inevitability of change and chance. The sea and the wind in particular,
used as metaphors for and symbols of sublimity, are elemental tropes that
recur in the text. This is, then, an underexamined figure at work throughout
the book and throughout the African American literary tradition, for Souls is,
in its entirety, about movement, psychic as well as physical, and about how,
to my mind at least, all of these things have quite a bit to do with what
black being, black existence, signifies, with the meaning sedimented within
seemingly uncomplicated and straightforward narratives of black life.31
The paratexts to chapter 13, “Of the Coming of John,” are of some
significance, not least in their relation to the Spiritual that serves as paratext
to “Of Alexander Crummell.” First, the title of the essay plays on the idea
of the coming of Christ, thus imputing to the title character, John Jones, a
salvific quality. Indeed, as we see by the end of Du Bois’s narrative, much
of which is fictional save some similarities to the setting of the town of
Altamaha Park, Georgia, which sits on the Altamaha River featured in the
story, John Jones is indeed a Christ-like being whose sacrifice by lynching
at the end of the story provides the narrative tragedy. The title of the story
also evokes the name of John the Baptist, whose regular habit of baptizing
converts in the waters of the river Jordan reinforces Du Bois’s imagery of
the sea in his fictional biography of the life of John of Altamaha.
More than this, Du Bois’s use of the name John resounds with that
of Elijah, who figures prominently in the Spiritual “Swing Low,” which
prefaces “Of Alexander Crummell.” John the Baptist and the prophet Elijah
alike preached by the River Jordan, and while John baptized converts to
his teachings in Jordan’s waters, Elijah, as I have mentioned, defended the
monotheism of his God and, like Moses, parted the waters of the Jordan. The
Jordan is arguably the most sacred river of Christendom, not least because
Christ was baptized by John in its waters.32 Baptisms John performed in
flowing waters such as those of the Jordan would have been understood as
the cleansing away of severe forms of uncleanness; such cleansings were
intended to bring about forgiveness and repentance. Thus, John’s baptisms
mediated divine forgiveness and forecasted the coming of a beneficent
savior who would both judge and restore Israel. The implications of this
are eschatological (having to do with the final judgment and end of the
world) as well as apocalyptic (that is, revelatory of a new beginning after
this ultimate destruction, such as is foretold in the Book of Revelation).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Romance of the Ganges” (1838),

the paratext to “The Coming of John,” reinforces the important motif of
the river, which thus becomes allegorical. Du Bois cites these lines (521):
What bring they ‘neath the midnight,

Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
Nor drieth with the dew;
Oh, calm it God! thy calm is broad
To cover spirits too.
The river floweth on.
The fuller poem is about love lost, about the strains and ambivalences
of friendship, about life and death and the sites of each. Central to the poem’s
imagery is the Ganges River, holy in the Hindu faith and continuously
flowing. Even so, time and memory seem not so swiftly carried along its
waves, for Luti, the poem’s heroine, still dwells upon the anguish of her
father’s death as poignantly as the more recent betrayal of her lover. Du Bois
takes the tragic imagery of the river-sea from the poem and transforms it
into that of the sea in “Of the Coming of John”: the “moving men” of New
York city, who “reminded John of the sea” (525); the “music of Lohengrin’s
swan” whose force caused John’s heart to sink “below the waters, even as the
sea-sand sinks by the shores of the Altamaha, only to be lifted again with
that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into the
sky”; John’s solitary walk down to the sea in mournful realization that the
people of Altamaha not only misunderstand him, but, more importantly, are
not in accord with the plan of uplift he has envisioned (530); and, finally
the sea-side as the site of white John’s assault upon black John’s sister,
Jennie, as well as black John’s retributive murder of white John (535). It is
toward the sea that John turns as the lynch mob, which he pities rather
than despises, descends upon him. As the mob approaches, he hums “Song
of the Bride,” again from Wagner’s Lohengrin. Du Bois alters the libretto to
fit his intent: “Freudig gefürht, ziehet dahin” (“Joyfully led, move along”).33
It seems, then, that although John is resigned to his death, he also sees his
own death as sacrificial, and thus as entailing a necessary resurrection and
renewed life in a day yet to come (a day when those forces that work to
constrain him will no longer have power over him). Philosophical as to his
fate but looking joyfully to the same “world beyond” that called Alexander
Crummell’s soul and embraced that of baby Burghardt, John can easily be
envisioned as a spirit baptized in the waters of the Altamaha and resurrected
in the spirit-world beyond its sandy shores.
Likewise, the reader easily imagines the Spiritual that prefaces John’s
story as a meaningful alternative to Wagner’s “Song of the Bride.” This is
especially so as one reads the slave singers’ apocalyptic lyrics that accompany
the bars of music Du Bois excerpts from “You May Bury Me in the East”:
You may bury me in the East

You may bury me in the West
But I’ll hear the trumpet sound
In that morning
The trumpet of the slaves’ song refers to the centrally important figure
of the trumpet in the Book of Revelation. Trumpets were sounded by angels
at the opening of each of the seven seals. The opening of the first six of
these were followed by horrific plagues, while the seventh proclaimed the
power of God’s kingdom (Rev 11:15–19). Later in this final book of the
Bible, after we read of the casting out of Satan and the defeat of the beast,
the appearance of New Jerusalem is allegorized as “a bride adorned for her
husband” (Rev 21:2). This metaphor alluded to in the Spiritual resonates
directly with the imagery of Lohengrin, but goes further in its connotations.
It conveys to the listener that God would not be less than his word: he
would preserve the humble but faithful man, even if he be a slave, through
the restoration of God’s kingdom. The body of the slave, the song gives us
to know, may be buried in the temporal world, on ground holy or profane;
but the slave’s soul will rise in that “great getting up morning,” and will
ascend to a heavenly realm of peace, love, and redemption. When coupled
with the essay and read alongside the reference to Lohengrin, “You May Bury
Me in the East” signals to the reader John’s honor, heroism, and redemptive
qualities. It is also a powerful, poetic condemnation of the Jim Crow South.
Navigating the Undulating Waters of Being:

The Spirituals and the Possibilities of Metaphor
Any study of the Spirituals must begin and end in the realm or sphere in
which these songs were developed and continue to exist, the realm Aristotle
calls nature, and that we, in our more recent historical moment, call “reality,”
the existential plane that includes not only the physical world in which we
live, but also the human condition of this world. Nature is itself a principle
of change, Aristotle tells us, and human beings existing in a state of change
can navigate its undulating waters through acts of consciousness, such as
thought and art, that evidence an awareness of one’s condition. It is such
awareness that founds the possibility of agency and freedom. Such awareness
also founds the possibility of the Spirituals.
These states of awareness, or acts of the mind that Du Bois refers to
as the inner life of the slave, center upon imagination because imagination
permits not reality, but an insight into reality. Freedom, which was habitually
sung by the Spiritual singers, comes only through an understanding and
interpretation of one’s own condition, such that through understanding
one’s current state of existence, one can imagine—and in turn, bring into
reality—a different state of being. The Spiritual singers’ primary obedience
was not to the state of enslavement and oppression in which they found
themselves, but to the revolution in imagination that permitted them to
arrest and redirect reality. The minimum requirement of such imagination,
so to speak, is metaphor, the ability to, as Aristotle put it, “see as,” to place
reality before one’s own eyes as well as the eyes of others, to project oneself
toward an ideal world yet to come, and to imagine a cognitive bridge that
spans the distance between what is and what is to be. It is from this site
of metaphorical imagination that the slaves’ songs sprung. They lived in a
place not their own, and, even more to the point, their bodies were not their
own in the illogic of their day. And thus their psychic resistance often came
through metaphorization: the doubled meaning of words and phrases; the
transposition of meaning across epistemological categories; the rendering
of allegory and myth; the simultaneity of abstraction and concretization in
imagery; and the rendering of narrative through silence and repetitive sound
(such as ritual omission and repeated moans rather than transparent words
with quite obvious meanings).
The theoretical postulate of Du Bois’s use of these songs in Souls,
along with his belles lettres essays and widely known citations of European
and Euro-American poetry, is a world of metaphor, where the poets’—in
this case, the Spiritual singers’—imagination engages the world of reality
around them with a dual aim. First, they aimed to affect and redirect reality
through their intellectual engagement with it. Second, they aimed to give
voice to their own being through a poetry of “revelation.” Certainly, this
has to do with the apocalyptic meanings at work in many of the Spirituals
Du Bois chooses for his reader. But we should also be careful to point
out that the Spirituals’ apocalyptic discourse is not so much nihilistic or
fatalistic as it is expansive, visionary, and unorthodox: regularly, their musical
discourse drew upon accepted notions of time and space to further expound
an ideal and infinite world beyond the one generally given as “real.” It repeats
metaphors of hearing and perception that make clear the slaves’ intention to
achieve in each song a unique expression (through lyrics as well as sound,
pitch, harmony, cadence, and so on), and to force the listener to attempt a
commensurate act of apprehension that leads to an understanding of the
breadth and plurality of human being, a movement toward the plural ideal
of “human brotherhood,” as Du Bois calls it in “The Conservation of Races”
and elsewhere.
The meaning of black being, Du Bois says clearly throughout Souls’s
many and important metaphors, is identical to the meaning of human being.
Thus the Spirituals Du Bois gives the reader of The Souls of Black Folk do
not simply found an aesthetic tradition that Du Bois calls truly American;
they also, in their attempt to place before the listener a reality not his or
her own, place before the listener the self-conscious beings that he or she
is not. As a result, Du Bois presents to his reader not a set of anonymous
spiritual fatalists, but a collective of essential, thinking poets.
7
Symbolic Wrights
The Poetics of Being Underground
Incipit
And there in that great iron city, that impersonal, mechanical city, amid
the steam, the smoke, the snowy winds, the blistering suns; there in
that self-conscious city, that city so deadly dramatic and stimulating,
we caught whispers of the meanings that life could have, and we were
pushed and hounded by facts much too big for us. Migrants like us were
driven and pursued, in the manner of characters in a Greek play, down
the path of defeat; but luck must have been with us, for we somehow
survived; and, for those of us who did not come through, we are trying
to do the bidding of Hamlet who admonished Horatio:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. [Hamlet Act 5 Sc. 2]
—Richard Wright’s Introduction to Black Metropolis, 1945
It is fitting that Wright himself should provide the incipit for the work
of this chapter. For in the epigraph above, drawn from his introduction
to Horace Cayton and St Clair Drake’s Black Metropolis (1945), Wright is
deeply concerned with a similar metaphorics of chaos and cosmos, apertures
and closings, heights and depths, and beginnings and endings that occupy
me throughout this study. Wright was one of the greatest interlocutors on
the modern implications of such dialectical oppositions, especially as they
occur in the arena of political discourse and novelistic representation. As
in his best known work of fiction, Native Son (1940), Wright’s narratives
gave birth to a broad new way of conceptualizing modern black life in
281
America; indeed, Native Son’s greatest explicit claim is that Bigger Thomas,
the novel’s tragic protagonist, is himself the scion of modern America and
its split human condition. Thus as a metaphor, Bigger represents not black
America alone, but America itself, replete with its ambivalences, paradoxes,
ironies, and cataclysms. Bigger is America’s natural and native son.
Yet even as much of our criticism has focused primarily on the
ideological problems Wright raises in his fiction and especially in Native
Son, there remains a need for further criticism focusing upon the workings
of Wright’s poetics in The Man Who Lived Underground (1944). In the wealth
of literature on Wright, the main features of his poetics certainly have not
gone unnoticed by critics,1 yet most writers have focused upon Native Son,
of course, with a second majority looking at his later fiction, especially The
Outsider (1953). New critical interest in Wright’s poetry is fast emerging.
However, the fundamental innovation that Wright’s poetics represents in
this novella, which is, of late, woefully under-studied,2 its differential relation
to similar poetics found throughout the African American canon, and its
potential for subversive action and knowledge have not yet received sufficient
attention in the scholarship. In drawing our attention to Wright’s poetics,
I do not mean to underscore simply the structural and formal elements
at work in his mode of art, but the affective force of his tropes, and the
symbolic exchange he establishes between the conceptual metaphors he
creates and the world beyond his texts. Wright himself calls our attention
to such matters of the text when he opines, in “Blueprint for Negro Writing”
(1937), that the “image and emotion” of literature “possess a logic of their
own” (1410). Like Equiano, Harper, and Du Bois before him, he insists that
affect and imagery—including figures of language—are capable of granting
form, meaning, and access to a new and better world.
The novella The Man Who Lived Underground, paradoxically points
the way to life in such a world through the complexity of its philosophical
metaphors. In considering the novella, this chapter examines a characteristic
element of Wright’s poetics and the central metaphor of this story: the
habitation of the chthonian world. This trope has, of course, attracted the
attention of many of Wright’s critics, most of whom, however, see it as
Wright’s bleak and pessimistic judgment of the world’s sorry state of affairs.3
My approach differs from this perspective. I see Wright’s fundamental
metaphor of psychic and bodily descent as emblematic of the ways in
which archetypal tropes of death and life, guilt and freedom, time and
space, memory and oblivion, and dreaming and waking facilitate the text’s
demand for a new and better world. Wright’s novella underscores the value
he places upon the exactness and complexity of the metaphorical image in
Symbolic Wrights 283
narrative, and the relation between metaphorical images and the words used
to convey them. Thus, as he, in the words of Shakespeare, draws his breath
in pain to tell the story of the underground man, the task he sets before
the reader is that of discerning the affinities of metaphorical language and
human being, even as they are condensed in the weathered patina of the
tragic anti-hero. The tonal images and sedimented emotions of The Man
Who Lived Underground form a tropological stream of discourse in which the
novella not only probes its own status as a work of art, but also demonstrates
the ways in which Wright’s theory and practice of metaphor touch on and
contribute to broader philosophical issues of the crises of social belonging,
the liminality of black existence, and the historicity of black being.
Of course, as I have shown, the use of ontological metaphorics takes
place throughout the tradition of African American poetry and prose alike.
In this study, I consider it as unfolding not in the pursuit of being (as has
often been argued by such noted scholars as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Figures
in Black (1987) and in The Signifying Monkey (1988), that is, that African
Americans have used inventive metaphorical strategies to “write themselves
into existence” and to “prove” their humanity, and thereby they establish or
enter into historicity), but in the sociopolitical revelation of black being, or
black being-in-the-world, to adapt the Heideggerian sense of this phrase
to my purpose, such that the always already being of African Americans is
granted, even the always already of their so-called racial difference. In The Souls
of Black Folk, as we have seen, Du Bois metaphorically uses bars of music to
preface each of his essays as a representation of black being, even though they
also constitute an instantiation of silence. Human expression is transfigured
into silence in Du Bois’s text, yet this silence signifies both literally (as “visible
music”) and metaphorically, by way of absent lyrics. The bars of music function
as graphemes that call us to a recognition of language, to an engagement with
language. And thus, drawing upon the ontological a bit further here, being,
not simply as particularity but also as existential thought in relation with the
present as well as future worlds, inhabits this language.
In using bars of music to represent the Spirituals and, thus, the thought
of the slave regarding her present and future conditions, Du Bois does not
pursue or bestow being through his prose. Rather, he reveals its always
already existence by thinking and sharing the poetics of the slaves with
his reader. Ethical work is done through this gesture in Souls, for how can
one grasp the truth of being writ large if one denies the existence of black
being there within the veil? Sociopolitical work is done as well: Du Bois
demonstrates how the slave and post-slave populations project their being
toward the world through the art of metaphor.
Here, then, we must see the Spirituals not simply as ecstatic religious
expression, but as an ek-static4 instance of allegorical thinking. Allegorical
thought, a species of metaphorical thinking, is also hermeneutical engagement,
a thinking and an interpretation that have to do with a sustained engagement
with worldly concerns, existential concerns. In this way, the Spirituals have
much to do with an afterlife, yes; but they also have much to do with a
critical concern for the world in which the slaves lived, and the world they
themselves envisioned and created.
It must be said that Richard Wright had little understanding of
the poetics of the Spirituals in the way I read them here. For Wright,
the Spirituals provided fertile ground for the exposition of a pre-modern
culture that must be overcome and surpassed.5 He saw little of the
modern possibilities—intellectual as well as political—that Du Bois saw
in the Spirituals. Instead, Wright proffers them in The Man Who Lived
Underground as evidence of a collective people’s guilt. This point will require
some explanation.
It is true that Richard Wright, in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,”
considered African American expression, including folklore, Spirituals, and
the blues, to be a font of “racial wisdom” (1405), and he believed that Negro
culture stemmed from the black church and African American folklore. Yet
he also felt that, since the Civil War, the black church had functioned as
an inadequate and even deceptive “antidote for suffering and denial” (1404).
While he allows that black religion constituted an important element of early
black radicalism and nationalism, Wright argued that Negroes of his own
day were still apt to look to the church as the source of “their only sense of
the whole universe, [their] only relation to society and mind” and their “only
guide to personal dignity” (1404). Such over-dependence upon black religion
and black folklore for the development of the Negro’s weltanschauung is as
manifest in black nationalism as it is in black institutions such as “a Negro
church, a Negro press, a Negro social world, a Negro sporting world, a
Negro business world, a Negro school system; in short, a Negro way of life
in America,” Wright insists (1406). Though African Americans did not ask
for these separate social institutions, Wright states, they are compelled to
accept them as integral aspects of a way of life that has been forced upon
them by the oppressive social and political systems of the southern United
States, especially.
Wright reiterates that African American writers must, in turn,
embrace black nationalism and its constituent elements—including religious
expression—as organic to black existence in America, but they must do so
only with an eye toward transcending them. He argues:
Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their

lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change
and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism
because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand
it. And a national spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism
carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It
means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that
is aware of the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate
aims are unrealizable within the framework of capitalist America;
a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of
self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence
of people in modern society. (1406)
Though the black folk were full of potential as a natural proletariat,

black folk were also guilty in Wright’s mind because they refused the power
of choice that was endemic to modern freedom: they could choose to move
beyond nationalism; they could choose a broader form of thought. Instead,
in Wright’s view, they had refused the self-consciousness and awareness
that Du Bois seems to accept as intrinsic to the black folk expression that
founds black nationalism itself, at least in Wright’s genealogy of the concept.
Wright argued that black folk expression, especially in the Spirituals, was
not a simple stage along the way to transcending an overly simplistic black
nationalism, but that black folk expression in the Spirituals and other
vernacular forms could, at the same time, be tapped as a source for the
transcendence of the worldly limits of racism and oppression, a way of
attaining, however tenuously, a state of psychic freedom and the realities
of bodily freedom. Du Bois, too, recognized the signal importance of folk
expression in American culture, but refused to call for its sublimation,6 as
did a number of his contemporaries, including James Weldon Johnson.7 Du
Bois, having completed his exposition of the Spirituals in the final chapter
of Souls, links them directly to the cause of democracy. He sees them as
cultural expressions that could help obliterate the global color-line that is
one of the central foci of his critique. This is why, perhaps, we note that
sharp shift in tone near the conclusion of The Souls of Black Folk, when Du
Bois, after providing one of the earliest critical treatments of the Spirituals,
which are indeed songs of freedom, in both the spiritual and moral senses of
this term,8 abruptly and brashly interrogates whites’ supposed sole possession
of freedom, which they ensured by claiming a racially exclusive national
identity. “Your country? How came it yours?” Du Bois queries incisively,
before launching a searing critique of American national history, in which
African Americans and their cultural expressions played a central and

definitive role. The conclusion of his strident exposition is the articulation
of a radical vision of democracy.
Wright, of course, did not note Du Bois’s revisionist perspective on
the Spirituals in “Blueprint.” Yet his erstwhile protégé, Ralph Ellison, for
whom The Man Who Lived Underground would be instructive as a model
and as thematic inspiration, forcefully takes up Du Bois’s attention to the
intersections of black folk culture and radical democracy when he raises a
similar question regarding freedom in his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. There,
his concern for freedom is expressed through metaphors of ideal democracy,
but his approach, too, contrasts sharply with Wright’s. The invisible man’s
quip, “I yam what I am” (266), and his forging in the very crucible of black
folk culture that is so important yet so seemingly dispensable to Wright,
call us to a greater consideration of the historicity of black being and its
continual efforts to make itself known even as it stretches forth toward
an ideal world to come. Black being, as such, has had to contend with
processes of objectification that arose in the early modern period, a period
contemporary to the rise of Western imperialism in the fifteenth century,
and that extends through the modern Civil Rights movement of the mid-
twentieth century to our own day. Embodiedness, and the phenomenology of
the black body, are issues in constant question in the work of each of these
writers and thus they are frequently at the center of a poetics of being in
African American culture and African American metaphorical constructions.
For metaphor, as Aristotle has taught us in the Poetics, sets before
the eyes an image that relates the reality in which being is situated; it
permits the grasping of the dissimilar within the similar, a transgression of
categories of identity and a deviance from established sets of knowledge.
Such oppositionality is false, of course, as the othering of the black body
in particular takes place via the exigencies and dictates of white Western
capital and political power. Wright makes clear his awareness of this point
in “Blueprint.” Yet Wright, like Du Bois before him and Ellison after him,
employs metaphor in an effort to establish a rapport with the white Western
reader (though he does not readily admit this point) and to commune with
the reader of African descent by way of a subject/object paradigm quite
familiar to the American reader (with whiteness occupying a position of
subjectivity and knowing, and blackness relegated to an antithetical position
of objecthood and inscrutability). And while Wright, unlike writers such as
Du Bois, does not suggest to the reader a clear path of action as black being
is revealed, he nonetheless offers her or him an ironic and subversive portrait
of conscious black being and an alternative pathway to ideal humanism.
I suggest that the alternate pathway Wright offers is hewn subtly

out of his antagonistic relationship to black folk culture and black folk
expression. It is no simple thing that Wright’s works remain compelling
to the present generation of readers. I would argue that this is so because
Wright’s novels, essays, short stories, and novellas (to say nothing of his
poetry) present to the reader a disturbing but crystal clear (if not at times
purposely hyperbolic) portrait of the journey of black being in mid-twentieth
century America. Whereas the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston (whose writing
Wright disparaged) might have provided her reader inspiration for living,
Wright shows his reader the clear path to death. In Wright’s narratives, this
pathway is littered with his protagonists’ choices, which in most instances
of Wright’s fiction—the so-called later Wright in exile as well as the early
Wright who wrote about the South from his perch in the urban North—
disallow the freedom for which the protagonists dearly yearn. The wages of
guilt, that is, the recompense for a refusal of consciousness, comprise the
lesson one draws from Wright’s fiction, but this is a lesson the reader must
learn on his or her own. Wright does not specify how we must act, that is, in
what ways we should demonstrate our care and concern for others through
ethical action, as do canonical figures throughout the African American
literary tradition, including the eighteenth-century autobiographer Olaudah
Equiano, the nineteenth-century poet and novelist and activist Frances Ellen
Watkins Harper, and the scholar Du Bois. Yet we, as did the protest agents
of the 1960s who embraced Wright’s work unequivocally, know that we
must. Wright’s greatest gift to us is such knowledge.
The grounds for an agency-based knowledge such as that Wright limns
are firmly situated in a poetics of underground life: one must immerse
oneself in the consciousness of the underground in order to grasp the global
consciousness that comes with freedom. In The Man Who Lived Underground,
Wright’s poetics take shape through metaphors of chaos and cosmos, two
oppositional, ontological tropes of understanding whose boundaries Wright
transgresses even as he transposes the categories’ content. Chaos becomes
cosmos in Wright’s revisionist text, and it then serves as the basis for
revisionist and revolutionary thinking. By consequence, cosmos is shown
to be not only inadequate, but also deceptive. That Wright’s underground
visionary, Fred Daniels, is remanded to death even as he seeks to emerge
from his underground space seems pure tragedy and ahumanist, but a careful
reading of the story reveals its affective intention: Wright intends that the
reader become outraged, and if we gauge carefully the outcomes he intends
his work to inspire, outrage, in turn, is transfigured into an ethical emotion,
an expression of concern and care for freedom and for conscious being.
Mapping Black Ontology and Black Freedom:

“Blueprint for Negro Writing” in Context
I have said that one sees clearly Wright’s concern for the ethics of emotion
and freedom in literature in the 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”
“Blueprint” follows other early attempts by writers such as Frances E. W.
Harper (“Christianity,” 1855), James Weldon Johnson (Preface to the Book of
American Negro Poetry, 1922), and W. E. B. Du Bois (“Criteria of Negro Art,”
1926) to articulate a poetics of African American literature and to outline
the function of this literature in relation to black existence in American
society, and it is instructive to contextualize Wright’s stance within this
genealogy of thinkers. Doing so will permit us to restore to Wright’s essay
the critical contexts he so neatly and purposefully strips away. It permits us
to see Wright’s criticism emerging not ex nihilo, as he so often portrayed it,
but out of a vibrant critical debate over the function and poetics of black
writing in America dating back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. And
it allows us to frame Wright’s ambivalent relationship to African American
folk culture in a critical and historical light so that we might see more
clearly the workings of folk expression and black spirituality in The Man Who
Lived Underground. Such insight is indispensable to grasping the meaning
at play in the narrative.
Early among African American thinkers on poetics is Harper, for
whom philosophy and science are subservient to Christian ideals that she
feels are the motive force behind her creative process. Both “have paused
amid their speculative researches and wondrous revelations, to gain wisdom
from [Christianity’s] teachings and knowledge from her precepts.” They
“may bring their abstruse researches,” but they are simply “idle tales compared
to the truths of Christianity” (42). Christianity, which comes to be expanded
to religion in general in this essay, “lifts the veil,” “triumphs over” death,
and “gazes upon the glorious palaces of God” as it instructs the individual
in ways of being (42–43).
Harper might seem quite far from Wright’s poetics, but as a theorist
of the relationship between religion and literature, and as one of the most
significant nineteenth-century writers to draw upon black folk expression
for her poetry, a consideration of her thought is crucial. What becomes
important in reading Harper here is a recognition of her willingness to
abstract from the Christian faith and religion in general the “Word of
God”—itself a metaphor for being, as it refers to both the written text of the
Bible and the Bible made flesh in the body of Christ—which she privileges
as “unique and pre-eminent” (43). Harper believed in the power of the Word,
that is, the original and divine Word of God coupled with the potential of
black vernacular (as she demonstrates in her Aunt Chloe poems, the focus
of chapter 4 of this study) to provide humans with enlightenment and
understanding. She exhibits none of Plato’s angst regarding the likelihood of
deception in vernacular language’s representation of divine inspiration, and
none of Wright’s concern that black religiosity must be surpassed. Instead,
she imagines this Word as aided by the Holy Spirit, who, it would seem,
acts as a medium for those divinely inspired poets and orators who speak
God’s Word on earth. As a poet, Harper saw herself as receptive to the Holy
Spirit, who gives shape to her literature and her poetic discourse. “Poetry has
culled [Christianity’s] fairest flowers and wreathed her softest, to bind her
Author’s ‘bleeding brow’ ” (40). “Literature [may bring] her elegance, with
the toils of the pen, and the labors of the pencil” (42), but literature without
religion, without God, is, Harper says firmly, form without content, shadow
without substance. The divine word is the only begetter of her earthly verse.
If we see “Christianity” as a statement of Harper’s aesthetics, the essay
morphs before our eyes from a fundamentalist riff on the glories of the
Christian faith to an extended meditation on the powers of the Word,
both sacred and secular. Harper’s poetics and “amateur” ethnography, her
collecting of the stories of Civil War–era black women and her translation
of these stories into narrative, polyphonic verse that is shaped by black folk
expression, reflects the relation she sees between black religion, the Word
of God, and black vernacular speech. Literature, then, is an artifact that
carries out a sacred and perhaps even ritualistic purpose—it aids humans
as an intermediary, a buffer of sorts between the hostile world in which we
exist and have our being, and the ideal world of divine sanctuary that we
strive for through action and imagination. It is a way of seizing power and
making meaning by imposing a form upon the chaos of the known world
at the same time that it allows us to grant comprehensible form to our own
wants and desires for a world to come.
In this light, Harper’s poetics, exemplified in such representations of
African American Christian religious practices as we see in the Aunt Chloe
poems, seem in abstruse ways to be aligned with Wright’s conclusion that
black struggles for freedom during the antebellum period took place via the
struggle for religious expression. Such contention “on the plantations between
1820–60,” Wright asserts, regularly “assumed the form of a struggle for human
rights” (1404). Seen through this lens, Harper’s focus upon religious expression
and ideals is not as deeply rooted in bourgeois middle-class thought as it first
appears to many critics of her work. In fact, it is deeply invested in a vision
of conscious being, ideal humanism, and, as Wright puts it, human rights.
James Weldon Johnson’s critical Preface to his anthology, the Book

of American Negro Poetry (1922), is likewise undoubtedly concerned with
human rights, but reflects none of the deep belief in religion that marks
Harper’s poetics. It has become famous in no small measure due to the
breadth of the poetry Johnson references there, but also as a result of the
force with which he puts forth his poetics of African American music and
literature. The Preface contains a range of literary and cultural criticism; it
appeared 10 years after the initial publication of Johnson’s Autobiography of an
Ex-Coloured Man (1912/1927), a novel whose exploration of black cultural
and vernacular forms, as well as its interrogation of black embodiedness
and the phenomenology of race, is in discourse with Du Bois’s Souls, and
Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, as well as Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Johnson’s Preface boasts his best known prognostication of the future of
African American poetics, a prognostication Wright likely took issue with
through his oblique references to unnamed black critics going “a-begging”
(“Blueprint” 1403) to white critics and readers. Johnson writes:
The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount

and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The
world does not know that a people is great until that people
produces great literature and art. No people that has produced
great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world
as distinctly inferior. (9)
Johnson was, of course, a race man, a proponent of black social

freedom and equality who might be considered tangentially affiliated with
the early twentieth-century cadre of black nationalists to whom Wright
refers in “Blueprint.” He held the firm belief that “the only things artistic
that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged
as distinctive American products” (10) had arisen from the creative minds
of the African American folk. He was not alone in his opinion that the
great original art of African Americans would bolster them in their quest
for a secure place in the American social sphere, nor was he this idea’s best
known proponent. W. E. B. Du Bois had written much the same in his 1903
classic The Souls of Black Folk, a text that shaped both the Autobiography and
Johnson’s Preface. In Souls, Du Bois opines that the African American “gift
of story and song”—folk-songs in general and particularly the Spirituals—
“the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American
music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this
side the seas [sic]” (545; 537). “It remains,” Du Bois continues, “the singular
spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people”
(537). Two decades later, in the 1926 piece “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois,
who, along with the Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey, was known as a
leading black nationalist and pan-Africanist, would underscore his earlier
argument regarding the importance of black poetics as a matter of life or
death by boldly stating that “until the art of the black folk compells [sic]
recognition they will not be rated as human” (1002).9
The recognition of black being was thus closely aligned with a poetics of
literature in the thought of Du Bois and Johnson, each of whom rooted their
poetics in a valuation of vernacular cultural forms such as the Spirituals. The
production and recognition of art and literature based on these vernacular
artifacts was, for each of them, part of a larger political program whose goal
was a concern for black existence, social equality, freedom, and the eventual
abolition of racial distinctions. In his Preface, Johnson is quite careful to
articulate these goals by way of literary and cultural poetics. In this respect,
his political bent was not far afield from that of the English critic F. R.
Leavis, who argued that the great tradition of English literature served as
an intellectual clearing house of English common identity.10 We often think
of Johnson and the small number of other early African American critics
as caught in a lonely but mighty struggle to make high art out of a black
folk culture that was seen by so-called mainstream society as constituting
nonsense. What we just as often forget or overlook is that, as is clear in
the thought of Leavis and is demonstrated in the use of the Spirituals by
Du Bois and Johnson, as well as in Harper’s valuing of religion and black
vernacular speech, folk expression in general was often viewed as a rich
resource for modernist aesthetics by writers across Europe and America,
black and white alike.
Many modernists were alarmed by the excesses of the industrial
revolution and its decimation of soulful, traditional modes of being. Just
as T. S. Eliot lays bare the heart of this malaise in his magnum opus, The
Waste Land (1922), Wright gets at the marrow of this fear by showing the
reader the effects of the soulless city on a black underclass in The Man Who
Lived Underground. The effects are sobering and horrifying. Wright exacts
a powerful critique of modern existence; he, no less than Leavis, lays the
foundation for cultural studies in his insistence that literature must bear
a direct connection to other fields of study and discourses that work to
convey the difficulties of the human condition, including philosophy, history,
and political theory. And in spite of his insistence that black folk thought
and its corollary black nationalist impulses be surpassed, he saw in the
complex structures of black folk culture—including religion—a rich resource
upon which the black writer and artist could and should draw. The writer
who “seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious
responsibility,” Wright argues. He must develop a complex consciousness
that recognizes and responds to the global nature of life. This consciousness
must draw upon the interaction between the local and the universal; it must
“[draw] for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and [mould]
this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today”
(1407). Wright averred that the writer could shepherd readers through a
radical experience of deep moral self-interrogation by drawing upon and
reshaping familiar and rich vernacular forms that were ripe for the cause, and
that through the experience of reading works that were intellectually engaged
and morally invested, people would examine their own lives and their own
positionalities. They would, in turn, be compelled to act thoughtfully—with
care and concern—through an engagement with literature.
The idea of literary studies as a site of deep engagement with the world
was, as Robert J. C. Young notes, “a self-consciously political activity from
the start” (Torn Halves 104). Du Bois, we recall, had said as much in 1897
when he argued, in “The Conservation of Races,” an essay that is widely read
as the most stringent articulation of Du Bois’s black nationalist sentiments,
that the establishment of an African American aesthetic tradition—a “Negro
school of literature and art,” as he termed it (822)—needed to be guided
by the race’s “representative” men, such as those of the American Negro
Academy. Johnson was only 15 years of age at the time Du Bois presented
“Conservation” as the Academy’s inaugural address and was thus far too
young for membership. Nonetheless, he aligns himself with the ideals of
the Academy when, in his Preface, he argues for a poetics whereby “the
colored poet in the United States” would “express the racial spirit by symbols
from within rather than by symbols from without” (Preface 41; my italics).
Intrinsic symbols would, for Johnson, provide the touchstone from which
black being—the mind, the intellect, as well as the body—would stretch
forward to engage through the language of metaphor an often hostile white
world.
Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” coming some 11 years after
Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) and appearing just as the Harlem
Renaissance was coming firmly to a close (the year Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared11), diverged from the ideas regarding
the expression of being through literature expounded by Du Bois. In
“Blueprint,” Wright seems either blissfully unaware or stubbornly ignorant
of Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races,” which calls for the establishment
of the very black social institutions that Wright lists in “Blueprint” as being
overly dependent upon African American religion. And like Wright after
him, Du Bois always intended that these separate institutions be abolished
as soon as “the ideal of human brotherhood”—the global humanism that was
so important to Wright—was realistically possible and attainable. Wright
and Du Bois alike called for solidarity among African Americans, a higher
consciousness and a critically revised understanding of humanism. The
major weakness of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint” is that he never discusses
analytically the work of black writers and critics whom he was quick to
disparage. He makes of the black literary tradition a tabula rasa that, or so
it seems, only he and those who followed his poetic dictates could fill with
art and meaning.
Once he had cleared the horizon of thinkers who came before him,
Wright charged the emerging black writer with guiding and shaping the
black collective consciousness, and this even as he called upon Negroes to
transcend the particularities of black nationalism. Black nationalism, though
useful as a social strategy, was to be “transcended” as blacks progressed toward
a higher ideal, Wright argued. The writings of the Harlem Renaissance
and earlier periods had failed in this regard, at least to Wright’s mind.
This literature had “been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays,”
written by “prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white
America,” desperately hoping to “show that the Negro was not inferior, that
he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people”
(“Blueprint” 1403). Instead of writing to white America, as Wright perhaps
saw Harper, Johnson, and even Du Bois doing, black writers should have
addressed their texts to a black reading audience in order to lead them
toward a higher consciousness. The workers of the black community would
have been ideal readers of this writing, Wright argues. Since they “[lack]
the handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide
social vision and a deep social consciousness. They display a greater freedom
and initiative in pushing their claims upon civilization than even do the
petty bourgeoisie. Their organizations show greater strength, adaptability,
and efficiency than any other group or class in society” (1403–1404). Indeed,
black workers constitute not the lumpen element of society; they are to be
regarded as a veritable proletariat capable of effecting social change. Black
writers have not taken advantage of the position in which their art places
them, Wright stresses. They have neither taken up their duty as writers, nor
have they formed useful alliances with black workers.
Nonetheless, in arguing that Negro art stems from the black church
and black folklore, Wright, without acknowledging that he is doing so, places
himself squarely within a genealogy of thought that includes Harper, Du
Bois, Johnson, and others. Yet he feels, in ways that Harper, Du Bois, and
Johnson do not, that the black church is also a false “antidote for suffering
and denial”; he sees the church, in vulgar Marxist fashion, as the opiate
of the people, a social sedative that is counter-productive to liberation. He
elaborates:
In the absence of fixed and nourishing forms of culture, the

Negro has a folklore which embodies the memories and hopes
of his struggle for freedom. Not yet caught in paint or stone,
and as yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the
Negroes’ most powerful images of hope and despair still remain
in the fluid state of daily speech . . . Negro folklore contains, in
a measure that puts to shame more deliberate forms of Negro
expression, the collective sense of Negro life in America. Let
those who shy at the nationalist implications of Negro life look
at this body of folklore, living and powerful, which arose out of
a unified sense of a common life and a common fate. Here are
those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is
lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture
in the shell of the old. And at the moment this process starts, at
the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their
suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.
(italics in original, 1405)
Wright evinces a good deal of ambivalence on this point, or so it

seems. Recognizing the power of a folk expression he (like Jean Toomer
before him) seems certain is doomed to die, Wright nonetheless calls upon
the black writer to make use of the power that emanates from the black
vernacular, to use it to guide and enlighten black people, to give them
some sense of what it means to live and exist, to be. Black nationalism,
though a natural and temporarily necessary outgrowth of black folklore,
paradoxically works against the enlightenment Wright calls for in this essay.
His understanding of the parameters of black nationalism seems, on first
look, contradictory. He writes that although black nationalism is reflected
in all of black culture, and especially in black folklore, this folklore is not
fixed; it acts from within “the fluid state of daily speech” (1405), the black
vernacular. In spite of this, Wright appears comfortable in asserting that
black nationalist ideas themselves arose from a seemingly stable, “unified
sense of common life and a common fate” contained in black folklore. These
nationalist notions form the foundation of black social “recognition” of the
“value in life as it is lived”; it points to the black folk’s recognition of the

“meaning in their suffering.” When this nationalism gains traction, when
it gains in social currency, the civilization that “engenders that suffering is
doomed” (emphasis in original, 1405), Wright warns. American capitalism
is, of course, at the heart of that doomed civilization—Wright makes this
clear. Yet, black nationalism, however much it may present a countermeasure
against capitalism, is a stage of thought that must be surpassed through the
higher intellection made possible by an art that emerges from the roots of
black nationalism: black folk culture.
Wright’s argument seems fairly circuitous unless the reader and writer
can join in to take it a bit further. The writer who “seeks to function within
his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility” in Wright’s eyes:
s/he must depict a complex consciousness that recognizes and responds to
the global nature of life, a global humanism, if you will. Wright’s opinion
that the writer should not simply present a mimetic portrait of black folk
culture, but should instead reshape and present it for purposeful consumption
by the reader seems to be what lies behind his rejection of Hurston’s realistic,
ethnographic representation of black folk culture in Their Eyes Were Watching
God.
Wright makes clear that Marxism is only a beginning toward the goal
of black freedom; it will aid the black writer to realize “his role as a creator
of the world” (1407); but it cannot encompass all of life. Life is of great
importance to Wright as an intrinsic symbolic concept, perhaps as that inner
symbol of which Johnson wrote. Life must be “lived”; experience must be
privileged over theory and should even be seen as giving shape to theory.
One might go so far as to say that the reshaping of experience into the
useful, subversive form Wright envisions constitutes theory.12 Theory, then,
must be presented as life experience on the page; life must be shown to be
acted out (through dramatic sequences representing thought and speech) by
way of the character’s individual will. And this individual will must act in
relation to the experience of the collective, and of the global community in
which that collective resides. It is interesting, however, that while Wright
promotes the notion of “faith” (the writer “possesses the potential cunning
to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he can create
the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life,” 1407), his own early
writing seems to express a sort of tragic sterility that likewise coalesces
with his theory. The writer who thus “steals away” not into the closet where
he might converse with his Lord (as said in the Spirituals), but into the
human heart where he might converse with humankind, “may expect either
to be consigned to oblivion or to be recognized for the valued agent he
is” (1407). We find such an anomaly of tragedy—the dialectic of oblivion

and recognition—at work in The Man Who Lived Underground, where Fred
Daniels’ purposeful descent into an underground, chaotic space of oblivion
forever seals his fate even as it paradoxically reveals his consciousness.
With all of the requirements of Wright’s poetics, with his call to
mold traditional expressions such as folklore even as one does away with
tradition, with his recognition of the largess/largeness of the human heart
even as he sentences his protagonist to death, theory does come to be of
signal importance. For theory, speculation, questioning, and wonderment
provide the materials with which to build a “human world” such as Wright
envisions. The poetics of being that emerge from Wright’s modernist angst
is tinged with hope and intention. And it is built upon a belief in the
ability of literature to do the world’s work. It sees literature as doing more
than reproducing the world in writing: literature is able to grant meaning
to a new and better world. If, as Wright insists, the writer’s function is to
guide and enlighten, and if part of his or her responsibility is to carry out
this task while at once responding to and transcending the nationalism of
black people, we must ask ourselves how well and in what way Wright
accomplishes the task he essentially sets before himself in The Man Who
Lived Underground.
Being Underground
The Man Who Lived Underground was written in 1942 but did not fully appear
in print until 1944, when a version of it was published in an anthology
entitled Cross Section, edited by the novelist and poet Edwin Seaver.13 Wright
begins his novella in medias res, and the use of this narrative device allows
him to render conceptions of time in complex foldings, such as flashback,
narrative reminiscence, and forgetting. Just as we are not quite certain of the
crime of the protagonist, Fred Daniels, as the story opens, neither are we
immediately aware of the exact geographical setting or of the protagonist’s
race. We know simply that he is running through an urban space, that he is
caught between impending danger and uncertain refuge (1437). He quickly
decides to lower himself into a manhole, and in doing so, he crosses the
first threshold of the narrative. Daniels at once transgresses and comes to
inhabit the limits that separate the cosmos—the world aboveground—from
chaos—the underground realm that becomes his provisional home.
The chaotic underground space of the novella is a geographical
metaphor of gape and rift. In Wright’s story, it is hardly the amorphous
and random primordial mass described in the Classical-era writings of Ovid.
Rather, Wright adheres more closely to the image of the underground given
in Hesiod’s Theogony, which classes the abyss as the site of the world’s origins.
Whereas the civilized world aboveground takes the name Cosmos and is
characterized by the rule of order, the underground world is given the name
Chaos, which precedes the existence and appearance of the Cosmos. Chaos
begets Cosmos, and thus is something of a pre-universe, a pre-condition for
the ordering of knowledge to which the Cosmos gives rise and which it in
turn bestows upon the civilized world. Whereas some aspects of postmodern
theory, for example, that of Gilles Deleuze,14 have tended to underscore
the continuity between these two realms rather than their opposition, the
modernist Wright seems intent upon underscoring the dissonance between
these worlds and the falseness of the Cosmos. At the same time, he critiques
the notion of the modern cosmopolitan writ large (a point on which I
expound below), in so far as this concept is founded on Enlightenment-era
notions of material value and global economic exchange. In the underground
space of the novella, we find instead numerous processes through which
Wright represents the repercussions of modern life on black being: the
interrelation of Cosmos and Chaos with reason and madness; the chaotic
interplay of memory and dreams; and the compression of time and space.
Essentially, Wright situates his anti-hero within the structure of ontological
myth, wherein Fred Daniels is compelled to define the nature of his existence
and the ultimate reality of things. Daniels may be seen as an iconoclast and
a deconstructionist, as he regularly subverts the ontological assumptions of
the world above ground. Indeed, Daniels’ descent into the underground world
may be likened (ironically, given Wright’s rejection of religion) to a Christian
rite of passage; as with baptism, Daniels’ immersion into an underground
“sea” of chaotically flowing, putrid water is intended to affect and transform
his mode of being. His descent is a metaphorical gesture in its religious
signification, and thus in its relation to African American folk thought and
expression. It may be read as a regression into the womb of mother earth.
But his descent also constitutes dissent and resistance; through it, Daniels
“becomes” a self-aware artist, a man possessed of self-consciousness. It is
because of his descent that Daniels emerges with a revised and critical
ontology. But certainly, his rite of passage does not confer upon him the
power to conquer death. At the novella’s conclusion, Daniels’ murder by
the police, the corrupt enforcers of the order of the Cosmos, remands him
permanently to the chaotic oblivion of art and shadows. He is not permitted
to re-emerge, and therein lies the tragedy of his life and existence.
Wright’s tragic and ironic anti-hero is not unlike Ralph Ellison’s
invisible man, as I mention above. The affinity between the two protagonists
is clear, given Wright’s depiction of a man who descends into an underground
space from which he designs an intuitive plan for his life and his mode
of being. The invisible man and Fred Daniels alike are concerned with an
ethical love and care for those in their community who cannot “see” and
do not “know” with each character’s own sensible acuity. Unfortunately for
Wright’s protagonist, whose struggle is both continuous and finite and who
is thus, like Bigger Thomas, stricken with a type of double-consciousness
and existential “guilt,” he emerges from his underground space only to
be consigned to it in death after a fashion that resonates with Wright’s
dictates in “Blueprint”: the artist always risks oblivion even as he strives for
recognition. It is as if the space from which the underground man plans
represents both freedom and enslavement, being and non-being; in the final
scene, his remanding into the underground space of enslavement/freedom is
made permanent by the trajectory of the bullet fired from the policeman’s
gun. The main character’s life is a tragedy, but it is also rendered absurd.
In a sense, the absurdity of the narrative results from the transformation
of the “real” world aboveground into the false or insufficient double of the
underground world. For Daniels, it seems, the originary Chaos of underground
life begets the Cosmos of the upper world, and reality is deemed the prosthesis
of originary chaos. Thus the underground world where he lives serves as
the ironic origin from which he divines the truth of being, a truth he longs
to share with the realm he considers to be distorted by the “dead world
of sunshine” (1451). “Reality,” then, is surreal; so, then, is Daniels’ ontology.
In a way, the relation between truth and the surreal (the truth of living
underground and the surreal stagings of life above ground) is analogous to
the relation between truth and fiction. The realm aboveground is contaminated
with a deceptive light that promises knowledge—a species of happiness and
security—but grants none at all, at least not in Daniels’ most recent experience.
In other words, Wright renders Daniels as a primal poet in a savage city, not
unlike that poet who, in Plato’s imagination, posed a threat to the order (the
cosmology) of the Republic, and must be banished by the guardians of that
city. Daniels’ art poses a threat because through it, he promises to bring into
being a thing that, prior to his descent, was simply non-being.
I see Wright doing a number of things with this sort of opposition
between ascent and descent, between being and nothingness. After a fashion,
Daniels may be seen as an analogue of the poets—Homer and others—
Plato wished to banish from his ideal Republic. Afraid that poets were
unduly capable of evoking in human beings feelings that could disrupt the
status quo, Plato argued that poets ought to be surveilled and controlled.
Deception, not only through poetry, but also through other sorts of aesthetic
representations, is the danger the Republic’s guardians should beware, a

warning Plato conveys through his allegory of the cave. Yet while Plato’s cave
is nonetheless free of poets (there are no poets depicted in the cave, only
hapless prisoners unable to discern between truth and falseness), Daniels,
who emerges in the story as an improbable poet of the chthonian realm,
descends into the underground where he encounters not the deception of
shadows narrated by Plato, but the enlightenment of darkness. For him, the
cave becomes a locus of insight where he sees more clearly, more truthfully
than in the blinding light of the city. By situating the locus of Daniels’
existence in an underground space beneath the modern city, Wright insists
that we meditate upon the problem of life and black being at its outer
limits. And because Wright renders the city and its entrails as veritable
characters in the story, arguably those characters with whom Fred Daniels
most regularly communes, the anatomy of the city itself, its geography,
emerges as yet another guiding metaphor of the novella.
On the question of such a metaphor of geography, I am drawn to
the work that David Harvey has done placing into relation geography,
anthropology, and history as signifiers in the modern world. In his essay
“Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils” (2000), Harvey
points out that in Immanuel Kant’s theory of geography, geography and
anthropology function as “the necessary conditions of all practical application
of knowledge to the material world” (532). Kant felt that “geography, together
with anthropology, defined the conditions of possibility of all knowledge
and that such knowledge was the necessary preparation—a ‘propaedeutic’
as [Kant] termed it—for everything else. While, therefore, geography was
obviously a ‘precritical’ or ‘prescientific’ state, its foundational role required
that [Kant pay] close attention” (530).
The point Harvey makes here calls us to consider more closely
geography as a metaphor that carries out a specific sort of intellectual work
in Wright’s novella: North/South, urban/rural, transatlanticism, colonialism,
and exile are all issues that inform Wright’s oeuvre to such an extent that
they must be considered aspects of his poetics. Certainly, Wright felt that
the locus of the city exerted a powerful force on his own fashioning of
his characters, his plot lines, and the imagery of his texts. For example, in
his introduction to Black Metropolis, from which I quote in the epigraph
to this chapter, Wright points out that the slums of Chicago produced
Bigger Thomas; we see clearly that an urban space likewise produced Fred
Daniels. And in a striking rhetorical move, Wright likens the pathology of
his fictional progeny to that of Adolf Hitler. He warns his reader:
Do not hold a light attitude toward the slums of Chicago’s South

Side. Remember that Hitler came out of such a slum. Remember
that Chicago could be the Vienna of American Fascism! Out of
these mucky slums can come ideas quickening life or hastening
death, giving us peace or carrying us toward another war. (xx)
In other words, then, America’s urban centers, with their complex

plight of poverty, industrialism, marginalization, and perhaps even fascism,
have the potential to produce a deadly schism. Wright continues:
Lodged in the innermost heart of America is a fatal division of

being, a war of impulses. America knows that the split is in her,
and that that split might cause her death but she is powerless
to pull the dangling ends together. An uneasiness haunts her
conscience, taints her moral preachments, lending an air of
unreality to her actions, and rendering ineffectual the good deeds
she feels compelled to do in the world. America is a nation of
a riven consciousness. (xxi)
The movement Wright describes in the novella does not serve as a

transcendence of this “fatal division of being,” the “riven” condition in which
America finds herself. Instead, this movement is radical submersion into
the break, as Ralph Ellison might put it,15 a descent into a heterotopic
space, for which Michel Foucault provides a helpful definition. Heterotopias
are dimensions apart, heterogeneous spaces that are “disturbing probably
because they secretly undermine language, because they shatter or tangle
common names, because they make it impossible to name this and
that . . . Heterotopias . . . desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks,
contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (Foucault, The Order
of Things, xviii). Kevin Hetherington draws upon Foucault’s thought to
define heterotopias as “spaces of alternate ordering” that “organize a bit
of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That
alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as
an example of an alternative way of doing things” (Badlands of Modernity
viii). Hetherington sees even so-called “normative” spaces—such as that of
industrial factories—as heterotopias, but for him, Foucault’s heterotopias are
neutral ground, spaces neither perfect (such as that described in Thomas
More’s Utopia) nor imaginary, but fitfully located somewhere between.
The alternative mode of action Wright depicts in his novella’s
underground space comments directly upon the epistemology Kant set out as
definitive of the modern world and its modes of consciousness. Kant’s treatise
on Geography (marred, like his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
the Sublime, with an inordinate but not surprising dose of racism) considers
modern time to indicate a “richness, fecundity, and life,” while space (like that
of the underground cave) “was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical,
the immobile” (Foucault, “Questions on Geography” 70). Wright is clear in
his refusal of this distinction; he compresses time and space in the novella,
and thus delivers a radical revisioning of the historicity of conscious black
being, and, therefore, the basis upon which we claim to know this or that.
If we look more keenly at what I shall call Daniels’ tableau, the poem
he has constructed in the cave from objects that constitute the detritus
of modern materialism, we may come closer to an understanding of the
significance of Wright’s strategy in this regard. Because language—the
ultimate conveyor of Western knowledge—ultimately fails the underground
man, his poetry largely comprises the material: its lines of verse are drawn
from the jewels he steals, the paper money he uses to veil the walls of his
cave, the various objects that serve as talismans. Daniels amasses a complex
pastiche of elements collected from the aboveground. We might say, in
reviewing the final composition he renders, that the lines separating these
elements themselves become blurred, to the extent that meaning is difficult,
if not impossible, to decipher. Foucault describes the sort of disorder that
characterizes heterotopias as that in which “fragments of a large number of
possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry”
(Order of Things xvii). The sort of “enigmatic multiplicity” of which Foucault
speaks reflects the revolutionary prescience of the underground space in
Wright’s novella, with its incongruous orders: technology (represented by the
radio, which regularly serves aboveground as a conduit of misinformation
and an instrument of control); capitalism (represented by the money, jewels,
and precious metals that are used as pure ornamentation—without exchange
value—in Daniels’ cave); weaponry (primal in the case of the cleaver, and
modern in the case of the gun); and time (represented by the watches—
each set to a random hour—Daniels hangs on the wall, alluding to his
subversion of the ordering of time and history). Collectively, these pieces,
along with Daniels’ inability to grasp fully the sense and ontology at work in
black folk expression, destabilize the provisional wisdom Wright assigns (in
“Blueprint”) to black vernacular and folk forms. They eventually constitute
the fragmented and heterogeneous poetry of the underground man’s cave,
itself deconstructive of the ordering of the cosmos which it, geographically,
precedes. They also suggest an alternative epistemology and, following Kant’s
thought, they impinge upon universal knowledge.
These are the spaces in which otherness and alterity might flourish
in support of a revised ontology and a subversive epistemology, yet Harvey
warns us against taking too much comfort in this theory. Heterotopias may
allow us to “think of the potential for coexistence in the multiple utopian
schemes—feminist, anarchist, ecological, and socialist—that have come down
to us through history” (537). However, Harvey complains that the radical
promise of the heterotopia has been reduced to theoretical commonplace,
that its thick potential becomes watery banality if “power/knowledge is or
can be dispersed into [multiple and many] spaces of difference” (Harvey
538). The disruptive effect of geographical thought “makes space a favorite
metaphor in the postmodernist attack—inspired, for example, by Foucault’s
The Order of Things—upon all forms of universality” (Harvey 539). But these
are only metaphors, he claims. They stop short of postulating “questions of
real geography and even the production of space” (541).
Harvey argues that we should resist overvaluing geographical metaphors
and instead pay attention to the ways in which “places and localized ways
of life are relationally constructed by a variety of intersecting socioecological
processes occurring at quite different spatio-temporal scales.” We must also,
he insists, give due consideration to “historical-geographical processes of
place and community construction” (542). Wright constructs metaphorical
spaces in his novella that are actually reflective of the “localized ways of life”
and “processes of place and community construction” that are so important
to Harvey, and they are not simple metaphors. It seems to me that the
imagination of critical, metaphorical spaces such as those appearing in the
novella are indeed productive of not only spaces that allow for conceptual
and revisionist thought, but that might also be seen as having the potential
to induce radical social action and consciousness on the part of the reader.
Here I return to my earlier point on cosmopolitanism: the disruptive
nature of Wright’s metaphorical underground space may be seen to attempt
the sort of cosmopolitanism Harvey values, if one sees cosmopolitanism
as an outcome of the erasure or mitigation of spatio-temporal boundaries
through self-reflective, rhizomatic errantry rather than as the well-rooted
growth of transnational corporations and international political formations
(such as the European Union).16 Consider, for example, Daniels’ erratic
encounters with black folk culture during his time in the underground, a
folk culture that seems alien to him, and which he observes with a certain
ambivalence. Wright’s paradigmatic representation of black folk culture
comes, in this instance, in Daniels’ distant hearing of the Spirituals, sung
during a church service going on in a sub-basement next to one of the
caves of Daniels’ underground world. He is both attracted to and repulsed
by the singers; their songs at once “enchanted” him (1438) and appeared
“abysmally obscene” (1439). On first spying the choir, with its “white robes”
and “tattered songbooks” in “black palms,” Daniels’ “first impulse [is] to
laugh” (1439). His second visceral emotion is that of guilt.
Why guilt? Even in his heterotopic space beyond the Cosmos, Daniels
feared that God would “strike him dead” for ridiculing the devoted song-
offerings of the choir (1439), which sang of love and a home beyond the
world in which they lived, even as slave singers had done in foregoing
generations. But unlike the improvised renderings that are characteristic of
the Spirituals, the singers of Wright’s underground sing from well-worn
songbooks, an unusual occurrence. While hymnals are bought and broadly
distributed throughout modern African American churches, it is unusual for
African American choirs (especially black Baptist and apostolic choirs that
continue the spiritual tradition Wright describes) to sing Spirituals (rather
than hymns) from songbooks (rather than from memory) while in the choir
stand on Sunday mornings. The guilt incurred by Wright’s fictional choir
appears to be that of being fed hopeful lyrics whose apparently dogmatic
and seemingly unreflective rendering in song brings pain to the protagonist,
because it seems to him that the singers are unconscious of their intrinsic
freedom, what Jean-Paul Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) refers to as the
ontological origins or foundation of freedom. Daniels shares some species
of the choir’s guilt since he feels himself to be existentially and morally a
part of the singers’ world, and he is thus unable to tear himself away from
the church scene:
After a long time he grew numb and dropped to the dirt. Pain
throbbed in his legs and a deeper pain, induced by the sight of
those black people groveling and begging for something they
could never get, churned in him. A vague conviction made him
feel that those people should stand unrepentant and yield no
quarter in singing and praying. Yet he had run away from the
police, had pleaded with them to believe his innocence. He shook
his head, bewildered. (1439, italics in original)
When Daniels hears singing coming from this same church later in
the novella, he has already made the decision to emerge from his heterotopic
space, to act in the aftermath of the false accusations that had disrupted not
only his own life (sending him into the solace of the chaotic subterranean
realm), but also the lives of others, such as the night watchman, who, after
being falsely accused of a theft that Daniels himself had committed, takes
his very life before the underground man, who watches the death scene as
though he were a spectator witnessing a performance. The singing convinces
Daniels that he must “tell” the church folks what he has learned, perhaps to
absolve both himself and them of their common guilt, and when he opens
the door to the church, the “deluge of song” that washes over him confirms
in him the necessity of this action, his deep-seated need to emerge from
the underground into what he considers to be the realm of false light and
“truth,” to convey to the black folk much needed knowledge, subversive
insight, and even salvation. As he approaches the church, he hears the
choir sing:
The Lamb, the Lamb, the Lamb

Tell me again your story
The Lamb, the Lamb, the Lamb
Flood my soul with your glory
The lyrics cast Daniels as a black Christ figure, come to take on sin
and guilt, and to save the black folk by way of the baptismal stream of his
narrative, his “story.” He is an ironic savior who comes to the surface of the
earth not from the realm above, but from a space below, where blackness
is not detrimental and evil, but affirming and good. The song that is next
taken up by the choir confirms this metaphor of Daniels as a black Christ:
Oh, wondrous sight upon the cross

Vision sweet and divine
Oh, wondrous sight upon the cross
Full of such love sublime
While Daniels is certainly positioned as the savior of the folk, the folk,
in turn, are transformed through this lyrical performance from a collective
of automaton-like singers to a cautionary, insightful group, gifted with the
second-sight of what Wright refers to in “Blueprint” as “racial wisdom.”
(Du Bois, as we recall, would often refer to the gift of second sight among
those living within the veil.) The lyrical commentary of the choir alludes
to the “wondrous sight upon the cross,” and a “love sublime.” It is perhaps
like the moral commentary of a Greek chorus and recalls Wright’s analogy
in his Introduction to Black Metropolis, wherein black migrants to northern
cities are likened to “characters in a Greek play,” “driven and pursued” down
“the path of defeat.” It warns Daniels of both bodily sacrifice and a love
vast in its dimensions, yet still comprehensible: the transitional stage of the
death of the body (the knowledge of the graveyard and the “laying down”
of the body, in the language of the Spirituals) and the subsequent rising up
of the spirit of consciousness in a sublime, transcendent, and even victorious
fashion. Even so, the death of the body is required before one can achieve
such transcendence; it is the sacrifice one must make should one wish to
live in the presence of God. As I have noted, Wright warns of an analogous
sacrifice of the artist in “Blueprint for Negro Writing”: “By his ability to fuse
and make articulate the experiences of men, because his writing possesses
the potential cunning to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart,
because he can create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life,
he may expect either to be consigned to oblivion, or to be recognized for
the valued agent he is.” The question is essentially one of life and death;
the Negro writer, Wright argues, “is being called upon to do no less than
create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die” (“Blueprint”
1407). The choir’s mortal warning, which seems to emanate from Wright’s
own theory of the poetics of African American literature, falls mute on
the ears of Daniels, who, intent upon conveying his own salvific message
rather than lending credence to the import of the Spiritual, is turned away
by the men of the church. Quite apart from the Biblical injunction to
take in strangers and anoint their feet with oil, Daniels, dirty, seemingly
intoxicated, and quite unruly, is turned out of the church to wander once
again the streets that precipitated his initial descent. He is, as Wright puts
it, consigned to oblivion.
The encounter with the church men, in particular, provides Daniels
with a new, but naïve purpose in his wandering above ground: to go to
the police and make a statement. “What statement? He did not know. He
was the statement” (1462). In yet another allusion to Christ—that Daniels
himself “was the statement,” that he was the “word” made flesh—he would
confess and assume, like Christ, guilt that was not his alone, but rather,
to his mind at least, everyone’s: “I’m guilty! . . . All the people I saw was
guilty” (1464). It is the scene in the church that most forcefully occupies
Daniels’ thoughts as he struggles to word his confession, and thus reveal
himself, his consciousness, to the same policemen who falsely accused him:
“His smile faded and he was possessed with memories of the underground;
he saw the cave next to the church and his lips moved to speak. But how
could he say it?” (1464). As he becomes convinced of the need to “force the
reality of himself upon them” (1465), he tries again to structure the narrative
of his confession, which somehow is rooted in the songs that emanated
from the church: “First, he ought to tell them about the singing in the
church, but what words could he use?” (1465). When the policemen finally
agree to take him to the cave and see what he has done, Daniels not only
feels relieved of his “burden,” but experiences a transcendental “selflessness”
(1468). He wanted “to prance about in physical ecstasy, throw his arm about
the policemen in fellowship,” and the song he sings as he is being driven
back to the manhole, “the song that had brought him to such a high pitch
of terror and pity,” underscores this sensation of “selflessness” and “ecstasy”
as he intones lyrics expressing his joy that the spirit of Christ now resides
in his soul: “Glad, glad, glad, oh, so glad / I got Jesus in my soul” (1468).
When they finally arrive at the manhole, Daniels is convinced that
by showing them his underground space, along with his inversion of the
meaning of material objects—his inversion of the “order of things”—he
will provoke in them a feeling of sympathy and empathy that would be
transformative:
He was eager to show them the cave now. If he could show

them what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt
and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of
pity. (1469)
For Daniels, the cave is a space of poetic meaning whose content,

the material objects he refashions and reorders, has been reduced to pieces,
fragments that are themselves metaphors of the modern condition, capable
even in their fractured state of producing meaning by way of what Daniels
refers to as “feeling.” Such feeling, Daniels believes, would lead others to
be “governed by the same impulse of pity,” a conclusion that, in Daniels’
mind, might advance in a number of hopeful directions. Not least of these
is compassion, which would indicate a “suffering with” another, signaling the
importance of strengthening the bonds of communal affinity and emotion
that would lead individuals to grant succor and care to other human beings.
Caring, then, as a fundamental humanistic act and construed as
a characteristic of Being-in-the-world by Heidegger, emerges as the
cornerstone of Daniels’ project, conveyed by the tableau he composes in
his underground cave, a poetic tableau that requires a reader/viewer in order
that its import and the possibilities it intimates do not fall soundlessly
into oblivion. Diamonds, jewelry, money, a typewriter, a radio, a cleaver, a
gun: all are forms that Daniels has emptied of their prior meaning as he
assembles a collage of sorts, leaving only structures that function as symbols
and metaphors at play in a heterotopic realm of chaos and formlessness.
Time, for example, loses its force in the cave: the underground man
is not sure of how long he sleeps, how long he has been underground,
or even whether it is night or day. His memory is likewise thrown into
chaos. He forgets his name and where he lives; he forgets where he was
arrested (1463). His mind and feelings work together to “reconstruct events
in reverse . . . his feelings ranged back over the long hours and he saw the
cave, the sewer, the bloody room where it was said that a woman had been
killed” (1463). It is perhaps the murdered woman who appears to Daniels
in a dream. Rather than her murderer (he maintains his innocence in this
regard, though he deems himself to be culturally and socially “guilty”), he
symbolically dreams himself her savior, one who walks toward her on water
just as Christ walked on the surface of the sea toward his disciples to
save them during a storm. Daniels’ dream reads as follows, introduced by
Wright’s characteristic ellipsis, itself another insistence upon fragments and
reordering. The dream is narrated using a Joycean stream-of-consciousness
technique to string together a number of fluid metaphorical images through
which Wright fleshes out the symbols that are central to his conveyance
of meaning:
. . . His body was washed by cold water that gradually turned

warm and he was buoyed upon a stream and swept out to sea
where waves rolled gently and suddenly he found himself walking
upon the water how strange and delightful to walk upon the
water and he came upon a nude woman holding a nude baby
in her arms and the woman was sinking into the water holding
the baby above her head and screaming help and he ran over the
water to the woman and he reached her just before she went
down and he took the baby from her hands and stood watching
the breaking bubbles where the woman sank and he called lady
and still no answer yes dive down there and rescue that woman
but he could not take this baby with him and he stooped and
laid the baby tenderly upon the surface of the water expecting it
to sink but it floated and he leaped into the water and held his
breath and strained his eyes to see through the gloomy volume
of water but there was no woman and he opened his mouth and
called lady and the water bubbled and his chest ached and his
arms were tired but he could not see the woman and he called
again lady lady and his feet touched sand at the bottom of the
sea and his chest felt as though it would burst and he bent his
knees and propelled himself upward and water rushed past him
and his head bobbed out and he breathed deeply and looked
around where was the baby the baby was gone and he rushed
over the water looking for the baby calling where is it and the
empty sky and sea threw back his voice where is it and he began
to doubt that he could stand upon the water and then he was
sinking and as he struggled the water rushed him downward
spinning dizzily and he opened his mouth to call for help and
water surged into his lungs and he choked . . . (1443–1444)
Daniels emerges from the dream at this point, having dreamt himself
as both savior and apostle working desperately to save the nude Madonna
and child: for it was the apostle Peter who began to sink into the sea
when his fear and doubt overtook him as he tried to walk on the water
toward Christ. Wright’s use of stream-of-consciousness writing in this
passage exemplifies the dessication of speech Foucault sees as characteristic
of heterotopias, and heightens the sense of urgency conveyed in the manifest
dream content as well as in its latent meanings: the underground man is
portrayed as a moral and upstanding person who risked his own life to
save that of two others, but it is an ethic he is hard-pressed to articulate.
Walking on water in the midst of an underground heterotopia becomes an
ironic and ambivalent metaphor of ethics: seemingly, the narrator implies, he
would have acted to save another human being in real life, and would not
have been able to commit an act of murder such as that of which he stood
accused, although he himself had not acted to relieve the suffering he had
witnessed while underground. It is as though his doubt and inaction render
his morality ambiguous; ironically, they are two aspects of his character that
had propelled him to an existence beneath the city.
The trauma of the underground space—its oscillations between
morality and guilt, freedom and entrapment, and its movement between
the past, the present, and the imaginary, eventuate in a failure of language
and a retreat into emotion. As Wright puts it in the novella, “He could
no longer think with his mind; he thought with his feelings and no words
came.” The ineffable here is connected to affect and emotion, an inability
to create content to fill a language that might convey his feelings. The
story itself is most obviously an allegory that encompasses metaphor,
irony, and what might be described as strivings to express that which is
inexpressible, ineffable, unspeakable. One essentially senses this striving in
Wright’s quotation of the Spirituals sung by the church choir that attracts
the underground man and names him, as he names himself, their savior.
However, like Christ the Savior, Daniels is destined to die. The choir’s
ironic warning of Daniels’ fate is foreshadowed in the numerous images of
death that appear in the underground space: the dead baby (both in reality
and in his reverie); the dead man at the undertaker’s; the woman who
drowns in his dream; and finally his own body, first as he lies “dead upon the
table” in his dream (1456), and again once he is shot by the policemen. As
the policemen plan his murder and conduct him back to the underground,
Daniels gleefully lowers himself one final time into the manhole that “gaped
round and black” (1469). After he is shot, Daniels’ body floats lifelessly away,
water blossoming around his head even as it had bloomed around the dead
baby (and here Wright continues the Christ theme, given that the baby in
the novella is an aspect of the Madonna and child trope). His own mouth
“gaped soundless” in death, just as the lifeless infant’s mouth had “gaped
black in a soundless cry.” Daniels and the Christ child alike pay the wages
of guilt.17 He, in a fate risked by the generalized “Negro writer” who figures
centrally in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” is consigned to oblivion rather
than agency.
Daniels’ murder at the novella’s conclusion indicates a literal “death of
the author,” such that the contents of yet another form, one whose meaning
is generally occupied by the person of the author or creator, is obviated.
Even so, the death of Daniels, and his purposeful emptying of forms and
obviating of language, do not relieve the reader of the need and demand for
interpretation of content. Herein lies the paradox of Daniels’ cave. Daniels,
an iconoclast, comes face to face with the inevitability of the icon. He is,
as Giorgio Agamben might term him, a revolutionary who is forced to
consider the futility of his revolt. Agamben writes:
In order to leave the evanescent world of forms, [the revolutionary]

has no other means than form itself, and the more he wants
to erase it, the more he has to concentrate on it to render it
permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to express.
But in the attempt, he ends up with nothing in his hands but
signs—signs that, although they have traversed the limbo of non-
meaning, are no less extraneous to the meaning he was pursuing.
(The Man without Content 10)
The signs Daniels refashions and reorders are extraneous to the meaning
he pursued because even as he completes his wordless poetic masterpiece, he
still feels compelled to move beyond it in order to accomplish its destiny.
The only remaining gesture available to Daniels near the end of the novella
(before his death) is that belonging to the double artist, who, not yet satisfied
with the mere production of art, wishes to effect the communion of art and
spectator. So long as no one else remarked the success of his masterpiece,
Daniels remained overtaken by the desire for community and for the
recognition of his thought and renewed sense of being.
I have underscored that Wright was unequivocal in his fiction as in his

criticism about the importance of community and the need for an engaged
art, and these demands eventually become the foundation of his poetics,
his artistic principle. In his conception of a poetics, which we see clearly
at work in The Man Who Lived Underground, he was not interested in what
Nietzsche referred to (in a fanciful but disparaging manner in The Gay
Science) as an art for artists only. Were this so, Daniels would not have
been so concerned to share his newfound point of view, his worldview
based upon a transformative aesthetics of materialism. In the 1957 essay,
“The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” Wright did not shift
position from his earlier work of criticism, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”
He continued to insist that the craft of writing should maintain a certain
autonomy, but that it should also reach beyond itself to communicate with
a community of writers and readers, even if one of the tasks he assigns the
text is the responsibility of creating readers or implying readers. There is
a way in which Wright strives to set before the implied or created reader
the scenes and images that beset his protagonist, and this setting forth is
most regularly accomplished through metaphors such as rift and descent,
and symbols such as darkness and light.
We often, mistakenly, consider metaphor to be simple ornamentation,
loosely called a figure of speech. However, metaphor, at its very foundations—
as the somatic phrase “figure of speech” suggests—is ontological in nature. As
metaphor is related to action or movement (physical, cognitive, or both), it
depends fundamentally upon the primal verb of existence, the verb “to be,”
whether that verb is explicit or implied. Paul Ricoeur has argued that there is
a harmony between the verb “to be” and the noun “reason”: being is rational,
while non-being is irrational; non-being is the chaos Fred Daniels negotiates
in life as in death. Yet if as Martin Heidegger writes, true poetry “awakens
the largest view” and “makes World appear in all things,” we must look a
little more closely at what the ontological and epistemological metaphors
in Daniels’ underground space do, what work they perform. That is to say
that if Fred Daniels’ chaotic poetry “makes World appear in all things,” then
it does, as Daniels insists, give birth to a true and radically new cosmos.
It associates with imagistic knowledge a mystery of sensibility, an intuitive
grasping of intent and import that is akin to perceiving in darkness, to
listening in silence.
It is perhaps because Daniels insists upon such paradoxes of metaphor
and symbol that he meets his end in tragedy. In spite of his amassing of
objects to adorn his underground cave, the tragedy of Daniels’ life is that
he cannot overcome the split between art and spectatorship any more than
he can heal what Wright describes as America’s riven consciousness, a split
similar to that endured by Bigger Thomas, who longs not simply to spectate
upon life, but to participate in what he considers to be “real” life, and thus
to know life. Bigger remains an enigma to himself, yet Daniels, gazing upon
the art he has made, is placed in contact with an innermost truth that he
is driven to share. To his mind, he has achieved perfect knowledge, which
he senses will displace and supercede the false logic of the upper world.
Nonetheless, Daniels’ creation does not ensure the erasure of his sense and
state of alienation; in fact, his act of creation seals his ultimate alienation
through death. The creative-destructive force and tragedy of his art is that
it eventually serves as a poetics of perversion that calls for a thoughtful,
even morally outraged response from the reader. Wright’s dynamic critique
in The Man Who Lived Underground demands that the reader engage in a
tensional imagination of truth, and makes of the tragedy that ensues from
an unjust death a heuristic that construes a new sphere of meaning opened
by metaphorical discourse. He makes of the death-laden split that inhabits
America, and the West more generally, the foundation from which a new
human existence and ethical human action become possible and necessary.
8
A Love Called Democracy

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
By Way of Conclusion
In the Prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man,1 the narrator
encounters an old slave who speaks to him of love. An “old singer of
spirituals,” the slave woman comes to him in a dream, a fissure “where time
stands still” (7). Not unlike the eighteenth-century autobiographer Equiano,
Harper’s Aunt Chloe, the spiritual singers who invisibly populate Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk, or who again play a central, epistemic role in Wright’s
The Man Who Lived Underground, Ellison’s singer also has critical knowledge
to impart. In the dream’s depths she confesses to him that she “dearly loved”
her master, the father of her children, although she “hated him too” (8).
The invisible man, writing of his dream from the critical distance of the
underground, admits that he also has “become acquainted with ambivalence.”
When he asks the singer why she moans, she replies:
‘I moan this way ‘cause he’s dead,’ she said.

‘Then tell me, who is that laughing upstairs?’
‘Them’s my sons. They glad.’
‘Yes, I can understand that too,’ I said.
‘I laughs too, but I moans too. He promised to set us free, but
he could never bring hisself to do it. Still I loved him . . .’
‘Loved him? You mean . . . ?’
‘Oh yes, but I loved something else even more.’
‘What more?’
‘Freedom.’
‘Freedom,’ I said. ‘Maybe freedom lies in hating.’
313
‘Naw, son, it’s in loving. I loved him and give him the poison
and he withered away like a frost-bit apple.’ (9)
This passage is instructive, for it introduces a theme that Ellison develops

throughout the novel. Love, or at least its expression and representation
in metaphorical language, is held to be ambiguous, always threatening to
teeter over into its opposite, hate. For the woman, the white master she
loves symbolizes the law and the oppressor, one who has used her both for
her labor and for sexual gratification. Nevertheless, she saves him, at least
temporarily. The narrator recounts that her sons would have cut their father
to bits had it not been for their mother holding them in abeyance. Finally,
the mother’s love leads her to kill her master; her moral spirit demands
his murder, and thus his death takes on a certain symbolic significance.
Not allowing her black sons to kill their white father, she herself poisons
the one who represents the nation-state’s law. Instead of guaranteeing her
and her sons the freedom stipulated by its own democratic ideals, the law
legitimates and ensures their continued oppression and enslavement under
the insufficient and negligent practice of democracy in America.
My reading of love in the invisible man’s early dream serves as both
a prolegomenon to the work of this chapter and an apt conclusion to the
work I have undertaken in this book. Over the course of this study, I
have attempted to underscore the ways in which many African American
authors employ philosophical metaphors that, while often drawn from the
vernacular tradition of African American expression, evince not only the
author’s sense of being and consciousness, but also the author’s exhortation
to contemplative and speculative thought that should lead to moral action
on the part of the engaged reader. The field of metaphor and tropes of love
in Invisible Man will be the focus of this final chapter, which examines how
the conceptual metaphor of love in the novel functions in connection with
its veiled, liminal spaces of consciousness, such as dreams and allegorical
undergrounds, wherein Ellison’s protagonist, in a fashion that is resonant
with yet ultimately distinct from that of Wright’s underground man, devises
plans for moral, democratic action.
Throughout this study, I have discussed the conceptual metaphors
by which the authors whose works I examine negotiate such ontological
and epistemological spheres or boundaries of thought. In the writings
of Olaudah Equiano, Frances E. W. Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the
transgression and inhabitation of the liminal spaces between these realms
are ultimately regenerative: while inhabiting such interstitial sites allows for
a certain opacity that shields the individual from racist overdetermination
A Love Called Democracy 315
and oppressive aggressions, they also bring about new life, new identity,
and a renewed quest for a sense of purpose. In Equiano’s Narrative, the
sphere of thought he promulgates takes shape through a discourse of spirit
and ethics. In Harper’s poetry, we find ourselves ushered into the realm of
slave being and moral contemplation in ways that Equiano does not neglect,
but that befit the context of Reconstruction. These metaphoric life-ways
are closely related to those traced by Du Bois, who likewise charts and
chronicles the onto-theologies of slave being and, importantly, archives its
experiences and expressions. Du Bois, having performed a critical ontology
of race in “The Conservation of Races” (showing race to be a specific sort
of social mythology that could and should be used strategically by oppressed
African Americans), guides his reader into the inner recesses of the veil
as he explores the varied meanings of black being in The Souls of Black
Folk. In Wright’s novella, the testing of ontological boundaries ends in a
tragedy that calls the reader to question yet again racialized epistemologies
of being and non-being as these impact black existence. The experience of
the liminal—the crossing of boundaries and the testing of limits—regularly
serves as sites of being and becoming in the conceptual metaphors devised
by these writers, sites of personal transformation and radical politics.
Ralph Ellison’s novel likewise dwells in such a site. A masterwork
of peculiar dimensions, Invisible Man was the only major work of fiction
published by Ellison before his death in 1994. Although his reviews, opinion
pieces, short stories, and essays appeared from the mid-1930s onward,
Invisible Man remains the yardstick by which Ellison’s literary talent and
intellectual acumen continue to be judged by twenty-first-century critics,
even those who consider the posthumous publication of Juneteenth (1999)
and, more recently, Three Days before the Shooting (2011).2 Each centimeter on
the yardstick appears to count as a mile, and justly so. Ellison’s debut novel
immediately propelled him to the heights of literary success, garnering the
coveted National Book Award in 1953, and helping him to win numerous
fellowships and teaching posts. However, some responses to the novel, such as
the white critic Irving Howe’s belated critique in the 1963 essay “Black Boys
and Native Sons,”3 appear truculent, complaining with an almost perceptible
pout that with the appearance of Invisible Man, social realism’s spell over the
African American novel, a magic that had been most assiduously practiced
by Wright before his untimely death in 1960, was broken. Ellison’s novel
is remarkable not only because of the willfulness he showed in breaking
away from his own Marxist leanings, along with those of his erstwhile
mentor, Wright,4 by composing a text that openly critiqued communism and
its grand scheme regarding the “liberation” of blacks in America. He also
defiantly concerned himself with artistic form and the craft of writing over
and above social and political propaganda of the sort advocated by Howe.
However, Ellison did not want to be misread on this point. “Now mind! I
recognize no dichotomy between art and protest,” he declared while being
interviewed by the Paris Review three years after the publication of his novel
(“The Art of Fiction” 169). He later clarified his stance in a 1966 New York
Times interview with John Corry: “I am a novelist, not an activist . . . but
I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures
can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement” (Conversations with
Ralph Ellison 101). Indeed, Ellison’s propensity to commingle a number of
novelistic devices—the use of complex and philosophical metaphors, the
layering of narrative voices, the combination of the symphonic and the
folkloric, and the use of a Prologue and an Epilogue to frame his work—
make his novel one that may be approached from a number of critical and
theoretical perspectives. They also render any singular or simplistic approach
regarding his poetics and politics inadequate to a sentient assessment of the
novel in all its complexity.
Acknowledging such limitations, my argument works toward an
analogy between Ellison’s conception of the liminal as an allegorical site
of preparation for democratic action, which insists upon “love” as an
Emersonian principle of democratic inclusion, and the unconscious as the
seat of the linguistic function, where a figure of speech, such as the metaphor
of love, takes shape. In this analogy, the skepticism in various trajectories of
poststructuralist and postmodernist theories toward the primacy of absolute
knowledge in Western epistemologies (articulated and conveyed via a system
of language that functions in accordance with the symbolic order) will be
useful. It aids me in tracing the contours of the discursive value of love as
metaphor and this metaphor’s imbrication with racial difference and national
belonging (which Ellison articulates through the trope of invisibility) that
carry out Ellison’s critique of exclusionary nationalist practices. In particular,
contemporary applications of Kristevan psychoanalysis, which extrapolates
from the Freudian psychoanalytic theory with which Ellison was quite
familiar, and focuses on the condition of the speaking subject as s/he enters
the symbolic realm and interacts and makes meaning with an Other, offer
a preliminary framework for reading the economies of language that have
crafted, in a variety of contradictory ways, the historical production of race.
Likewise, Paul Ricoeur’s interpretations of Freudian thought in relation to
aesthetics and philosophical thinking have aided me in seeing more clearly
the interrelation of psychoanalytic theories of the self and the philosophy
of being as these meet in the occasion of metaphor. Finally, the thought of
Audre Lorde and Hortense Spillers has encouraged me to attend to what

I call a latent but insurgent black maternal feminism in Invisible Man, a
discourse with which Ellison’s name does not usually resonate.
Through an analysis that acknowledges the social symbolism, linguistic
symbolism, and what Fred Moten has called the “ocularcentrism” at work in
at least Lacan’s version of psychoanalytic theory,5 I read Ellison’s metaphor
of love as democracy as emerging from the multiple folds of his Americanist
discourse. Following the intentionality of both Ellison’s fiction and his
criticism, the American nation-state emerges as a problematic metaphysical
construct of the symbolic realm, subtended by the Law of the (white) Father.
Via the specific organization of its metaphysics, the American nation-state
early on established a set of meanings attached to the raced, gendered
black body that impacted in tension-filled ways how this speaking subject
broached questions of blackness and being in the realm of the symbolic.
Ellison, as he demonstrates in a number of his critical essays, takes note
of this sort of metaphysical discourse used in founding the nation-state
in the eighteenth century and in outlining its criteria for membership.6
These criteria fell in line with the ideals of Western civilization, and were
given pointed force through a practice of political and scientific racism
wherein various populations, separated into ostensible racial groups, were
placed along a hierarchical chain of being that curtailed, to a great extent,
their right to citizenship in the nation-state as well as their freedom to
be “at home in the world,” to borrow a favored phrase of Ellison’s. The
metaphysical discourse used to establish the nation-state—and this discourse
is furthermore, as I have shown, quite metaphorical in nature—did not
simply outline an epistemology of being-in-the-world that stipulated the
non-being of black folk. It also established guidelines for what sort of speech
may be “heard” by society, what sort of speech is recognizable. This has, in
ways that will become clear over the course of this chapter, much to do with
the metaphoric symbolization of the body that speaks of love, particularly
if this body has been raced as black.
What Ellison gets at in depicting certain situations of physical
love (that is, sexuality or sexual behavior that the invisible man often
characterizes in terms of his love for the white women he is with) alongside
his critical adaptation of Emerson’s theory of a loving, democratic society,
is a critique of an “empty narcissism” on the part of both his protagonist
and his nation. The invisible man’s quest for sexual love, which is not
unrelated to his quest for a sense of self and being or consciousness, is
fueled by his narcissism (his limited self-love), his unactualized being, and
his lack of social and personal recognition. In short, the invisible man is
invisible because he does not love morally and is not morally loved by the
socius in return. He “plunges”—another verb that repeats in the text of
Invisible Man—outside of the nation’s democratic embrace, and thus into
the realm of invisibility.
In this way, I see the novel’s highly celebrated metaphor of invisibility
as fully dependent, for its philosophical and psychoanalytic import, upon the
metaphor of love. The movement Ellison effects between the invisible man’s
immature, naïve, and narcissistic expressions of love, which all take place
within a Freudian context of sexual tension that is at work throughout the
main body of the novel, is at odds with the greater love the invisible man
insists upon (in the Prologue and Epilogue) from his underground cell. In
being forced underground, the invisible man is forced out of his narcissism:
he is compelled to depart from a state of self-love, which is really a non-
loving, non-reciprocal state of non-being, and to enter a critically reflective
space that provides for contemplation and enactment of a greater, moral
love. In the chaotic space of the underground, a womb-like and ultimately
maternal space that is the opposite of the symbolic, cosmological realm
of the father, Ellison’s protagonist benefits from its nurturing even as he
envisions the rebirth of a world that makes newly possible the realization
of a beloved community.7
Speaking for the Beloved
The philosophical and psychoanalytic questions of black being that found my

inquiry into Invisible Man will first require contextualization. I provide that
in this section by discussing the politics of speaking and black representation
with which Ellison contended in mid-twentieth-century America, and
preface it with a turn to the contextualization Ellison himself affords
regarding his protagonist’s act of writing.
The metaphor of love as democracy, or democracy as love, rings forcefully
when we recall that Ellison drew its inspiration, as I have mentioned, from
the work of the man for whom his father named him, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ralph Waldo Ellison was convinced that “Emerson’s essays fulfilled a need,
precisely because Americans existed in a society and in a country which
was not tightly structured and in which no one, at that time especially,
could set a limit upon possibility, certainly not at the level of imagination”
(“The Novel as a Function of American Democracy” 311). In “Politics”
(1841), Emerson posited the utopian and optimistic notion that the nation-
state could and should be re-envisioned as founded upon the “principle of
right and love.” Within this guiding ideal lies morality, a “reliance upon the
moral sentiment,” Emerson opined (125). Ellison, prodding the conscience
of his protagonist in the mournful aftermath of Brotherhood member Tod
Clifton’s death and reprising Emerson’s sentiment, puts the question to all of
his readers: “And could politics ever be an expression of love?” (Invisible Man
341). The question the invisible man poses provides an apt contextualization
of the very act of writing his memoir, and reveals the role of moral love in
the novel’s theme and overall import. Through the metaphor of love, Ellison
proposes a political agenda with real implications for the actualization of
American democracy, and he seeks to bring his agenda to agency through
the act of writing itself.
The invisible man differs greatly from Wright’s underground man in
this regard, though Wright’s novella clearly influenced the shape of Ellison’s
novel to an important extent. While the invisible man evolves a language of
love, Fred Daniels abandons spoken language in his heterotopic underground
space—or, perhaps it is better said that Wright purposely allows love’s
discourse to desert Daniels. In our reading of the two texts, we move from
the fragments of poetry in Wright’s novella to the open unity of prose in
Ellison’s novel. Ellison’s protagonist, undoubtedly speaking with the voice of
his creator in the Prologue and the Epilogue, describes the memoir as an
act of love whereby he hopes to advance not only toward an understanding
of the “principle” of moral democracy on which the country is founded, but
also toward a plan of right action that would permit him to breathe life
into that principle.
In his grotto, for instance, he pauses in deep contemplation of this
principle while querying his grandfather’s advice to “overcome ’em with
yeses” (13): “Did he mean say ‘yes’ because he knew that the principle was
greater than the men. . . . Did he mean to affirm the principle? . . . Or
did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the
men as well as the principle, because we were the heirs who must use the
principle because no other fitted our needs?” (433). He works through these
questions by connecting the space of writing and the concept of love to a
space of moral action, or at least to a preparation for principled action that
will achieve ideal democracy and work against nationalistic exclusions. The
invisible man tells us in the Epilogue that he tortures himself “to put it all
down” in writing because he has, in fact, learned things that came to him
once he stepped away from normative and constraining discourses, such as
those espoused by the Brotherhood’s version of communism and by Ras’s
variety of black nationalism. His concluding thoughts near the end of the
Epilogue reveal the very schisms from which the question has arisen:
So it is now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to

defend. . . . I denounce because though implicated and partially
responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt
to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all
I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to
love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man—but
too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you
approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach
it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and
I love. (437–38)
The protagonist’s conclusion sheds meaningful light on the psychical

fractures from which arise his revised “approach” to the meaning of his
life. His mode of response to the painful experience of a racialized and
fragmented existence emerges as a philosophy of moral love—a higher love
toward which he strives, but which he has not yet achieved. Were we to
heed the invisible man’s example, which he describes as a “divided” strategic
approach, defining his ultimate philosophy of moral love in light of Ellison’s
view of the novel as a function of American democracy would require that
we approach it piecemeal through the idea of nation and the construct of
race and, more specifically, through varied inscriptions and discourses of
blackness. That which lies at the heart of discourses on the nation is regularly
articulated, as I discuss in the foregoing chapters of this study, through
metaphors of purity and blood, of community and belonging, of authenticity
and legitimacy (including jurisprudence), and by extension, metaphors of
desire. So much of what lies at the heart of nationalist discourses evolves
out of figural language that we regularly use to describe families and our
membership in them at the same time that it echoes tropological language
used to talk about racial belonging and our longing to belong to a community,
society, or nation.
In fact, as I discuss in chapter 4 of this study, the idea of the nation
is theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Gellner, and Hans Kohn, among
others, as a political entity that grew out of family units—biological unions
that came together in work and cultural groups to form the basis of the
city-state, a precursor of the nation-state. Thus the notions of blood that
give life to our ideas of race likewise engender our concept of the modern
nation-state. In chapter 3 of this study, I discuss The Metaphysics of Morals
by Immanuel Kant, whom many scholars recognize as providing the modern
definitions of both race and nation at a moment in Western history that
has left an indelible mark on our considerations of the Enlightenment. Kant
writes that the members of the nation can be “represented as analogous to

descendants from a common ancestry (congeniti). . . . [I]n an intellectual
sense or for the purposes of right, they can be thought of as the offspring
of a common mother (the republic), constituting, as it were, a single family
(gens, natio) whose members (the citizens) are all equal by birth.” Thus,
the essence of racial thinking (underscoring here the essentialism that is
caught up with racialism) is situated in founding metaphors that overlay
with discursive sediment the politics of the nation-state and underscore
through tropes of mother and family the idea of the nation-state as a
home to which we belong, a dwelling or habitation. The essence of racial
thinking is imbricated with the question of national belonging, which we
often metaphorically imagine in terms of home and community: mother,
family, membership, as well as the republic, the citizenry, and its culture.
In light of such discourse as this, it is telling to consider once more
Ellison’s by now well-known theory of the aims and function of the
American novel. Similarly, the relation of the ideas of nation-state and
“home”—a concept-metaphor, really, in Ellison’s thought—should lead us
to meditate further upon his pert attention to conceptual metaphor as he
composed his text. Ellison’s theory of the novel linked love and being, as
well as nation and home. Likening the novel to an existential habitation,
Ellison argued that the novel could provide a portal to a realization of the
democratic ideals upon which the country had been founded. For instance,
when considering what he felt to be the “chief significance” of Invisible Man
as a novel, Ellison concluded: “Its experimental attitude, and its attempt to
return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which
typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction” in the tradition of Mark
Twain (“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” 102). Ellison argued that
the twentieth-century American novel was in crisis precisely because of its
inattention to the moral problems facing the nation. These had to do with
what he describes as “the conflicts within the human heart which arose
when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed
with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love” (104).
Specifically, for Ellison, the Negro in American fiction could aid us not
only in redeeming the lost values of the novel, but also in achieving the
lofty democratic aims of our nation. For the Negro in American fiction,
he argued, “symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious,
underground aspect of human personality. In a sense the Negro was the
gauge of the human condition as it waxed and waned in our democracy”
(104). He concluded that in order to “see America with an awareness of
its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced
to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has

led . . . to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our
current fiction” (104–5). And thus his extrapolated conclusion, coming in
the penultimate paragraph of his acceptance speech upon winning the
1953 National Book Award: “The way home we seek is that condition of
man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term
democracy” (105–6).
Ellison’s metaphor of love as democracy is foundational to his novelistic
poetics, especially as exemplified in Invisible Man. It takes shape through
what he saw as the re-determined foundation of the nation-state, as well as
by way of a number of deft theoretical framings. Ellison relates this metaphor
to representations of embodied blackness that serve to undergird the central
critique of his novel: blackness and democratic inclusion provisionally appear
to be diametrically opposed in Invisible Man, and each in turn runs counter
to the exclusionary principles that give shape to the nation-state.
Ellison’s thought on this point resonates with that of two writers who
occupy my attention earlier in this study—Equiano and Du Bois. Each
approaches the idea of blackness by way of an analysis that destabilizes the
concepts of blackness and whiteness alike, especially as these concepts pertain
to ideas of national identity. The intellectual process subtending this outcome
takes on different guises in the work of each writer, but mainly occurs within
a debate over the notion of nationhood and national belonging. Equiano,
for instance, speaks of his blackness as a disembodied African identity to
which he no longer has full access. Yet the negative attributes associated
with embodied blackness by Europeans disallow him the Englishness he
desires and ultimately approximates and critiques. On the other hand, Du
Bois’s 1897 critical ontology of blackness or, more specifically, of a racialized
identity called blackness or the Negro, is more pointed, yet nuanced. In
“The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois considers blackness a political tool
that—once it has been historicized and deconstructed—may be used to unite
Americans of African descent in the face of white American aggression.
However, Du Bois points out that this uniting force is quite unstable. He
reads race as metaphor and ephemeron: blackness is, for him, a limited
identity that may be cast off when two important events have taken place.
First, the “Negro people as a race” must make a lasting “contribution” to
“civilization and humanity, which no other race can make.” Blackness as
racial identity may then finally be cast aside once “the ideal of human
brotherhood” will have become a “practical possibility” (“Conservation” 825).
But Du Bois never argues that the idea of black culture must be relinquished
fully. Rather, he demonstrates the capacity of black culture to exact critique
(in the manner that Hortense Spillers recognizes and advocates in “The Idea
of Black Culture”8) through his attention to the transcendent and visionary
power of the Sorrow Songs, his portraits of southern black life in America,
and his construction of a sometimes transcendent, sometimes immanent
narrative persona in The Souls of Black Folk.
Ellison’s interpretation of blackness differs somewhat from that of
Equiano and Du Bois, yet resonates in perhaps unexpected ways. In “The
Art of Fiction,” the 1955 interview conducted by the Paris Review, Ellison
pronounces his ideas on the topic, and seems to imply that while conceiving
Invisible Man, he had no intention of subverting the usual social implications
of blackness in Western thought in favor of a critique that blackness might
bring forth:
[T]here are certain themes, symbols and images which are based
on folk material. For example, there is the old saying amongst
Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if you’re brown, stick around;
if you’re white, you’re right. And there is the joke Negroes tell on
themselves about being so black they can’t be seen in the dark.
In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings
which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology:
evil and goodness, ignorance and knowledge, through blackness
to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment: invisibility to
visibility. (“The Art of Fiction” 173)
It would seem on first surmise that Ellison, for whom “the word,” that
is, language, is of utmost importance, incorporates conventional, negative
perspectives on blackness into his aesthetic without challenging their
connotations. As Ellison continued to restate his position on the point,
however, his concept of blackness showed greater nuance, in a manner of
speaking. Moving from a perspective of blackness framed and conditioned
by what Ellison himself refers to in 1955 as a white “Western mythology,”
in a 1966 interview he launches a different sort of “definition,” sprawling in
its breadth and complex in implication. Although Ellison expresses concern
over an “increasing emphasis on Negroness, on blackness” in certain quarters
of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements, he expands his perspective
on blackness by distinguishing biological notions of race from the culture
a so-called race possesses and shares with the world:
[Blackness] grows out of despair. [. . .] It attempts to define

Negroes by their pigmentation, not their culture. What makes
you a Negro is having grown up under certain cultural conditions,

having undergone an experience that shapes your culture. There
is a body of folklore, a certain sense of American history. There
is our psychology and the peculiar circumstances under which
we have lived. There is our cuisine, though we don’t admit it,
and our forms of expression. I speak certain idioms; this is also
part of the concord that makes me a Negro. (Conversations with
Ralph Ellison, 101)
Ellison agrees with Du Bois when he propounds blackness by way

of culture and consciousness rather than biology. But to opine (seriously)
that blackness is disgorged by a social condition of “despair” is to raise
any number of pertinent questions. Does he insist that African Americans
despair over their station in life, which is determined, as it were, by virtue
of the color of their skin and not by their culture alone? Might one then go
on to say, as Ellison seems to here, that the despair that engenders blackness
reflects a rather desperate attempt on the part of the larger “white” society to
constrain “black” people, to put them “in their place” by way of a restrictive
process of determination reserved for “black skin”? If blackness entails a
specific sort of psychology and “a certain sense of American history,” as
Ellison puts it, are these intrinsically negative fields of inquiry because they
themselves sprout from the negativity that blackness—if we follow what
seems to be Ellison’s logic in this regard—appears to be?
Surely Ellison’s sense of Americanness has something to do with how
he frames blackness here, as he intimates when he comments on the “certain
sense of American history” he feels Negroes possess. Even as Ellison quite
presciently distinguishes between a biologically essentialist view of race and
one that sees race as an amalgamation of cultural values, he is still less
than precise in conveying his sense of the relationship between biology
and culture, a relationship (nature vs. nurture) that has long been under
debate. Blackness as despair seems harsh and jagged, especially coming from
an intellectual of Ellison’s stature, who articulated such thoughts at the
height of the Civil Rights movement and on the eve of the Black Power
movement. We could point our finger at Ellison and echo Ernest Kaiser’s
later condemnation of him as an “establishment writer” and, what is more
damning, an “Uncle Tom.”9 But such angling would overlook the fact that
Ellison’s ideas on blackness, as stated in a number of interviews reprinted
in the important collection, Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995), are
not far from the proclamations of black cultural nationalists such as Kaiser,
who denigrated his work during the late 1960s and 1970s, and for whom
Ellison had little appreciation in return.
For example, Ellison’s emphasis on black vernacular as “part of the
concord that makes me a Negro” is but a stone’s throw from the exhortations
of a certain Professor McWorter, who, according to James A. Emanuel,
defines blackness in terms of black speech. Such a definition is, Emanuel
writes, central to a “prescribed training for literary competition” (“Blackness
Can” 213). Similarly, Sarah Webster Fabio echoes Ellison in deeming black
language “an idiom of integrated insight,” a poetic creation and an amalgam
of “idiosyncrasies—those individualized stylistic nuances (such as violation
of structured syntax [and somewhat esoteric metaphorical contrivances])
which nevertheless hit ‘home’ and evoke truth” (qtd. in “Blackness Can” 211).
Black Aestheticians such as Fabio and Emanuel shared a grand
appreciation of the Afro-French Négritude movement, with its staunch
valuations of African-oriented cultural artifacts. Whatever affinities Ellison
might have unconsciously had for Black Aesthetic-tinged evaluations of
African American culture (for he consciously distanced himself from the
movement), he critiqued the Négritudinists openly. Going beyond the
perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre, who characterized Négritude as an “antiracist
racism” in his 1948 essay “Orphée noir,” Ellison condemns Négritude as an
ideology that “represents the reverse of that racism with which prejudiced
whites approach Negroes. As a theory of art it implies precisely that culture
is transmitted through the genes. It is a blood theory” (“A Very Stern
Discipline” 303).
In his exceptionalism, Ellison not only failed to give Négritude its
due by not examining its premises and evolution more carefully; he also
“rejected any notion of a link [with Africans] just as [he] later rejected
[Melville] Herskovits’ ideas” about African cultural survivals (Conversations
with Ralph Ellison 67). Ellison’s position on blackness, read through his
ostensible disdain for certain of its theoretical manifestations, were likely
precipitators of the assaults lanced against him by writer John O. Killens
and historians John Henrik Clarke and Herbert Aptheker. Harold Cruse’s
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) gives an account of the verbal
fracas that took place during the 1965 conference, “The Negro Writer’s
Vision of America,” organized by Killens and held at the New School
for Social Research in February of that year. The participants might well
have burned Ellison’s image in effigy, so intense was the defamation of
Ellison’s intellectual and artistic character recounted by Cruse. According to
him, Clarke portrayed Ellison as “ ‘standing outside his people’s struggle.’ ”
Aptheker, a white Marxist historian who had been named W. E. B. Du

Bois’s literary executor in 1946, concurred, adding with what seems to be
unconscious irony that “ ‘[it] is unfortunate that Mr. Ellison is not here’ ” to
voice a defense of himself. “ ‘[He] has made himself not particularly visible
in the struggles of the Negro people’ ” (Cruse 501–508).
Most likely, Ellison made himself a target of such ad hominem attacks
because of his own theory of the novel and his ideas of cultural and literary
aesthetics, which carefully merged his apparently anti-black nationalist ideas
on blackness with his developing concept of Americanness and democracy.
He was, perhaps, most culpable in the eyes of Killens and the AFNA cohort
for saving his loftiest literary praise for white American and European
writers. (Ellison did not even respond to “most mail addressed to him by
his fellow black writers,” John Henrik Clarke chided.) He admired Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922) as an example of a great work of American literature,
whose stature derived, in part at least, from its use of cultural forms and
traditions in the text. He was also deeply intrigued by Russian literature,
and, as is well known, held the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the highest
esteem. The French writer André Malraux became a good friend of Ellison’s,
and his La Condition humaine (1933; translated into English as Man’s Fate
in 1934) provided Ellison with an example of a novel influenced by Marxist
ideology (as were the works of any number of the AFNA group), yet free
from the limitations of socialist dogma, which often produced, Ellison was
known to complain, dull, ineloquent fiction.
While Ellison’s novel remained popular with a number of white
mainstream critics, the widespread condemnation that flowed from Black
Aesthetic and AFNA circles largely proscribed his work in the halls of black
literary criticism, and rendered his pronouncements on blackness somewhat
circumspect. As late as 1988, critic Valerie Smith accused him of denying
“his intellectual links with and debt to earlier black writers” (“The Meaning
of Narration in Invisible Man” 26). However, Ellison does acknowledge
inheritances from his black literary antecedents, albeit implicitly. His
belief in the importance of black cultural forms—folklore, Spirituals, the
blues, and jazz—emerges as a guiding force in the invisible man’s memoir.
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative (and more obliquely, that of Equiano)
undoubtedly provided Ellison fertile ground for troping on the multiple
naming his protagonist endures. Ellison’s narrator remarks directly upon the
renaming Douglass withstands in order to attain a position of social power,
and by the time of the Prologue and Epilogue, as he undertakes the writing
of his memoir, it is clear that he has read and critically digested Douglass’s
Narrative: “Douglass came north to escape and find work in the shipyards;
a big fellow in a sailor’s suit who, like me, had taken another name. What
had his true name been? Whatever it was, it was as Douglass that he
became himself, defined himself ” (Invisible Man 288). Du Bois’s critique
of black leadership, articulated searingly in his essay, “Of Mr. Booker T.
Washington and Others,” resonates in the scene where the invisible man is
first introduced to Jack’s mistress, Emma. “Their leaders are made, not born,”
she says cynically of black people (Invisible Man 230). Du Bois had written
in The Souls of Black Folk that while others “had become leaders by the silent
suffrage of their fellows,” Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute
(Ellison’s alma mater, though he never earned a degree) whose image is so
clearly evoked in the second chapter of the novel, was hoisted into leadership
on the shoulders of white “national opinion” (Souls 397–98). Du Bois is quite
direct in his criticism: “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old
attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar
time as to make his programme unique. . . . Mr. Washington’s programme
naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money
to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher
aims of life. . . . [it] practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro
races” (398). The invisible man, from the critical distance of the underground,
recalls the sight of a statue of Washington, and likewise wonders about the
true aims of the founder’s seemingly liberatory ideology:
Then in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college

Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the
breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic
folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled,
unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered
more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a
more efficient blinding. (28)
Certainly this ambiguous image of uplift calls to mind the title of

Washington’s 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, even as the concept-
metaphor of the veil signifies at once the blindness and insight modeled
by Du Bois in Souls, where Washington’s motives were likewise cast
into question. A further example of the black literary heritage resonant
in the novel is found in the work of James Weldon Johnson, whose The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912/1927) Houston Baker sees as
a “prototype” for Ellison’s experimental text.10 Johnson’s nameless narrator
encounters the greatness of black cultural forms, and carries with him a
talisman (the ten-dollar gold piece made worthless by the hole his father
had drilled through it) that is recast as various fetishes in Ellison’s work.
Throughout the novel, the invisible man is adamant about keeping with him
a leather briefcase bearing a number of “important papers,” Mary Rambo’s
broken bank (the “cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-
mouthed Negro”), and Tod Clifton’s dancing sambo doll.
In implicitly and at times explicitly engaging Douglass, Washington,
Du Bois, and Johnson through his fiction, Ellison nods to black literary
antecedents, all male, it must be said. (While not sexist, Ellison was at least
superficially masculinist in his fiction, a point I take up in the next section.)
Assuming a public mantle that continues a long tradition of contending
with notions of “manhood” (a topic that demands a chapter of its own),
Ellison, unlike Wright in this regard, exempted himself from what Herbert
Aptheker called the “visible” circles of activist black authorship, becoming
hyper-visible in the “mainstream” world of white letters while (from his own
perspective at least) fully immersing himself in writing with an aesthetic
purpose and a latent, if not overt, political focus. Jerry G. Watts deems this
the “conundrum” of the anti-black nationalist black intellectual: inscribing
blackness as invisibility in a way that counters the concrete, essential black
subject imagined by the Black Aestheticians, while at the same time speaking
of blackness in ways that do not conform to the contours of the prescriptive
boundaries of discursive black self-determination put into place by such
powerful black nationalist artistic and intellectual circles as the Harlem
Writers Guild, constituted a transgressive gesture on Ellison’s part. In other
words, in the eyes of many black nationalist thinkers, Ellison was hardly the
ideal porte-parole of everyday black people facing bleak social and political
situations. To speak plainly, Ellison was, in some circles, considered a sell-
out who had abandoned his people.
Yet this conclusion, framed and clouded as it is by essentialist issues
of racial and cultural authenticity, must be dismantled carefully and with
insight. Watts, of course, begins this work by recuperating Ellison’s image as
an intellectual who might not have been openly political, but was certainly
influenced by political thought and saw art as unavoidably social and political
in nature. Nonetheless, in Watts’ estimation, Ellison was also an elitist
“who [believed] that disengagement from politics best [served] his creative
ambitions” (Heroism and the Black Intellectual 21). More recently, Nicole
Waligora-Davis sees Ellison’s “racial philosophy” as one that constituted “a
rubric as much an expression of black nationalism as it is the formation
of an ethical system for human interaction and accountability.”11 Ellison’s
route in political thought was necessarily different because he conceived of
the responsibilities of the artist in terms that demanded critical distance
and space for reflection. His considerations and critiques of American

society were generally informed by his broad and deep understanding of
the historical principles that founded the concept of ideal democracy in
America, and that generally meet staunch resistance when they run afoul
of the exclusionary and racist practices of the nation-state on both sides
of matters, by both white American racist, terrorist, and so-called “nativist”
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and by extreme black nationalists, such
as the African Blood Brotherhood, an organization of the 1920s not unlike
the group of black nationalists led by Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer in Invisible
Man.
We may conclude that Ellison was an apolitical, disengaged literary
aesthete only if we deny that the novel, as a literary genre and social tool,
bears any sort of politically symbolic power. I agree with Ellison that as
a form, the novel does possess this sort of power. Ellison often alluded to
the symbolic origins, form, and function of the novel in his many essays on
the subject of literature and democracy in Shadow and Act (1964) as well
as in Going to the Territory (1986). Therefore, what has often been called
Ellison’s Euro-Americanism, further remarked in his appreciation of the
Irishman James Joyce’s dual manipulation of and innovations in literary
form and linguistic content, could also be interpreted in relation to the
sort of cosmopolitanism and internationalism that framed the political era
in which Ellison understood the novel to first rise and take shape as a new
genre of writing.
Internationalism, from the early days of its conception in eighteenth-
century liberalism, has always had to do with the formative ideals of
individual nation-states as they relate to one another. It may be seen as yet
another dialectical process whereby nation-states recognize in each other the
merits of their respective civilizations, which may, in turn, be said to possess
a specific exchange value. Evolved and developed societies are considered
as such by other nation-states only to the extent that evidence of their
development is tangible or material. Advancements in technology and, no
less, in the sciences and the arts come to be of paramount importance in
the display of high “culture,” the major principle underlying concepts of
civilization. Literature was thus widely held to be indicative of “high culture,”
and non-literate, or oral, societies were relegated to the hinterlands of
savagery. Such purported “savages” as Africans and Native Americans were,
of course, forbidden the communion of nation-states and their emerging
democracies due to the oral—and thus “low”—foundations of their cultures.
They were, hence, without civilization and were cast outside the boundaries
of the international community of nation-states.
As I discuss in chapter 3, philosophical texts by writers such as Kant

and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, along with those of their Romantic-era successor
Georg W. F. Hegel, laid the theoretical foundations upon which the modern
nation-state would rise and flourish. And with the rise of the modern nation-
state came a fundamental change in the concept of democracy. Coined in
the fifth century by the Greek historian Herodotus, “democracy” combined
two words meaning, separately, “the people” and “to rule.” Thus the original
meaning of democracy was, in the literal sense, “rule of the people,” a concept
that was not widely popular with all political observers. Plato’s attitude
toward the concept was “decidedly hostile,” Muhammed Rejai writes, and
Plato’s student Aristotle “accepted it with severe qualifications” (3). The
concept fared no better as early modern philosophers and theorists began
to imagine the birth of the nation-state. Analyses such as that of Niccolò
Machiavelli underscored the tension between concepts of the nation-state
and democracy. Rejai points out that the centralization of power proposed
by Machiavelli in his 1532 book The Prince “was manifestly detrimental
to the development of democratic” thought (11). Political philosopher
Chantal Mouffe concurs. The forms of consensus postulated by the modern
nation-state and required for its longevity “are by necessity based on acts
of exclusion,” she writes (378). Mouffe and her collaborator, the political
theorist Ernesto Laclau, remind us that the “original forms of democratic
thought were linked to a positive and unified conception of human nature”
(181), and this nature, as theorized by Europeans and the American
“founders,” was not inclusive of African identities. Africans were thus cast
outside of the community of human being and, hence, the community of
national citizenry. They were excluded from the very ideal of the beloved
community Ellison sought to promulgate.
The notion of community in these arguments over national belonging
can be seen clearly in the foundational work of a number of Enlightenment-
era nationalist theorists, Thomas Jefferson prominent among them. Jefferson,
one of the “classical” theorists of modern democracy identified by Rejai,
reflects this notion in his widely remarked Notes on the State of Virginia
(1804). There, as Jefferson contemplates the maturing of the American
nation-state, he insists that once slavery in the United States is abolished,
blacks should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” The objection to
the presence of blacks is physical and moral as well as political, the statesman
argues, fearing that “the real distinction which nature has made . . . will
divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end
but in the extermination of one or the other race” (46). Such a disruption
in the space of the socius was, to Jefferson’s mind, conducive neither to the
principles of national belonging nor to the ideals of democracy as they were
theorized in his day.
The Civil Rights–era image of democracy Ellison renders against
Jefferson’s classical version of it (we might just as likely say that Ellison
undertakes a pointed diachronic exposition of America’s democratic
shortcomings) must therefore also be read as a critique of the traditional
liberal concept of democracy and its limited notions of “freedom.” Because
the classical theorists of democracy, such as Jefferson and Rousseau, held as
main values liberties in the forms of “inalienable” and “self-evident” rights
( Jefferson) and community or social welfare (Rousseau), classical democracy
such as that which they practiced stressed such ideas as the “common
will” and the “common good” (Rejai 24). The principle of liberty was
understood as a “non-interference with the right of unlimited appropriation
and with the mechanisms of the capitalist market economy,” and it is this
notion—pointedly economic and laissez-faire capitalist—that constituted
the eighteenth century liberal idea of individual freedom. This traditional
view “exerts itself to discredit every ‘positive’ conception of liberty as being
potentially totalitarian,” Laclau and Mouffe write. “It affirms that a liberal
political order can exist only in the framework of a capitalist free market
economy” (172). Thus, twentieth-century conservatives, who hearkened
to a profoundly anti-egalitarian defense of the free-market economy and
concomitant ideas of individual freedom, did so on a platform provided by
the anti-egalitarian principles of eighteenth-century liberalism. They worked
“to redefine the notion of democracy itself in such a way as to restrict its
field of application and limit political participation to an even narrower area”
(Mouffe and Laclau 173).
The conservative definition of democracy underscored by Mouffe and
Laclau finally ends in the emergence of a state ideology that contradicts
and even at times seeks to render impotent the contemporary demands
of democratic principles that evolved during various phases of the Civil
Rights movement, from the late nineteenth century to Ellison’s own time.
Yet Ellison appears not to have wavered in his faith in the possibility of a
beloved community, a revisionist sort of “ideal” democracy, and never failed
to call upon the American nation-state to actualize the humanist ideals
that founded its democratic principles, even if these were at odds with
free-market principles.
Thus, he embodied what the black feminist legal scholar Dorothy
Roberts elsewhere calls a “fidelity to the Constitution.”12 The invisible man’s
rejection of certain threads of political ideology, signified in his membership

in the Brotherhood and his ultimate understanding, by the time of the
Prologue and Epilogue and the beginning of his hibernation underground,
that ideal democracy had been hijacked and obscured—and that it needed,
above all, to be rescued and resurrected—finds an analogy in Frederick
Douglass’s democratic philosophy. Douglass’s shift during the nineteenth
century from a Garrisonian rejection of the Constitution, to a realization
that the Constitution was being misused and willfully misinterpreted by the
ruling class signals for Roberts the profound degree of trust that African
Americans and their intellectuals have traditionally placed in the founding
documents of this country. Douglass, who once dramatically intoned that
the Founding Fathers, in crafting the Constitution while neglecting to
abolish racial bondage, had “attempted to unite Liberty in holy wedlock
with the dead body of Slavery,” later turned from this position to embrace
the Constitution. For surely, he wrote, this document “could not well have
been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of
rapine and murder like slavery.”13
Central to my point here are the familial (“holy wedlock”) and sexual
(“system of rapine”) metaphors Douglass crafts in order to exact his early and
late critiques of the nation-state’s biopolitics and practices of racial exclusion.
Douglass clearly recognizes, in his early statement, not only the foundational
nature with which family was considered in relation to the edification of
the nation-state. (This is a point I examine and discuss in chapter 5 of
this study.) He also sees the sexual contradictions at work in joining a
false conception of liberty and liberalism with the moribund and sinful
practice of human bondage. Douglass’s critique of the sexual disparagement
of black womanhood (which I see in his choice of the word “rapine,” a word
full of classical connotations of the vengeful sexual assault of the women
of a community), alongside the effacement of black existence (in his use
of “murder”) render his analysis one that cannot be ignored. Further, it
resonates with the use of familial and maternal metaphors in writings on the
nation-state by figures such as Kant. Again, Kant’s metaphorical rendering
of the republic as the “common mother” of the citizenry, a figure who
can provide a sense of cohesion, belonging, and “home” even to disparate,
heterogeneous nations lacking consanguinity, places the mother at the center
of the discourse on nation and democracy, as I see it. I will return to this
point shortly.
Douglass’s thought continues to resonate with that of contemporary
intellectuals, who have no more released the Constitution from its
responsibility toward democracy than did he and Ellison. As I discuss at
greater length in chapter 2 of the present study, Wahneema Lubiano, in

her introduction to the collection of critical essays entitled The House that
Race Built (1997), an outgrowth of the Race Matters Conference convened
by Lubiano and others at Princeton University in April of 1994, the very
month when Ralph Ellison died, writes:
The United States is not just the domicile of a historically specific

form of racial oppression, but it sustains itself as a structure
through that oppression. If race—and its strategic social and
ideological deployment as racism—didn’t exist, the United States’
severe inequalities and betrayal of its formal commitments to
social equality and social justice would be readily apparent to
anyone existing on this ground. (vii)
Here the question of race interrupts the notion of national community.

If race did not exist, Lubiano argues, then each person living within the
nation-state’s borders could easily apprehend the country’s critical failure to
ensure social justice and social equality for its citizens. However, because
race and racism are alive and well in America, most Americans are blinded
(by race itself ) to these problems. While Lubiano supplies, in short order, a
most insightful and incisive critique of the shortcomings of our democratic
order (“The idea of race and the operation of racism,” she writes, “are the best
friends that the economic and political elite have in the United States”), she
proposes no alternative to a democratic society founded upon Constitutional
ideals. Instead, she forcefully appeals to the doctrines of equality and justice
in her introduction, and part of the purpose of the collection is to “call into
question and to account a liberal majority that trivializes racism by turning
its attention to individual remedies, to attitude adjustment, to ‘color-blind’
legal adjudications” (vii).
In the same collection, Toni Morrison uses her introductory essay,
“Home,” to expound a similar point, while putting forward a different
argument in favor of democratic inclusion:
From the beginning I was looking for a sovereignty—an

authority—that I believed was available to me only in fiction
writing. . . . I believe . . . that my own writerly excursions and my
use of a house/home antagonism are related to the topics addressed
[at the Race Matters Conference held at Princeton University in
1994] because so much of what seems to lie about in discourses
on race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, [and]
belonging. . . . The anxiety of belonging is entombed within the

central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism,
nationalism, the break-up of federations, the rescheduling of
alliances, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these figurations of
nationhood and identity are frequently as raced themselves as the
originating racial house that defined them. When they are not
raced, they are . . . imaginary landscape, never inscape; Utopia,
never home. (passim)
Morrison’s house/home metaphor appears to pay implicit homage

to analogous metaphorics Ellison unfolded in his acceptance speech upon
receiving the National Book Award in 1953 for Invisible Man. Indeed,
during the previous year, 1993, Morrison had been awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature an emblematic forty years after Ellison garnered the National
Book Award, so it is not unreasonable that his words would have resonated
with her thoughts in the month of his death. Ellison, retelling the tale of
Menelaus in the Odyssey and thus allegorizing the quest for self-identity
that lies at the heart of his novel, concludes his remarks on the political and
cultural contributions he felt Invisible Man made by devising a metaphor
that explicitly connected the home metaphor at work in his novel to both
love and democracy. In fact, as I mention earlier, the syntax of his sentence
draws a metaphorical equivalence between each of these terms: “The way
home we seek is that condition of man’s being at home in the world, which
is called love, and which we term democracy” (“Brave Words” 105–6).
We might say that love, home, and democracy form a tripartite
conceptual metaphor of the ideal human condition in Ellison’s thinking on
both the novel and the nation. In his critical writings as well as in his fiction,
Ellison, like Morrison, seeks to refashion the American domicile into a site
where politics might actually be something other than an expression of the
will and desire of the white ruling classes, which often demand the exclusion
and marginalization of “lower” classes based on racial determination and
socioeconomic positioning. Rather, he hopes that the American house, a
sphere dominated by the racist, gendered, and class-oriented ideology of
the nation-state, might be transformed into a home shaped instead by the
principles of moral democracy and capable of accommodating pluralism
and hybridity, or what Ellison often refers to in terms of “possibilities.” As
Ellison addresses himself to this concept, he insists upon the responsibilities
of citizenship, and in Invisible Man this democratic dilemma is, we might
say using Ellison’s own metaphor, “acted out upon the body of a Negro giant
who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon
which and within which the action unfolds” (“Twentieth-Century Fiction”

28). In Invisible Man, Ellison renders the black body as a metaphorical
liminal space upon which and within which the conflicts engendered by the
struggle for true democracy are acted out. For him, the Negro represents,
as he maintains in “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” “the gauge of
the human condition as it [waxes] and [wanes] in our democracy”” (104).
In Ellison’s concept of the American novel, the black body serves as a
metaphorical barometer of the nation’s democratic sensibilities. It clarifies
the effects of America’s racial house upon the black body that seeks a home,
a habitation.
Ellison’s project in Invisible Man, and the later projects of Lubiano,
Morrison, and other participants in the Race Matters conference, work to
point out the peculiar nature of racial construction in the United States,
with particular attention to historical circumstances and the exigencies of
nationalist thought that are in regular and at times tensive articulation with
traditionally democratic notions such as liberty and equality. This work of
unmasking, as it were, the specificities of American power structures that
inhere in the nation-state generally approaches its object via a tripartite
vocabulary of power, authority, and legitimacy. Ellison’s own recognition of
the eighteenth-century roots of the novel, which “rose,” as Ian Watt14 points
out, at the very moment when a number of Western nations were coming
to see themselves as nation-states, when ideologies of race were crystallizing
and when modern capitalism began to exert its force, means that we as
readers must arrive at an understanding of the impact of nationalist ideology,
racial thinking, and political theory on Ellison’s text and his response to these
discourses. Because he saw the novel in general, and thus Invisible Man in
particular, as having always been “tied up with the idea of nationhood,” (“The
Novel as a Function of American Democracy” 310), and because the tension
that begat Invisible Man commences with Ellison’s—and his narrator’s—
metaphorical formulations regarding the implications of blackness upon
blackness (that persistent and progressive blackness brings about both social
invisibility and hypervisibility), we must further contextualize Invisible Man
as the outgrowth of Ellison’s consideration of a particular historical moment
in the West, when ideas of race and homelessness most forcefully collide
with those of home and national belonging, when raced bodies take on a
value coeval with the dictates of a new market economy, and where speech
has a certain and dynamic role in the realm of political power.
All such roads lead to the metaphor of love, and ideally so if we follow
Ellison in his critique of American democracy. Ellison gives us to know as
well that love’s discourse in the novel must come from and demonstrate
its relation to the linguistics and stylistics of the community. Otherwise, it

can hold no cultural or political authority. That the work of Lubiano and,
especially, Morrison is emblematic of black feminist critical discourse on love
and democracy, and that the maternal is conceptually and historically at the
core of notions of “home” in the modern nation-state, form the occasion
for my return to the maternal in this next section.
Love’s Habitation: Blackness, The Uncanny Maternal, and

American Democracy
The “body” of Ellison’s novel is itself, like the black body of his metaphorics,
situated in a caesura: set in the placeless place that is at once Harlem
and America, yet neither one of these in reality. This textual body is love
positioned in and emergent from the void, since Ellison names the occasion
of the novel as the occasion of love, the event and necessary condition of
his having to “put it all down” (437) even as he locates Harlem “nowhere,”15
the site of both the common black man and this marginal man’s lived
condition of existential chaos. Harlem is thus not a utopia—the dreamed
of place to come. It is, rather, an atopia, the no-place or abyss where black
being is presumed to fall inexorably into nothingness. Because Ellison titles
his novel with the very name most of us have come to bestow upon his
protagonist, and because the novel serves as the fictional memoir of a self
that exists symbolically in autobiographical narration, I want provisionally
to consider the novel and its text as a body. It may be considered a living,
symbolic, and exiled being cast out of doors as well as outside of home and
love. It is cast instead into an atopic habitation that both skirts and limns
the biopolitical realities of an exclusionary nation-state. One might say that
it is a body birthed from a certain womb that served as both home and
reprieve from a racist onslaught: the body of the black mother.
I have noted how Ellison tropes upon Wright’s underground man
and the poetic revolution of his chthonic heterotopia. Wright’s protagonist,
as we have seen, constructs out of the fragments of his existence a poetry
that threatens the ontology, the epistemology, and even the politics of the
above ground. Thus his is a stanzaic space, the nucleus of dessicated poetic
thought, a “dwelling” or “room” (following the etymology of the word
“stanza”) in which both his thought and his lyrical spirit simultaneously
expand and contract. Wright’s caesura—even in its emphasis upon song,
which recalls the meaning of the word “caesura” when used as a verb, an
elongation of utterance in a “singsong” style that evokes Daniels’s impulse
to sing as the police drive him back to the manhole—calls us once more
to reconsider the scission Western philosophy has long upheld between
poetry and philosophy. What is regularly overlooked by this insistence is
that all poetic projects—even those articulated in the vernacular—are aimed
toward not only beauty, but also thinking and knowledge.16 With Daniels’s
annihilation we read not only of the silencing of the black body that seeks
a habitation. Perhaps more importantly, we see Wright’s broader critique of
the hegemonic marginalization of black epistemology, an epistemology that,
from the perspective of the black metaphorics I have examined throughout
this study, nonetheless looks persistently for and towards a brighter world
to come; a world that can serve openly as a dwelling—a home—rather
than as a refuge.
In the Prologue, the invisible man’s first descent into his memory,
history, and imagination comes by way of song. Precipitated by the “lyric
of sound” (6) intoned by Louis Armstrong, he quickly enough perceives the
mournful strains of the slave mother’s Spiritual. The bluesman Armstrong
and the Spiritual-singing mother alike sing songs of existential angst and
disappointment that mirror the state of the invisible man’s unconscious.
It is as though by descending from Armstrong’s conscious world into the
unconscious realm of the black mother, Ellison’s character descends into a
preternatural site rife with sacrament and mystery. The love of which she
later speaks to him appears primordial and, in fact, antecedent to all other
moral concerns. Love begets freedom, the woman tells him (9), and thus
it bears some inherent relation to the principle on which the invisible man
mediates at length in the Epilogue. It is, in fact, that which prompts his
further reflection, his writing of his life’s exploits in the pages of a fictitious
memoir.
Ellison, as was often his wont, crafted his fiction with an eye toward
the cultural practices that constitute the rituals of the Western world, and
thus his descent into the underground, following the path taken not only
by Wright, but also by such classical figures as Orpheus and Odysseus,
comes by no accident. Few students of Ellison’s fiction and essays will be
surprised that he saw in ritual the source of literary inspiration and Western
culture, more generally. Ellison was, as he notes in “The Art of Fiction”
and elsewhere,17 a great observer of the archetypal contradictions that were
the ironic cultural artifacts of these rituals. His return to the space of the
maternal—the movement toward the maternal is always a “return,” since
the maternal is antecedent to human life—obviates the simple trope that
would make of Ellison’s descent and prospective ascent a rescinding of the
West’s normative negation of black being. Ellison’s return to the womb of
the maternal is, rather, a complex return to the very embrace of human life
that idealizes agape love, makes eros possible, and holds thanatos, or the death
wish so often identified in Wright’s fiction, at bay.18 Again, Ellison seems to
say, the descent into the womb, while seemingly a remanding to a daemonic
place, is a prolegomenon, a propaedeutic to the world that love demands.
Audre Lorde has written of this maternal space as the “Black mother”
who “exists more in women; yet she is a name for a humanity that men are
not without.” Men who deny the primordial feminine being Lorde names
as central to the existence of all humanity “have taken a position against
that piece of themselves, and it is a world position, a position throughout
time” (Sister Outsider 101). Lorde’s feminist worldview may seem far in
intent and time from Ellison, but in fact, she was (writing in 1979 and
specifically assuming a transhistorical stance) much more contemporary to
his thought than it would seem were we to glance only briefly between them.
This appears especially so if we take the additional step of pointing out the
resonances between the feminist and womanist position Lorde upholds,
and that of one of the most astute feminist and poststructuralist readers of
Ellison, Hortense Spillers.
Where Lorde speaks of the “Black mother within” who provides a
creative and epistemic power that men must, if they will, learn to recognize
and prize, Spillers writes in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), that she
as a black woman, like Lorde before her, has been named, but hers is a
case of ritual misnaming. Dubbed “Sapphire,” “Peaches,” or “Earth Mother,”
did she not exist she “would have to be invented” (203). For Spillers, the
“black woman,” devised in a masculinist and sexist language that demands
the bracketing qualification of quotation marks, is central to a conceptual
metaphorics that is analogous to Du Bois’s powerful concept-metaphor of
the color line: “We could add to [Du Bois’s] spatio-temporal configuration
[of the color-line] another thematic of analogously terrible weight: if the
‘black woman’ can be seen as a particular figuration of the split subject that
psychoanalysis posits, then this century marks the site of ‘its’ profoundest
revelation” (203).
I will return to Spillers’s fruitful analogy shortly, but will here
underscore how her extrapolation of Lorde’s humanistic metaphor of the
“Black mother” eventuates in her argument that the
African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the

mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, in ways that
the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly
reprieve. This human and historic development—the text that has

been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent—takes
us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of
American women’s community: the African-American woman,
the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and
shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the
law of the mother—only and precisely because legal enslavement
removed the African-American male not so much from sight as
from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction
of the father’s name, the father’s law. (Italics in original, 228)
Turning once more with these words in mind to the scene from the
invisible man’s dream that I quote at the outset of this chapter places before
us a quite different notion of Ellison’s psychoanalytic of race and descent
(which signifies doubly here as both a genealogy and a movement into the
depths of the psyche). Ellison seems to challenge white Western metaphysics
of blackness with a differential symbolic of black feminism and maternality
with which he is not generally credited. More often, he has been critiqued
for eliding black women in his novel of black invisibility, much in the same
way that Ellison himself critiques Ernest Hemingway for erasing blacks
from his fictional portrayal of America in a fashion that is analogous, in
Ellison’s striking metaphor, to a denial of their very humanity,19 a literary
lynching. Or, he has been criticized for silencing them through, for instance,
Jim Trueblood’s blues ballad of father-daughter rape and incest, which has
received such outstanding readings from Spillers and Baker. Yet is there
not something more to these “marginal” figures of black women in Invisible
Man, especially since most of them are depicted as maternal figures?20: the
slave mother whom the invisible man encounters and queries at the outset
of his dream; the young slave woman being auctioned at yet a deeper level
of his reverie, “a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like
[his] mother’s as she stood before a group of slaveowners who bid for
her naked body” (7); the evicted Mrs. Provo, a former slave mother whose
scene of dispossession (he has seen, among her possessions strewn along a
Harlem sidewalk, “an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age”)
evokes in the invisible man a mental vision of his mother “hanging wash
on a windy day . . . her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind”
(206–7); and Mary Rambo, whose earnest nurturing of the protagonist and
cloying rambunctiousness recall the stereotype of the mammy figure earlier
redeemed and refigured by Harper in her Aunt Chloe poems.21
That each of these maternal figures appears in the oneiric, multiple

folds of the invisible man’s Prologue, analogous to the unconscious levels
of the mind where, Ellison has contended, the Negro is repressed in the
American psyche, should give us some indication of the ritual significance
of these elided feminine black figures. I would argue that it is from their
repressed yet mythological presence—narrative myth being one of the
primary ways in which human beings seek to make sense of their existence
by configuring a story of origin and roots, in short, a narrative of originary
birth and home, and thus a narrative of originary maternality—that springs
a metaphorics of black being.
The Repression of the Black Maternal
The idea of an originary yet repressed black maternal in Ellison’s fiction

is fairly analogous to his general theory of repression in the novel. Such a
reading can be supported by a glance at the theme of repression Ellison
develops over the course of his criticism. In “Twentieth-Century Fiction,”
for instance, he writes that while the “conception of the Negro as a symbol
of man . . . was organic to nineteenth-century literature” (88), after “[Mark]
Twain’s compelling image of black and white fraternity [in Huckleberry Finn]
the Negro generally disappears from fiction as a rounded human being”
(89). The Negro was “thoroughly . . . pushed into the underground of the
American conscience” to such an extent that even a writer of Hemingway’s
stature (in addition to the early Faulkner) “missed completely the structural,
symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys
rescue Jim” (90). The “dual function” of such a “dissociation seems to be that
of avoiding moral pain and thus to justify the South’s racial code,” Ellison
concludes. For the Southerner, if not for American writers more broadly,
Ellison argues, “the Negro becomes a symbol of his personal rebellion, his
guilt and his repression of it” (98).
This often rehearsed point of Ellison’s poetics (and for Ellison, a moral
American “conscience” was necessary to an American consciousness capable
of realizing its ideals of democracy) reads compellingly in light of Spillers’s
theory, which calls us to see the black female as that “insurgent” “social
subject” that “breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks
both a denial and an ‘illegitimacy’ ” (“Mama’s Baby” 228–29). Her insurgency
goes against the law of the white father while re-instantiating the lost law of
the black mother. Spillers, like Ellison, identifies a repression (a denial) that
is both secondary and peculiarly “American” (228). Such a denial ironically
enables the black American male (writer) to “[embody] the only American
community of males handed the specific occasion to learn who the female
is within itself ” (228). When Ellison’s American male, himself a writer
and thinker still caught within the depths of his dreams, returns to the
old slave singer to ask her, “what is this freedom that you love so well?”
one of her sons seizes him “in a grip like cold stone” and roars, “next time
you got questions like that, ask yourself !” (10). Playing on the vernacular
phrase “ask your mama,” the son’s exhortation that the invisible man should
instead ask himself rings with the tones of the oracular black female within.
Upon hearing his question, the old slave woman of his unconscious had
become confused, muttering a string of disjointed sentences that leaves the
invisible man “dizzy” (9). She had first looked “surprised, then thoughtful,
then baffled” as she uttered her response. She seemed as helplessly obscure
as the oracle of Delphi had been deliberately ambiguous, and equally as
enigmatic. It is the ritual riddle of maternal blackness that thus sets the
invisible man into motion toward waking, toward consciousness: he suddenly
comes out of the dream, “ascending hastily from this underworld of sound
to hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking, ‘What did I do / To be so
black / And blue?’ ” (10).
The ambivalence that Ellison here ascribes to the mother’s language and
elsewhere to language writ large, questioning its standing as the unassailable
repository of meaning, resonates in the slave mother’s Delphic inscrutability
even as it rings in Armstrong’s bluesy “silence of sound” (10), the “invisible
music of [his] isolation” (11). The mother’s riddle of freedom, prefacing the
jazzman’s invisible sound of solitude, proves to be the insurgent ground
that precipitates the invisible man’s intellectual and ontological quest. Most
readers attribute this impetus to the grandfather’s dying words in chapter 1
of the novel. That may be so in the chronological time of the invisible man’s
life. Yet in the time of the novel, the memoir in which the invisible man
reflects upon his life, the paternal is fully absent from this formative moment
when the invisible man explains his self-reflexion. (Indeed, the patriarch—the
white father—has been murdered by the mother in an act of moral outrage.)
His experience assumes iterability and expression through the crafting of this
body of text, and he determines to narrate his story only after his encounter
with the primordial slave mother. The mythological symbolism of the slave
mother as Delphic origin, the womb to which the invisible man returns and
from which he must emerge, reborn anew, marks the underground as a site
of the sanctuary of thought whose portal must be a two-way street.
But somehow, if I may be permitted a dialectical leap that promises
to bridge the distance between the slave mother’s riddle of freedom and the
lesson of love she offers the invisible man, the rebirth that love appears to
herald offers as well a philosophy of love, one that tries to get at the heart
of the human quest for life. To love is somehow to live again, as Kristeva has
put it in Tales of Love.22 Love is a primordial state to which human beings
can take recourse through memory and dream and upon which humans
can take meaningful action. In Invisible Man, the true knowledge of love
is discovered and revealed only in the space of the womb, as the invisible
man queries love’s Pythia in the labyrinth of the underground, that semiotic
chora23 that, as Kristeva would have it in Revolution in Poetic Language
(1974), “precedes and underlies figuration” (2170) and is identified with the
uncanny maternal body.
And yet love is also, in the psychoanalytic framing that was so
instructive to Ellison’s fiction, the coming together of eros and agape, of
Freudian sexuality and loving democratic ideals. Kristeva writes of the
“twisted commingling of sexuality and ideals that makes up the experience
of love” (1). Love is a possibility that can transform the Manichean relation
between I/other into a dynamic relation of “the I with the Other” (15).
Here she does not speak of the emotion in individuals’ love for one another
or the affect of romantic or courtly love (her initial reference is to the
transference and counter-transference of love between analysand and analyst
in the clinical setting), but of love as an experience, and hence as the “act”
of love, of love as “doing.” Love’s absence is a death, Kristeva tells us (15).
The absence of love—of, perhaps, Du Boisian humanism, Wright’s notion
of “care,” and Ellisonian democracy—is non-Being.
Ellison seems to say, in part, that one thing Wright’s Bigger Thomas
and Fred Daniels lack is love, love of a certain kind that the invisible
man comes to possess and understand only in the critical distance of his
grotto. It is a higher form of love, a democratic love, that the invisible
man postulates in the realm of the underground through his interlocution
with the maternal, and thus the love he exhorts is the loving act of moral
responsibility: an ability to respond critically and morally to one’s social
context, an ability to enact and foster positive change. “Irresponsibility” is
part of his “invisibility,” the invisible man tells us: “any way you face it, it
is a denial. . . . Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a
form of agreement” (11), a relation.
In this intellectual framing that defines the function of his invisibility,
and naming himself as one who suffers from “hysteria,” the protagonist
deems his invisibility a “sickness” that is “not unto death” (11), but rather
that for which he has found a cure. (Interesting to note here that the word
hysteria is drawn from the Greek for womb. Ellison would have been quite
conscious of this point as he cast his protagonist into a state of hysteria that
eventuates in a descent into a womb-like, underground space.) Invisibility,
a conceptual metaphor that Ellison develops out of the Freudian theory
of repression, is an insufficiency and a social illness whose antidote lies in
Ellison’s concept of love.
Freud claimed to have discovered repression, according to his
biographer Peter Gay. He likened it to resistance, and in this way he drew
an equivalence between the act of repression and that of deviance. Freud
used the notion of deviance to characterize repression, and in fact, saw
defensiveness—such as that which Ellison describes as the response of many
whites when faced with the presence of black people—as the most significant
expression of repression. In Freud’s theory, repression is not an “original”
defense mechanism, but arises when “a sharp cleavage has occurred between
conscious and unconscious mental activity . . . the essence of repression lies
simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the
conscious” (italics in original 569–70). The primal stage of repression, a
first phase (570), consists in “the psychical (ideational) representative of
the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious” (570). From this
denial, a fixation emerges. “The second stage of repression, repression proper,
affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of
thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection
with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same
fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually
an after-pressure” (570). Secondary repression occurs with the “surplus” of
repressed representations (experience, memory, image, language, etc.). One
should not overemphasize the repulsion of the object/representative that is
at the center of repression, Freud tells us. Equally important if not more so
is the “attraction exercised by what was primally repressed upon everything
with which it can establish a connection.” These two forces necessarily
“co-operate,” he argues (570). That which is repressed “proliferates in the
dark,” he writes in tones that likely long reverberated with Ellison. Repression
does not take place only once, but “demands a persistent expenditure of
force.” Its “mobility” is expressed in the “psychical characteristics of the state
of sleep, which alone renders possible the formation of dreams. With the
return to waking life the repressive cathexes which have been drawn in are
once more sent out” (572).24
The act of repression Freud describes is directly related to the act of
the metaphorical, as Jacques Lacan has underscored in his work. Lacan
argues that metaphor “consists in the substitution in a signifier-signified
relationship of the new signifier, S´, used as the signifier of the original
signifier S, which now becomes a signified.”25 Metaphor is itself a new

signified, overwriting another signified as if it were a palimpsest, yet destined
to be sedimented under a future signified, it seems.
The implications of this point in relation to Invisible Man are telling.
Such sedimentation does occur, but only at the level of secondary repression,
a refusal, as Ellison argues through the prose of his Prologue, but also an
admission of existential guilt: the invisible man is a victim of others’ refusals
to “see” him, yet he is also guilty because he has not taken responsibility
for his own humanity; he assumes that his is a quest for being through
others—that his being requires the determination of others—rather than
seeing his being as self-determined and fully human. He suffers from
a double repression, a double refusal that differs subtly from Du Bois’s
concept-metaphor of double consciousness. Rather than experiencing a
Du Boisian sense of multiple being that results from the processes of racism
and nationalism, the invisible man suffers from an Ellisonian construct of
infra-humanity—he lacks what Charles Mills terms the Ellisonian sum (see
chapter 2). He is thus guilty for not possessing the wherewithal to impose
a humanistic and loving pattern on the social chaos that casts him as an
outsider. That is, the organizing model of love, the “beloved community”
or “a love called democracy,” the concept-metaphor of democratic love first
suggested by the insurgent and uncanny figure of the slave mother—who
symbolizes home (heimlich) but is undoubtedly displaced and dispossessed
(unheimlich)—constitutes what I see as Ellison’s overcoming of the invisible.
Invisibility, as conceptual metaphor, is an insufficiency and a social illness
whose antidote lies in Ellison’s concept of love.
I speak of such invisibility in relation to an “empty narcissism,” after
the fashion in which Kristeva describes this phenomenon. In the language of
the unconscious, she tells us, one finds floating signifiers that are themselves
metaphorical. This would be, following Freud’s theory of secondary
repression, word-presentations that have risen from the unconscious into
the consciousness, only to be repressed into the unconscious by the pre-
consciousness. These re-emerge as memory traces, those formed by experience
as well as by myth, history, and ritual, and may be written on the body as
wounds.
Invisibility is such a wound. For Kristeva, who re-reads and revises
Freud’s theory of love26 as she surveys it in what she calls the “field of
metaphor,” narcissism is a “screen for emptiness”; it is a wound that “displays
itself in feelings of solitude and emptiness—those temporary freezings of the
death drive” (Tales of Love 21, 337, emphasis in original). The invisible man’s
provocative yearnings for sexual love are what Kristeva might refer to as a
fragile “narcissistic elaboration” (43), a complex and empty act that, for him,
can only be narrated from the invisibility of the underground as he recounts
his “pre-invisible days” (37), the time before he understood his condition of
invisibility. The sexual acts he narrates—each of those that occurs during
his time of hyper-visibility—are charged with such conflicting, death-driven
emotions as hate and fear. The love he expresses in that realm thus cannot be
but compromised, in moral terms, by the “temporary freezings” of thanatos,
the death drive.
In this light, the ultimate fulfillment of the invisible man’s quest for
being cannot come through a simple pursuit of sex (acts of eros) that he
narrates in detail throughout the novel. Rather, it comes via his movement
toward a moral, democratic love (agape love) whose value and possibility
he comes to recognize only in the fissure of his underground existence,
the realm of mother love. Again we see here how Ellison’s metaphor of
invisibility is wholly dependent, for its psychoanalytic and philosophical
import, upon the metaphor of love.
Ellison quite skillfully demonstrates that the concept of moral love
can take shape only through the choric example of black maternal love—
itself seemingly repressed—that he encounters in the underground of both
Harlem and his consciousness, the mother’s law that is not only antecedent
to the stasis and constraints of the white father’s law in the realm of the
symbolic (Spillers), but also to the conceptual metaphorics of invisibility
Ellison deploys there. I am certainly ascribing to Ellison a feminist sensibility
which he nowhere, to my knowledge, claims, but which is indeed in evidence
in the workings of the text, and thus may be said to be rendered only
unconsciously. A reading of the invisible man’s encounters with many of
the white women of the text bears out the argument that they not only
differentially symbolize the white father’s law and proscriptions (as Freud
gives them in Totem and Taboo and elsewhere), but that his sexual “love” or
desire for them can only be morally insufficient, even as the invisible man
recognizes their humanity in relation to his own.
For instance, while above ground, the invisible man is ambivalent about
love, and his claims to love truly some of the white women he encounters
are thus placed in doubt even as we juxtapose them to the black maternal
figures he describes and encounters in the underground. There is something
illicit and immoral about his relations with the white women of the story,
from his encounter with the stripper of the battle royal scene, to the lewd
demands of Sybil. The reader finds not the agape ideals of moral love that
would help found a beloved democratic community; rather one finds the
pure eros of Freudian theory, a theory of sexuality rather than moral love.
The protagonist desires to both “love and murder” the stripper (16); for the
unnamed wife of a Brotherhood leader he feels a certain “poignancy,” “the
sensation of something precious perilously attained too late” (315); and he
calls Sybil his “too-late-too-early love” (399). When we turn to Ellison for
an explanation of these relationships, we find that he has little to say on the
point. One of his few statements appears in “The Art of Fiction,” where,
when asked about the “love affairs—or almost love affairs” of his character,
he responds laughingly:
I’m glad you put it that way. The point is that when thrown
into a situation which he thinks he wants, the hero is sometimes
thrown at a loss; he doesn’t know how to act. After he made
this speech about the Place of the Woman in Our Society,
for example, and was approached by one of the women in the
audience, he thought she wanted to talk about the Brotherhood
and found that she wanted to talk about brother-and-sisterhood.
Look, didn’t you find the book at all funny? I felt that such a
man as this character would have been incapable of a love affair;
it would have been inconsistent with his personality. (emphasis
in original 180)
Ellison’s comments certainly caution us against opening ourselves to

believing the invisible man’s professions of deep and abiding—moral—love
for white women in the novel. This is especially so in light of his attention
to Freud’s writings on repression and sexuality. However, there are enough
references to sexual love in the text to allow us to formulate our own
conclusions.
The Irresponsible Dreamer: Reveries of Sexual Love
Let us look first to the Trueblood encounter, which Ellison laces with
resonances that repeat in the invisible man’s own experiences. After leaving
Trueblood’s farm and being vehemently accosted at the Golden Day, he
drives Mr. Norton, the white philanthropist, back to the campus. The
protagonist’s behavior with the donor has, of course, landed him in a vat
of hot water, and he is ordered by Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, to
attend services in the chapel and to report directly to the administration
building afterwards. The invisible man’s description of the college choir at

the chapel mirrors his first impressions of the student body. Upon arriving
on campus, he recognizes immediately the military-style uniformity with
which the students are trained: “shoes shined, minds laced up, eyes blind
like those of robots” (28). Such an impression strikes him once more as
he describes the student choir as a group of enunciating automatons who
move “with faces frozen in solemn masks” and “mechanically” sing songs
that effortlessly please white campus visitors. The songs are rendered in the
spirit of an “ultimatum accepted and ritualized, an allegiance recited for the
peace it imparted and for that perhaps loved. Loved as the defeated come
to love the symbols of their conquerors” (86).
I want to underscore the way the narrator recounts not only his early
formation as an ardent and quite willing participant in the automatization
of his own thoughts and emotions—the vet from the Golden Day describes
him as a “walking zombie,” the “perfect personification of the Negative”
(72)—but also the “love” of the defeated for the symbols of their conquerors.
It takes no great critical powers to point out that the American white
woman serves as an iconic symbol of the nation and its purported ideals
of freedom. This is seen quite clearly in the nation’s statuary: blind Justice
holding a balance; Lady Liberty bearing the torch of Enlightenment; and
Armed Liberty (the Statue of Freedom) gracing the dome of Washington
DC’s Capitol building are among the most visible examples. Equally
obvious and more ironic is the nationalism Ellison ascribes to the stripper,
whose iconography—an American flag—is inscribed on her very body, and
whose body is laid bare for all to regard and “read,” even the black boys
to whom it is forbidden. Of further note in this regard is the white paint
of Brockway’s factory, used to blanch national monuments to a perfect
alabaster. The irony of both scenarios should not be lost on the reader.
The illusory whiteness of Brockway’s “optic white” (165) paint comes only
by way of a crucial but imperceptible number of drops of “black dope”
(151–52), added and mixed to perfection. And the stripper is a white
woman of questionable morals whose sexual value increases as it is denied
to black males.
As he does so many times in the narrative, the invisible man slips into
an interval in time whence he observes and interprets the scene: the stripper
“seemed like a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the angry
surface of some gray and threatening sea. I was transported” (16). After
being groped by the “town’s big shots” (15), she tries to escape, an exit the
narrator and the other boys trapped in the room also long to make. For a
brief moment, the invisible man sees beyond her mask of paint and rouge;
he sees his own emotions mirrored in her eyes: “above her red, fixed-smiling
lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and
that which I saw in some of the other boys” (17). As she finally escapes, the
invisible man likewise believes he has been released, that he is free to leave.
However, he and the other boys are herded into the ring and blindfolded.
As the band of cloth is placed over his eyes, he silently goes over his speech:
“In my mind, each word was as bright as flame” (17).
The day’s mishaps—the occasion of the smoker in lieu of the high-
toned social gathering he had anticipated; his being pressed into the battle
royal when his only purpose had been to give his speech; and the mauling
of the stripper by the town’s leading white figures—all fail to make a lasting
impression on the invisible man. Even as the battle royal takes place, and he
and the other boys subsequently are made to scramble upon an electrified
rug for what turns out to be worthless gold-colored tokens, the protagonist
still thinks of his speech: “I felt myself bombarded with punches. I fought
back with hopeless desperation. I wanted to deliver my speech more than
anything else in the world, because I felt that only these men could truly
judge my ability” (20). It is perhaps best said that the invisible man fails
to grasp the implications of the unfortunate turn of events. He fails to
allow the faint connection he makes with the stripper upon looking into
her eyes to impress upon him the utter inappropriateness of the speech he
is about to give; he fails to rebel against the will of a malicious collective
force. Instead, conjuring his best Washingtonian air, he later intones as he
stands bleeding before the still raucous crowd of men, “ ‘Cast down your
buckets where you are’ ” (24).
The narrator’s reward for his accommodationist reprisal of Washington’s
1895 Atlanta Exposition speech is a “gleaming calfskin briefcase” (25), which
contains a college scholarship (26). That night in his dream, his grandfather
torments him, forcing him to open a seemingly endless succession of
envelopes until he finally comes upon one that holds a message of ominous
proportions: “To Whom It May Concern. [. . .] Keep This Nigger-Boy
Running” (26).
This line is usually read as the motor that powers the picaresque nature
of the narrative. While the Prologue is often considered a prolegomenon to
the important work of the invisible man’s memoir, the opening sequence of
chapter 1 itself is taken to give the reader the most central understanding of
the structure by which the text progresses. Yet it is clear that time intervals
and dream states that appear throughout the text are pivotal nodal points
that are instructive and regenerative in the Prologue. However, they are
mainly ignored or misunderstood in the action of the novel as the invisible
man moves to the next phase of his life. In this regard, he calls to mind
yet again Wright’s underground man, who ignores the warnings of the
church choir and sets the stage for his own death and permanent descent.
The invisible man’s first glimpse of Harlem (which the insane vet from
the Golden Day had described to him as a Mecca of sorts, and which
appears to the protagonist as “not a city of realities, but of dreams”27), and
his arrival at the meeting place of the Brotherhood, the “Chthonian” (an
etymologically significant hellish place where he felt he had “been through
it all before”28) all serve to propel the protagonist somewhat mindlessly
across the action of the novel. Often such intervals of time and space are
mitigated by the actual or dreamed presence of a white woman. Trueblood’s
story, the invisible man’s seduction by Red, and the Harlem riot scene, each
contain the presence of a white woman. That the narrator fails to benefit
from the dream states, fails to learn from his mistakes time and again in the
main body of the narrative, demands the attention of the reader regarding
any profession of emotion the protagonist utters regarding the women with
whom he becomes sexually involved.
Ellison’s overlapping conceptions of time, space, and rhythm, an
imbrication that is most evidently manifested in the novel’s Prologue, are
cogent in the Trueblood incident. As Houston Baker points out, “The multiple
narrative frames and voices in Ellison’s Trueblood episode include the novel
Invisible Man, the protagonist’s fictive autobiographical account, Norton’s
story recalled as part of the fictive autobiography, Trueblood’s story as framed
by the fictive autobiography, the sharecropper’s own autobiographical recall,
and the dream narrative with in that autobiographical recall” (Blues 176). I
am most interested in the lowest frequency of Ellison’s narrative range in
this section of the novel, and that is the allegorical dream that Trueblood
points to as the impetus behind his violation of his child. It is this scene
that seals for many the absence of any sort of feminist perspective that
could be at work in the text.
In a sequence of events that culminate in what seems to be a strange
non sequitur, Trueblood describes how he came to his dream state. His
daughter, Matty Lou, slept between him and his wife out of necessity in
order that they might keep warm. Jim Trueblood’s version of the story, the
only version to which we are privy, contends that Matty Lou called out in
her sleep, and threw her arm around her father’s neck, turning and squirming
against him (44). Trueblood turned his back and tried to move away, but
Matty Lou continued to draw near. “Then I musta dropped into the dream,”
he said abruptly, recalling for us the way the invisible man more smoothly
slipped into the breaks of Louis Armstrong’s music and “look[ed] around” in
the novel’s Prologue as he descended into the depths of his reefer-induced

reverie (7). Trueblood compares his daughter’s call of “Daddy” (mumbled,
Trueblood supposes, while dreaming of her own beau) to the soft moans
made by a woman he used to date, Margaret. Jim and Margaret used to lie
in bed together and listen to the music that emanated from the riverboats as
they drifted by (43–44). Both the woman and girl, as well as the riverboats’
music, in some strange way precipitate his descent into the dream.
Although the dream is important, as Baker points out, for its depiction
of the black male as bearer of the phallus29 (and therefore as possessor
of some socio-sexual power), it is also significant as another instance of
premonitory warning against a facile belief in sexual love that the invisible
man refuses to recognize. It foreshadows both his experience at the Liberty
Paint factory hospital and his involvement with the unnamed seductress
of the Brotherhood, whom I shall call “Red.” The nameless woman in red
symbolizes for the young orator beauty and femininity, purity and fertility
(309). Yet she is clearly immoral: she uses him for her sexual pleasure, and
the invisible man becomes lost in her in a way that reminds us of Jim
Trueblood’s dream, where Trueblood momentarily becomes lost in the body
of a white woman, who, like a succubus, enters the room through the door
of a grandfather clock. Trying to break free of her—she had wrapped her
arms about his neck in a motion mimicking that of Trueblood’s sleeping
daughter—Trueblood “throws her on the bed and tries to break her holt”
(45). “That woman just seem to sink outta sight, that there bed was so
soft. It’s sinkin down so far I think it’s going to smother both of us. Then
swoosh! all of a sudden a flock of little white geese flies out of the bed like
they say you see when you go to dig for buried money” (45).
Echoing Trueblood’s dream, in the seduction scene with Red, the
invisible man sees himself in a mirror
standing between her eager form and a huge white bed, myself
caught in a guilty stance [.  .  .] and behind the bed another mirror
which now like a surge of the sea tossed our images back and
forth, back and forth, furiously multiplying the time and the
place and the circumstance. [. . .] [O]ne free hand went up as
though to smooth her hair, and in one swift motion the red robe
swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and
generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.
It was like a dream interval [. . .]. I was heading for the door,
torn between anger and a fierce excitement, hearing the phone
click down as I started past and feeling her swirl against me
and I was lost, for the conflict between the ideological and the
biological, duty and desire, had become too subtly confused. I
went to her thinking, Let them break down the door, whosoever
will, let them come. (314–15)
In Trueblood’s dream, it is Mr. Broadnax, the woman’s husband, who

enters the scene and looks upon them disinterestedly, saying “ ‘They just
nigguhs, leave ’em do it’ ” (45), no doubt a reflection of the implications
of Trueblood’s act speaking to him in the judgmental voice of the white
Father as Trueblood rapes his own daughter. He gives in to his weakness
and his desire, and his cowardice is exposed when he describes his daughter
to Norton and the invisible man as part child, part woman, part angel, part
whore: “sometimes a man can look at a little ole pigtail gal and see himself a
whore—you’all know that?” (46). In his dream, the grandfather clock, which
represents a cessation of time, accords the only means of escape from the
room where Trueblood, like the invisible man with Red, is being seduced
by a white woman. After disentangling himself from her, Trueblood finally
gets the door open and steps inside the clock:
I goes up a dark tunnel, up near where the machinery is making

all that noise and heat. It’s like the power plant they got up to
the school. It’s burnin’ hot as iffen the house was caught on fire,
and I starts to runnin’, tryin’ to get out. I runs and runs till I
should be tired but ain’t tired but feelin’ more rested as I runs, and
runnin’ so good it’s like flyin’ and I’m flyin’ and sailin’ and floatin’
right over the town. Only I’m still in the tunnel. Then way up
ahead I sees a bright light like a jack-o-lantern over a graveyard.
It gits brighter and brighter and I know I got to catch up with
it or else. Then all at once I was right up with it and it burst
like a great big electric light in my eyes and scalded me all over.
Only it wasn’t a scald, but like I was drownin’ in a lake where the
water was hot on the top and had cold numbin’ currents down
under it. Then all at once I’m through it and I’m relieved to be
out and in the cold daylight agin. (45–46, emphasis in original)
Trueblood describes his escape from the white woman as the sensation
of moving through a tunnel that, nonetheless, imparts the feeling that he is
flying. He moves toward a huge electric light emanating from the eye of the
jack-o-lantern, which bursts and scalds him, drowning him in cold currents
(the reflection of his orgasmic incest with Matty Lou). His experience
resembles the invisible man’s surfacing from Lucius Brockway’s basement,

into the factory hospital, and, later, his emergence from the subway into
the arms of Mary Rambo. After the explosion in “the basement” “three
levels underground” (recalling again the three levels of descent in the novel’s
Prologue), the invisible man feels as if he is sinking “in the center of the
lake of heavy water” (175). He awakens to a “bright third eye that glowed
from the center of [a man’s] forehead” (176). The “cold numbin’ currents”
of Trueblood’s dream are translated into “cold-edged heat” that pounds
the invisible man’s body “between crushing electrical pressures” (177) as
the medical staff administers an experimental “shock treatment” that will
produce the “effects of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of
the knife” (180). The procedure results in an excisionless castration intended
to cure a case that, according to a white doctor, “has been developing some
three hundred years” (180).
The scene in the hospital responds to Trueblood’s indecision over how
to extricate himself from his intercourse with Matty Lou: “There I was tryin’
to git away with all my might, and yet having to move without movin’. I
flew in but I had to walk out. [. . .] There was only one way I can figger
that I could git out: that was with a knife. But I didn’t have no knife, and
if you’all ever seen them geld them young boar pigs in the fall, you know I
knowed that was too much to pay to keep from sinnin’ ” (emphasis in
original 46).
Trueblood emerges from his nightmare with a sense of self-determination:
“I ain’t nobody but myself ” (51). He finds a sympathetic audience in
Norton, whose feelings for his own daughter border on the incestuous. Norton
describes her to the protagonist as “a being more rare, more beautiful, purer,
more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. [. . .] Her
beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was
to drink and drink and drink again. [. . .] I found it difficult to believe her
my own” (33). When Norton confronts Trueblood after first hearing of his
transgression, he is amazed that Trueblood has acted upon his desire for his
daughter, the desire Norton never dared fulfill. Trueblood had “looked upon
chaos” and was not “destroyed”: “You did and are unharmed!’ he shouted, his
blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation”
(40).
The invisible man also escapes unscathed from his encounter with
Red. Similar to Mr. Broadnax, who looks upon Trueblood’s coupling with
the white woman of Trueblood’s dream and walks away unconcerned, Red’s
husband returns home after she has conquered the invisible man, who lies
stated in her bed:
I didn’t know whether I was awake or dreaming. [. . .] It was

strange. My mind revolved. I was chased out of a chinkapin
woods by a bull. I ran up the hill; the whole hill heaved. I
heard the sound and looked up to see the man looking straight
at me where he stood in the dim light of the hall, looking in
with neither interest nor surprise. His face expressionless, his
eyes staring. (315)
The hill Trueblood climbs to get to Mr. Broadnax’s house (44) reappears
in this dream sequence. After Red’s husband reminds her, “Wake me early,
I have a lot to do,” she wishes him good night and drifts back into sleep.
The invisible man studies her, touches her, ponders their night together
and, becoming anxious, wonders how he can best extricate himself from
the situation without becoming the main attraction of a “lynching bee”
(Shadow and Act 37). Wondering how he, too, can escape the knife (a ritual
that regularly accompanied a lynching), he experiences a range of emotions:
I leaned over her, feeling her breath breezing warm and pure
against my face. I wanted to linger there, experiencing the sensation
of something precious perilously attained too late and now to be
lost forever—a poignancy. But it was as though she’d never been
awake and if she should awaken now, she’d scream, shriek. [. . .]
Why had I gotten myself into such a situation? (315)
The invisible man expects that at any moment he will become a sacrificial
goat, a victim of white society’s totemic retribution: “My heart pounded
as I closed the door and went down the hall, expecting the man, men,
crowds—to halt me. Then I was taking the stairs” (315–16).
The lynching motif arises twice more before the dénouement of the
novel. The first comes during the riot scene when the invisible man sees
a feminine figure dangling by her neck from a lamppost in Harlem. The
second comes in the final dream sequence, in which the invisible man is
finally castrated by a gang of his tormentors: Bledsoe, Norton, Jack, and Ras
all play a part in the illusory castration of our hero. The riot in Harlem erupts
after Brother Hambro has informed the invisible man that the people of the
Harlem district must be sacrificed for the greater good of the Brotherhood
(380–81). After the invisible man has whipped the community into a frenzy
over the injustice of Tod Clifton’s death, the Brotherhood leadership decides
to withdraw from the uptown district, leaving the crowds vulnerable to the
charisma and influence of Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer. Ras’s exhortation
to violence comes at the expense of the people: as the Brotherhood had

planned and anticipated, the police retaliate full force, effecting a massive
devastation of black life and property. Once the invisible man realizes he
has been duped, but before he learns of the riot brewing in Harlem, he
decides to infiltrate the inner circle of the Brotherhood with the help of a
white woman, and he eventually settles on Sybil.
Just as Aeneas consults the sybil, or priestess, before his descent into
the underworld, the invisible man attempts to elicit information from Sybil,
the wife of a Brotherhood big shot, before his eventual retreat underground.
Ironically, however, the protagonist’s Sibyl has no information to give him.
She is the diametrical opposite of Virgil’s creation, for she can neither offer
him any helpful advice, nor can she escort him about the underworld to
assist him in his search for himself.
The scene with Sybil turns from one in which the invisible man
had planned to seduce her into one where she attempts to run a pathetic
seduction game on him. “Who’s taking revenge on whom?” he asks himself
(393), going on to describe what was happening with Sybil in terms of
a different paradigm. Instead of loving the symbol of the conqueror, that
is, the black man loving the white woman as a sexualized representation
of American nationality and white male power, Sybil becomes a sybaritic
sign of the “conquerors conquered” (393). The invisible man interprets her
hedonism as a reflection of the myth of the black phallus—the black man
as simply a less powerful figure of power to worship alongside the white
man. When Sybil whispers in the invisible man’s ear her wish for their
evening’s pleasure, he is shocked to find out that she wants him to create a
rape scene in which he, a “beautiful” black man, takes on the role of a big
black “brute.” “With all the warnings against it, some are bound to want to
try it out for themselves,” he quips (393). He is even less offended by Sybil
than by Red, who had confided to him that he frightened her a bit because
of the “primitive” tone of his voice (312). However, he chooses not to have
intercourse with Sybil while allowing her to believe that they had been
intimate. A pitiful figure without, it would appear, any redeeming graces,
Sybil nonetheless draws the invisible man to her. He believes himself to be
attached to her emotionally, lovingly, and in fact mourns the times that will
not allow for their relationship (399). Later, while negotiating the streets
of Harlem after the riots that follow Clifton’s death, he sees a number of
naked white feminine bodies swinging from the steel arms of streetlamps,
and thinks immediately of Sybil, afraid that she might have been trapped
and lynched (420).
The bodies are actually mannequins; they are unreal, yet they sway
in the wind and give the illusion of life, of white life sacrificed to black
violence. The narrator grieves over the possibility of Sybil’s death, of her
sacrifice, and wonders if he is somehow responsible, if he had gone too far
in initiating a sexual relationship with her for the express purpose of gaining
inside information regarding the plans the Brotherhood has for the Harlem
district (397). What is the significance of Ellison’s use of the white female
body in this instance? And why lynching, as if to signify upon the lynching
of black males with the lynching of white females?
Sacrificing Sexual Desire
I would like to elaborate two ideas here in response to Ellison’s evocation

of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) in chapter 9 of the narrative, and
these are the image of the white woman as repository of white male and
black male desire, and the issue of retribution and violence in response to
the prohibition set about the body of the white female. It is no accident
that Freud’s text is found lying open on young Mr. Emerson’s desk (137).
As with other elements of the novel, the presence of Totem and Taboo is
meant to provide another source of meaning for the reader. Ellison, as
I mention above, was quite familiar with Freud’s work. Biographer Mark
Busby observes that Ellison became acquainted with Freudian theory while
a student at Tuskegee, “and again as an aide to psychologist Harry Stack
shortly after his arrival in New York” (Busby 70). I will discuss Freud’s ideas
of “taboo” along with René Girard’s critique of taboo and social retaliation
in Violence and the Sacred (1977). These two analyses will shed light on
Ellison’s construction of lynching in the closing sequences of the novel,
and it is my hope that this analysis will bring the conversation neatly back
round to one in which Ellison’s theory of moral democracy as love will
come clear, for it resonates with the images of the black maternal with
which he opens the text.
I read Freud here as myth and narrative, and I think in this way
his theory can be quite useful to our discussion. Freud defined taboo as
something sacred, yet uncanny and forbidden (Totem and Taboo 26). He
writes, “taboo expresses itself essentially in prohibitions and restrictions”
(26), and asserts that man’s early “systems of punishment are also connected
with taboo” (29). Thus, taboo becomes the law (34). Girard critiques Freud
on a number of points, specifically on substitution in sacrifice, and the role
of desire in Freud’s Oedipus theory.
Relative to the first point, in Totem and Taboo, Freud tells the story
of a father who is jealous and violent. He decrees that his sons are not to
touch sexually any woman of the clan. Driven by sexual desire and rage, the
sons come together and slaughter their father and eat him; they thereby take
on the father’s essence, incorporating him. Guilt subsequently sets in, and
the sons mourn their father—he becomes the sanctified father. They render
into law the father’s prohibition against the women, insisting on exogamy
and the incest taboo. Women then become tokens of exchange between
tribes, and, borrowing a term from the work of both Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Gayle Rubin, a “traffic in women” ensues.
Girard, who is anti-modern, disputes Freud. He feels that Totem and
Taboo is very close to Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex, and to set this
paradigm on its head Girard renders the positions of victim and victimizer,
object and subject, interchangeable. That is, the (white) woman, as object of
desire, assumes a mutable position from which she emerges as actor instead
of merely as the sexual object that is acted upon. Furthermore, where in
Freudian theory the (white) woman as object of desire stands apart from any
scene of action, in Girard’s model, desire is mediated by the (white) father,
with whom the subject, in our case the black man, identifies.
As I discuss above, it has often been observed by both Ellison and his
critics that Invisible Man is replete with reflections of myth and ritual, and
not only those emerging from the heritage of African American folklore.
In this respect, the myth of black male sexual prowess, and the ritual of
lynching that accompanies this myth, align themselves with Girard’s revision
of Freudian sexual taboos. In addition to mitigating Freud’s more rigid stance
on the position of the (white) woman solely as the object of desire, Girard
elaborates a theory of retribution and vengeance in response to transgression
of social norms and regulations. His theory of violence and sacrifice, which
does not specifically discuss the ritual of lynching but to which I will relate
this act, posits violent acts of sacrifice as measures that work to “restore
harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric” (Violence and the
Sacred 8). The victim of sacrifice serves as a substitute, and the sacrifice
itself may be described as an “active mediation” between the sacrificed and
a higher power (6). Expanding on this idea and adapting Girard’s own
thought, I will define lynching for our purposes as a racist, “deliberate act
of collective substitution performed at the expense of the [black] victim
and [provisionally] absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries
pent-up within the [white] community” (7). (I write “provisionally” since
history has taught us that no one violent act of substitution such as lynching
ever seemed to satiate the white “community.”) By definition, the victim
of sacrifice is generally an outsider, a marginalized individual or collective
existing on the fringes of society and often feared by the hegemonic
group (12).
Such a description is operative in both the scene where the invisible man
believes he has seen Sybil swinging from a lamppost by a rope around her
neck, and in his own dream where he is castrated—another form of lynching—
by his motley crew of tormentors. Sybil fulfills Girard’s prescription of the
mutability of woman as the object of desire. She alternately plays the role of
aggressor and victim in the novel. The narrator chooses Sybil as his oracle
not only due to the fact that she is the wife of a high-ranking Brotherhood
member, but also because in spite of her pathetic demeanor, she regularly and
persistently pursues him. She “was one of those who assumed that my lectures
on the woman question were based upon a more intimate knowledge than
the merely political and had indicated several times a willingness to know
me better. I had always pretended not to understand [. . .]” (390). Once the
invisible man chooses her and finds she has no information that will benefit
him, he is nonetheless forced to go ahead with the seduction scene he has
set because she assumes the role of seducer perforce:
‘Come on, beautiful,’ she said, ‘pour.’
I poured her another and another; in fact, I poured us both

quite a few. [. . .] Then she looked at me, her eyes bright behind
narrowed lids and raised up and struck me where it hurt.
‘Come on, beat me, daddy–you–you big black bruiser. What’s

taking you so long?’ (394)
The invisible man restrains himself from striking her back, and as she
loses control with each glass she imbibes, she reverts to helplessness and
passes out. It is then, oddly enough, that her humanity comes to appeal
to the narrator: “She lay anonymous beneath my eyes until I saw her face,
shaped by her emotion which I could not fulfill, and I thought, Poor Sybil,
she picked a boy for man’s job and nothing was as it was supposed to be.
Even the black bruiser fell down on the job” (395).
The myth of the black macho dispelled (the invisible man appears
in this scene to have been unable to perform sexually—he “fell down
on the job”), the invisible man puts Sybil in a cab and heads uptown,
where he encounters the riot in full rage. Having been grazed by a
policeman’s bullet and after participating in the arson of a rundown tenement
house, the invisible man once more feels himself to be running “as in a
dream”:
Ahead of me the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine

from a lamppost. I felt myself spin around with horror and it was
as though I had turned some nightmarish somersault. I whirled,
still moving by reflex, back-tracking and stopping and now there
was another and another, seven—all hanging before a gutted
storefront. [. . .] I steadied long enough to notice the unnatural
stiffness of those hanging above me. They were mannequins—
‘Dummies!’ I said aloud. Hairless, bald and sterilely feminine.
[. . .] But are they real, I thought; are they? What if one, even
one is real—is . . . Sybil? I hugged my briefcase backing away,
and ran. . . . (419–20)
The symbolic lynching of a white woman enacts a complete reversal

of the lynching of a black man. In the text there is a simultaneous critique
of blackness and emasculation of black manhood, as well as a commentary
upon the state of American democracy. The white woman as national icon,
as pure, fertile, sexual yet forbidden—all images Ellison evokes and toys
with in the narrative—culminate in the tragicomical figure of Sybil and her
lynching in effigy. Not only is the white woman desexualized and sterilized
in this gesture (and hence her force as a tool of the white man in the battle
for black male sexuality is nullified); a portion of the illusion of American
democracy as unassailable has been put to death (the white woman as a
symbol of the nation and of the conquerors is liquidated). The invisible man,
however, is left powerless—he can do nothing to ensure that none of the
mannequins is in fact Sybil; he cannot discern reality. In running from the
scene of Sybil’s symbolic lynching—an action that repeats his running from
Ras and his henchmen, his running from a gang of white men looking for
trouble after the riot, and, as the invisible man states, his running “within
myself ” (403)—he falls blindly into the manhole. Later in his subterranean
dream, his own castration is the mode by which Jack and the others purport
to free him of his illusions, and thereby, as Girard observes, restore a false
sense of order and stability to white society.
Yet the most significant dream that appears in the entirety of the
novel is that of the slave mother, for it is to her principle of love—not yet
perfected—that the invisible man returns when he writes of his preparatory,
divided strategy of denouncing and defending, saying yes and saying no,
loving and hating (437–38). This is especially clear since the morally loving
import of that dream stays with him as he writes his memoir, while in the
memoir itself, he admits that he cannot, finally, identify (with) the real
Sybil. The uncanny slave mother instructs him on a new taboo—pure hate,
against which she forms a law. The insurgent mother’s law against hatred
is a law against narcissism (insufficient love) and the death drive, which
Kristeva names as “[hatred’s] psychological equivalent” (43). Hatred and
the death drive result from a sense of the abject allowed to “run wild”:
“Narcissism and its lining, emptiness, are in short our most intimate, brittle,
and archaic elaborations of the death drive. The most advanced, courageous,
and threatened sentries of primal repression” (43–44).
Ellison understood well the need to confront and deconstruct the
concept of repression when it was psychologically experienced by and
socially applied to the figure of the Negro. As he makes clear in the essay,
“Harlem is Nowhere,” the city in which he sets his novel is “the scene of the
folk-Negro’s death agony,” “the symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation
in the land of his birth” (Shadow and Act 296). Yet by developing “insight
into the relation between his problems and his environment” (302), the
African American could realize the possibility of what Ellison calls in this
essay “transcendence” (296). Invisible Man seems to offer a corrective to
certain aspects of Freud’s psychology of love, which would better be called
a psychology of sexuality. Ellison’s text begins with a critique of which he
is fully aware. As he puts it, the end is in the beginning, and thus the
mother’s law of love, which the protagonist engages after the exploits of
his youth, in fact informs his reflections on the morality (and lack thereof )
of his life. Through the framing perspective of the mother’s law, Ellison as
novelist undertakes a variety of representations (symbolic, imaginary, and
real) that call the reader, who perhaps, in this context, functions as the
analysand, to attempt to reconcile his or her own divided reality with that
faced by the protagonist.
Black Being’s Moral of Love
After a fashion, the reader’s engagement with the text (and not Ellison’s act
of writing alone) is an act of love, a display of moral responsibility. By the
time of his writing, which is chronicled in the Prologue and Epilogue, the
narrator’s self-consciousness is effected through memory, the consciousness
of a past that he has examined, set down, and disseminated through
novelistic discourse. Though he loves as well as hates, love is the criterion
for emerging from his “hibernation,” as he learns from the slave mother in
the Prologue. As he seeks new life and rebirth—he anticipates his coming
out, his re-emergence from the womb of the earth, and his quitting the realm
of chaos for the space of the cosmos—he does so not only for himself, but
for all of humanity. What takes place as this new vision of democratic love
encounters the limits and static resistance of the symbolic realm Ellison does
not show us. But the transition is certain not to be smooth. Black being,
in this sense among others, is radical.
Notes
Introduction
1. “The Conservation of Races,” 817.

2. Various disciplines have different but strikingly related perspectives on
the question. Critical and human geographers often discuss identity as constructed
in relation to national and other geo-political formations. Philosophers investigate
identity in terms of equivalence, sameness, and similarity of varying types and
degrees. And sociologists inquire into the psychodynamic and sociological forms of
identity, theorizing it with relation to the symbolic interactionism that emerges from
the pragmatic theories of William James and George Herbert Mead. Of course, in
literary theory, our current perspectives on identity have been strongly influenced
by structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Saussurean linguistics, Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian ideas of discursive formation have held
sway over the field for the past three decades, with studies of the hybridity and
creolization of identity coming about in the seminal works of Édouard Glissant,
Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. Black feminist theory, womanism, and feminist
theory have also addressed and critiqued the question. On this score, see work by
Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and Naomi Zack (a philosopher of race and
mixed race identity), among others.
3. Two years before he left the United States in 1946 to begin life as an
expatriate in Paris, Richard Wright took an interest in Heidegger’s philosophy of
being, not in a simplistic effort to glean ideas from Heidegger’s thought, but in order
to assess Heidegger’s perspective on Western being (a point that Heidegger specifies
in On the Way to Language, 1959) against Wright’s own philosophical conception of
black being. Once his move to France was complete, he was introduced by Gertrude
Stein to many of the prominent members of French intellectual society. Through his
interactions with them, his concept of black being continued to evolve, an evolution
that I discuss at length in chapter 7.
4. See Fanon’s well-known essay, “L’Expérience vécue du Noir” in Peau noire,
masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952): 90–114. Fanon writes: “Si les études de
Sartre sur l’existence d’autrui demeurent exactes (dans la mesure, nous le rappelons, où
L’Etre et le Néant décrit une conscience aliénée), leur application à une conscience nègre
se révèle fausse. C’est que le Blanc n’est pas seulement l’Autre, mais le maître, réel ou
361
362 Notes to Chapter 1
imaginaire d’ailleurs.” (112). [“If the studies of Sartre on the existence of others remain
correct (insofar as, we recall, Being and Nothingness describes an alienated conscience),
their application to a Negro consciousness appears false. It is that the white man is
not only the Other, but the Master, real or, moreover, imaginary.” My translation.]
5. In Paris, Wright would, of course, become a friend and interlocutor of
the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Long established in Paris by the
time Wright arrived, the philosopher Jean Beaufret—who knew Sartre personally—
taught at the École Normale Supérieure from 1946–1962, and was a member of
a social circle that included Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louis Althusser, and Jacques
Lacan. Though he would come to oppose Sartre’s perspective on existentialism, he
was deeply invested in identifying a synthesis between Sartrean existentialism and
Marxism, a quest that led him to the writings of Heidegger. (Beaufret credits Sartre
with guiding him to Heidegger.) Beaufret was, thus, in great measure, responsible
for introducing Heidegger’s work to French philosophers and intellectuals. Believ-
ing Heidegger to be innocent—by Heidegger’s own account, which did not escape
dispute—of charges of Nazism, Beaufret committed himself to the study and dis-
semination of Heidegger’s thought. By this time, Wright had already discovered
Heidegger for himself, having asked Dorothy Norman, the prominent photographer,
editor, author, and activist, “to instruct him on existentialism and the writings of
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, whom she had read. She invited Paul Tillich
and Hannah Arendt over so that they could discuss the topic with him” (Michel
Fabre, Unfinished Quest 299). Importantly, Wright did not look to Heidegger for
inspiration on ways to theorize black being, but appraised Heidegger as he analyzed
the works of various thinkers who were contemplating the deep and complex prob-
lems of modern being. See the “Translator’s Introduction” to Jean Beaufret, Dialogue
with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy, trans. Mark Sinclair (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2006): vii-xiii; and Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in
France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005): 157–206.
6. See “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings (Ed. David Far-
rell Krell. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 247.
7. See Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in
Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
207–273; and Heidegger, “Lecture Six,” in The Principle of Reason (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 48.
Chapter 1
1. Please see Gates’ 1988 study The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-
American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press).
2. Of particular interest are Plato’s Republic and the Poetics and the Rhetoric,
by Aristotle.
3. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida, (New York:
Routledge, 2007), 3.
Notes to Chapter 1 363
4. Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor: Imperfect Thought

(Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 24.
5. Aristotle, The Rhetoric and The Poetics of Aristotle (New York: Modern
Library, 1984), 173.
6. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked
Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Ed. Vincent Carretta (New
York: Penguin, 1999).
7. Please see Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom, by Lawrence W. Levine (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), and Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and The Foundations of
Black America, by Sterling Stuckey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) for
pertinent discussions of African American oral traditions and the politics associ-
ated with them.
8. Please see Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
Press, 1976) for a full and engaging discussion of this form and its history.
9. Murray, Stomping the Blues, 88. See also Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and
Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York:
Vintage, 1990). Davis explains that the “formal blues played a minimal role in
Billie Holiday’s repertoire.” Even so, “her music, deeply rooted in the blues tradi-
tion, recalled and transformed the cultural product of former slaves and used it to
powerfully contest and transform prevailing popular song culture” (161).
10. For an extensive discussion of this point, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The
Signifying Monkey, chapter 4, “The Trope of the Talking Book,” 127–169.
11. Sojourner Truth, The Book of Life (London: Black Classics, 1999): 74.
12. Ellison writes of the importance the Harlem Renaissance writers, James
Weldon Johnson among them, held for him in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,”
published in Shadow and Act (1964) and reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph
Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003): 202. For critical
commentary drawing comparisons between the two works, see Houston A. Baker,
Jr., “A Forgotten Prototype: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Invisible
Man,” in Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature (Washington, DC:
Howard University Press, 1974): 17–32; Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence
of Genius (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002): 411; and Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., Introduction to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Vintage,
1989): xvi.
13. In his review, “Between Laughter and Tears” (New Masses, October 1937),
Wright condemned Hurston’s novel on the very grounds James Weldon Johnson
(in his Preface to the Book of American Negro Poetry) used to declare dialect poetry
moribund and passé: it could convey only two limited emotions: humor and pathos.
Wright’s dismissal of Hurston’s novel as a book that had no “basic idea or theme
that lends itself to significant interpretation” (22) was searing. He roared on: “Miss
Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel a tradition which was forced upon the
Negro in theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘white folks’ laugh. Her
characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum in
that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between
laughter and tears” (emphasis in original, 25). Hurston, stung by Wright’s reproval,
returned the favor in April 1938 when she pointed out what were, to her mind, the
myriad failings in Wright’s short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, published
earlier that year. Hurston wrote in her review, which appeared in the April 2, 1938
issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, that Wright’s fiction was so overburdened
with hatred that he had neglected to take note of what she called “the broader and
more fundamental phases of Negro life” (Hurston 32). The lines between the two
writers could not have been more clearly drawn: each was the other’s antithesis
of his or her own ideal. For Hurston, Wright, despite his humble beginnings as a
Mississippi sharecropper’s son, could in no way measure up to the “characteristic”
Negro, whose expression was creative and full of life in spite of the obstacles and
oppressions that African Americans faced. And for Wright, Hurston was far from
the radical visionary artist whose works reflected Wright’s dictates in “Blueprint for
Negro Writing.” See Zora Neale Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” The Saturday Review
of Literature 17 (April 2, 1938): 32; and Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and
Tears,” New Masses, 5 (October 1937): 22, 25.
14. One exception to this claim may be found in Lorenzo Dow Turner’s
1949 study Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Turner was one of Hurston’s linguistics
professors during her matriculation at Howard University in the 1920s, and was a
pioneer in his field. His book is cited by Margaret Wade-Lewis (in her 2007 intel-
lectual biography Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies) as the first and still
most important study of African linguistic and cultural retentions among the Gullah
people. Even so, it is not widely cited among scholars of African American literature
and culture, likely because, as the introduction to the 2002 edition of Turner’s work
puts it, “the Sea Islands” where Gullah is spoken “do not represent wider African
American culture (even in the rural South), and much of what Turner found there
was not found elsewhere.” As her English professor, Turner was a strong influence
on Hurston; she speaks of him in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) as the man whose
commanding and sensitive voice made her feel that she “must be an English teacher.”
Apparently, he did not make her feel as though she must be a linguist or, more
precisely, a sociolinguist and anthropologist. This urge would come later, once she
had left Howard for Columbia to study under the preeminent Franz Boas.
15. In his Preface to his own translation of Homer’s Iliad, Pope writes that
“Invention . . . in different degrees distinguishes all great Genius’s,” [sic] and that
“in Homer and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresist-
ibly. . . . That which Aristotle calls the Soul of poetry, was first breath’d into it by
Homer.  . . . Aristotle had reason to say, He was the only Poet who had found out
living words; there are in him more daring figures and metaphors than in any
good author whatever [sic].” The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Alexander Pope. Ed.
Steven Shankman (London: Penguin, 1996). 3–9, passim. Homer’s epic hexameter
poem the Iliad relied upon Greek mythology and folk traditions, and though it was
“composed” about the eighth or ninth century before the common era, it was not
written down until much later. It and the Odyssey alike belong to the Western oral
tradition, mixing legend and history, fiction and fact. In their oral states, both may
arguably be related to folk literature. According to J. A. Cuddon, folk literature is
the provenance of “primitive and illiterate people” (The Penguin Dictionary of Liter-
ary Terms and Literary Theory 346). Cuddon argues that folk literature is a vague
term that may include folksongs, drama, and legend, and that it only becomes
true literature “when people gather it together and write it down” (346). Examples
of folk literature are found, according to Cuddon, in the work of the philologists
and folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose collection of folktales, Grimms’
Fairy Tales (1812–1822), emerged as a leading text of nineteenth-century German
Romanticism. It may be worthwhile to investigate any existing links between a text
of folklore, such as that published by the Grimms, who influenced the development
of German romanticism, and the publication of African American folklore by Zora
Neale Hurston and others, who influenced the development of the Harlem Renais-
sance. Just as German Romanticism was deeply intertwined with a German sense of
national identity, so the Harlem Renaissance was characterized by a literary aesthetic
indelibly marked with notions of blackness and social belonging. It is this note that
Du Bois and Johnson—in their own analyses of black cultural expression—strike
so forcefully in their works.
16. Hurston enrolled in Columbia University’s Barnard College in 1925, and
began to study anthropology under Franz Boas that year. She had studied linguistics
under the prominent African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner at Howard
University, where she earned an associate’s degree in 1920. In 1926, according to
Cheryl Wall, she began to undertake field work “for Boas in Harlem, measuring
the skulls of passersby to disprove theories of racial inferiority.” After meeting with
the patron Charlotte Mason, Hurston began to collect folklore and information on
various types of African American cultural artifacts in 1927. That year, Boas also
arranged for her to receive a research fellowship that would fund her study and
collection of African American folklore. Hurston’s work took her to Florida as
well as the Bahamas, and she published her findings in such prominent periodicals
as the Journal of American Folklore during the 1930s. During this time, she wrote
plays and transcribed source material that included folktales, work songs, sermons,
proverbs, children’s rhymes, and blues lyrics. She organized folk concerts, one of
which, The Great Day, played on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre in 1932.
Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, was begun and completed in 1933; it would be
published the following year. This intense flurry of intellectual, artistic, and academic
activity all preceded the composition of Hurston’s signal essay on African American
vernacular expression, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which was published
in 1934. For Wall’s quote, please see “Chronology,” Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and
Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 964.
17. See the Poetics 1457b.
18. Aristotle describes simile in this fashion in the table of contents that
prefaces the Rhetoric. See the description of Chapter Four in Book III.
19. Lévi-Strauss is well-known for his opposition to racism, yet a number of
scholars have pointed out that his analyses did not deal adequately with q uestions of
racial inequality and injustice. See, for instance, Kamala Visweswaran, “The Interven-
tions of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race, and the Critique of Historical Time,”
in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Sybol
Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 227–248.
20. Course 71; Signifying Monkey 47.
21. Space will not allow for an analysis of the more troubling aspects of
Hurston’s discourse in this essay: the issues of class it presents, its posture on race
and essentialized being, and so on. For a fuller treatment of the text, see Karla F.
C. Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987). Most commentaries on “Characteristics” avoid this aspect
of the writing, possibly due to what Ann duCille has described as the iconization of
Hurston, what she terms “Hurstonism.” She calls it “the conspicuous consumption
of Zora Neale Hurston as the initiator of the African American women’s literary
tradition,” and thus it functions as a lionization and mythologizing of Hurston that
would logically render any pointedly critical examination of perceived weaknesses
in Hurston’s arguments and positions difficult if not blasphemous in black feminist
thought. Please see duCille’s essay, “The Mark of Zora: Reading between the Lines
of Legend and Legacy,” in The Scholar and Feminist Online 3.2 (Winter 2005), n. p.
22. The interested reader should reference the special issue on metaphor,
Critical Inquiry 5.1 (Autumn 1978): 1–201. This issue contains wide-ranging yet
in-depth treatments of metaphor and its theories.
23. “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph
Ellison, 67.
24. See “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals” in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Mem-
oirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl Wall (New York: The Library of America, 1995),
870.
25. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
1256–57.
26. Lacan did so in the essay, “From Interpretation to the Transference,” in
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
XI (New York: Norton, 1981), 249. He writes, “It was thought to be very clever
to do this with metaphor, arguing from the following—to that which carries the
weight, in the unconscious, of an articulation of the last signifier to embody the
metaphor with the new meaning created by its use, should correspond some kind
of pinning out, from one to the other, of two signifiers in the unconscious. Such
a formula is quite definitely unsatisfactory. First, because one ought to know that
there can be no relations between the signifier and itself, the peculiarity of the
signifier being the fact that it is unable to signify itself, without producing some
error in logic.” Lacan did not deem Laplanche’s interpretation to be wholly use-
less, however, since it identified in his schema certain characteristics of elementary
signifiers. A useful discussion of Laplanche’s interpretation and Lacan’s thought in
response to it is found in Anika Lemaire’s Jacques Lacan, preface by Jacques Lacan,
trans. David Macey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), especially the section
titled “Critical Study of ‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study’ by J. Laplanche

and S. Leclaire. Clarifications as to Lacan’s Thought,” p. 113–131.
27. On this point, please see Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pages 145–8. Even
as Ricoeur rebuts Jakobson’s opposition of metaphor and metonymy, the classical
comparatist Michael Silk argues not against Ricoeur’s opposition to what Silk calls
Jakobson’s “dyarchy of metaphor and metonymy” (121), but against what he sees as
Ricoeur’s refusal to acknowledge the various forms metaphor can take, specifically
those forms of poetic metonymy that actually function as metaphors. Ricoeur does
acknowledge that metonymy can, in certain instances, serve as metaphor. He also,
as I have discussed, argues against a parallelism between poetic metaphors and
philosophical metaphors. Without taking up this aspect of Ricoeur’s argument, Silk
chides Ricoeur for allowing his analysis of metaphor to become “remote from poetic
actuality” (143). The “experience of poetry,” Silk asserts, may not be “sufficient” to
a theory of metaphor, but it is “plainly necessary for any adequate theory” (144).
“Poetic usages” are not the “scaffolding” of philosophical theory, he insists: “they are
their bricks” (146). This point, of course, runs counter to Ricoeur, who argues that
though it may offer an event in thinking, metaphor is ever only anterior to the type
of speculative thought in which philosophy engages. See Michael Silk, “Metaphor
and Metonymy: Aristotle, Jakobson, Ricoeur, and Others,” in Metaphor, Allegory,
and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003): 115–147.
28. The implications of this may be traced not only in Ricoeur’s work, but also
in that of Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997);
and in The Margins of Philosophy (1972), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
29. First published in 1987; reprinted 1993 in A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Natoli
and Hutcheon (New York: State University of New York Press), 273–286. Citations
here refer to the Natoli and Hutcheon edition.
30. Derrida’s pronouncement comes in Of Grammatology and should be con-
sidered in its context. It reads as follows: “. . . [I]f reading must not be content
with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something
other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobio-
graphical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place,
would have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give
here to that word, outside of writing in general. That is why the methodological
considerations that we risk applying here to an example are closely dependent on
general propositions that we have elaborated above; as regards the absence of the
referent or the transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text [there is
no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]. And that is neither because Jean-Jacques’s
life, or the existence of Mamma or Thérèse themselves, is not of prime interest to
us, nor because we have access to their so-called “real” existence only in the text and
we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation.
All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more
radical reasons. What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the
‘dangerous supplement,’ is that in what one calls the real life of these existences
‘of flesh and bone,’ beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as
Rousseau’s text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been
anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth
in a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening, and being added only
while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement,
etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present,
Nature, that which words like “real mother” name, have always already escaped, have
never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance
of natural presence.” (158–159)
31. I bracket the “negation” of Gates’s intentionality in this sentence to under-
score the inevitable risk Gates and other theorists, including I myself, run when
examining African American literature through the lens of a white Western meta-
physics that has, from at least the early modern period onward, denied the very
possibility of a metaphysics of black being, even if that lens is a critical one. If the
African American philosopher Lewis Gordon is correct in arguing that possibility
itself is the philosophical precondition and propadeutic of human freedom, denial of
the sheer possibility of a metaphysics of black being not only relegates black being
to enslavement; it also remands it to the realm of oblivion, or non-being. Thus the
African American theorist seeking to promulgate black being must carefully devise
ways, as Hortense Spillers and Ronald Judy have both pointed out, of having our
metaphysics and eating it too.
32. The reader may refer to the well-known passage in Thomas Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), where he speaks of “the black” as unknowable,
and thus as ill-suited for full incorporation into the American body politic, because
of the thick “veil of blackness” that deflects whites’ attempt to divine the emotions
and thoughts—the humanity—of the black “other.” Jefferson’s perspective was not
simply influential and representative of the raciology of his time, which was marked
by the rise of racial pseudosciences in an era of humanistic “enlightenment”; it was
also quite Platonic in its formulation, given that Plato’s dictum in the Republic
regarding those who were best suited as the guardians of his ideal society were those
whose bodily form aptly reflected their inner goodness. Thus physical beauty was
indicative of intellectual, moral, and ethical “goodness.” In Plato’s words, “a good
soul will, by its excellence, render the body as perfect as it can be” (Republic Bk III
403c). Some commentators on Plato’s work may see this as simply one aspect of his
program of education for elite young men. Yet when read as a text whose influence
on Jefferson was formative, the dicta of both men resonate one with the other in
clear tones. Of course, Plato did not conflate beauty of the body with the good-
ness of one’s soul, and argued, through the figure of Socrates, that a beautiful body
could never on its own form a good soul. However, he does imply that goodness
of soul, that is, of character and consciousness, will undoubtedly be reflected in the
physical human form. Given that Plato and Jefferson alike were, in their respective
texts, contemplating the attributes of the ideal republic and the place of the citizen
within it (and notwithstanding that this critical aspect of Socrates’s dialogue at this
point in the text shortly follows a discussion of legitimate love—as opposed to
vulgar conduct—between male lovers), one can easily draw these two thinkers into
discourse one with the other, even across the millennia of time that separate them.
33. Rhetoric 1355 b 25.
34. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, first published in 1936 and reissued in 1965,
I.A. Richards seeks to resuscitate the waning discipline Ricoeur describes: “These
lectures are an attempt to revive an old subject. I need spend no time, I think, in
describing the present state of Rhetoric. Today it is the dreariest and least profit-
able part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So
low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than
to trouble ourselves with it—unless we can find reason for believing that it can
become a study that will minister successfully to important needs. As to the needs,
there is little room for doubt about them. Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study
of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3).
35. “The Art of Fiction.” Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964),
169.
Chapter 2
1. Space will not allow for discussion of a good number of thinkers who
likewise take up the implications of literature’s imbrication with philosophy even as
they devote critical space to the role of language and writing in the expression of
black being. Significant among these thinkers is Nahum D. Chandler, author of the
forthcoming book The Problem of Pure Being: Annotations on W. E. B. Du Bois and
the Discourses of the Negro. This study has benefited in myriad ways from Professor
Chandler’s generosity of spirit and acute intellectual work.
2. Moorings and Metaphors, 78.
3. The illimitable character of black being is, as I discuss fully in the chapter
on “The Conservation of Races,” both deferred and anticipated by Du Bois in this
1897 essay, which is perhaps his most controversial piece of writing. The concept is
treated at length by Nahum Chandler in his unpublished manuscript, “The Question
of the Illimitable in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois” (n.d.).
4. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History. Rev ed. Trans. J. Sibree.
(London: The Colonial Press, 1900): 8.
5. G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History was published in 1831, rather than
in 1813, as given in this quote. In his preface to the second edition of his father’s
work, Charles Hegel writes that the first lectures on which the book is based were
not delivered until the “winter of 1822–23” as a graduate course (xi). The first edi-
tion of the Philosophy came after Hegel’s death in 1831, drawn from his lecture
notes for the course as given from 1830 to 1831. The revised, 1900 edition hearkens
back to the earlier set of notes, from 1822–23 and 1824–34. See Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, rev. ed. (London: The
Colonial Press, 1900).
6. See pgs 92–93 of Figures in Black.

7. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races.” Writings. Ed. Nathan Huggins.
(New York: Library of America, 1986): 825.
8. Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Racial
Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005; Stuart Hall, “Subjects
in History: Making Diasporic Identities” in The House that Race Built (New York:
Vintage), 1998: 295.
9. “Subjects in History,” 298.
10. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003): 204–205. Officially titled The Negro Family: The Case
for National Action, The Moynihan Report, as it is widely known, appeared in 1965.
Steven Steinberg names the report as a pivotal point in liberal America’s disengage-
ment from race-based policies of social equality. See his essay “The Liberal Retreat
from Race during the Post-Civil Rights Era” in The House that Race Built, 13–47.
11. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
3. In Hayles’s view of the posthuman, “consciousness, regarded as the seat of human
identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind
thinking, [is considered] as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to
claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (2–3).
12. Barnor Hesse, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Postracial Horizon” in The
South Atlantic Quarterly 110.1 (Winter 2011): 155–178. While Hesse’s argument is
quite valid, there is, of course, more to the story. Taking pre-1492 Spain into con-
sideration, with its purity of blood trials and its ultimate “expulsion,” in 1492, of the
Moors and the Jews, religious “difference” between Europeans as well as whites and
nonwhites must be seen as a precursor to modern ideas of racial difference. Likewise,
the concept of social otherness was quite alive in pre-modern ideas on ethnicity, as
well as in early modern quasi-medical (or proto-medical) discourses on the body
and its humors. See, for instance, Mary Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race
in Early Modern Drama (2003) for a discussion of a number of points regarding
race and bodily humors. David Levering Lewis’s recent book, God’s Crucible: Islam
and the Making of Europe, 570–1215 (2008), explores an even earlier time period
and its struggles over race and difference. See also María deGuzmán’s Spain’s Long
Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), which touches upon Spain’s purity of blood
trials and treats fully Spain’s lingering shadow of “blackness.”
13. See, for instance, Wright’s introduction to Black Metropolis, by St. Clair
Drake and Horace Cayton (1945), where Wright cites James not as the source of his
own social philosophy, but as affirmation of thoughts he developed independently.
14. I am borrowing by allusion from the title of Robert Gooding-Williams’s
2009 study, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America
(Harvard University Press). Though he credits Souls as being the most influential
Afro-Modern contribution to black political philosophy, Gooding-Williams sees
Du Bois’s thought as inherently limited in ways that demand its surpassing, even
as its example is instructive. To this end, he uses Du Bois’s work as a segue back
to the earlier political thought of Frederick Douglass, whose aims and meth-
ods Gooding-Williams sees as more promising for twenty-first-century African
American political thought. My own perspective, of course, diverges from that of
Gooding-Williams.
15. See Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. 134; Gulnara Bakieva, Social Memory and
Contemporaneity, ed. Maura Donohue (Washington, DC: The Council for Research
in Values and Philosophy, 2007), v; David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim
and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of these New Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Trans-
action Publishers, 1995), p. 17; Julius Stone, Province and Function of Law: Law as
Logic, Justice, and Social Control (Sydney, Australia: Assoc. General Publication, Pty
Ltd, 1946; Rpt. 1973), p. 479; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii.
16. Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review
6.3 (Winter 2006): 7.
17. As Glissant’s translator Betsy Wing explains, Glissant’s sense of wan-
dering, given in the French as errance (or errantry), is not mindless roaming, “but
includes a sense of sacred motivation” (Poetics of Relation [Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997] 211ff1).
18. First published in boundary 2 21.3 (Fall 1994): 65–116.
19. Du Bois’s final book, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, was published
posthumously in 1968, the year after Cruse’s Crisis appeared. Du Bois counted Souls
and Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) among his autobiographical writ-
ings; however, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept
would remain his fullest autobiographical work to appear before The Autobiography.
While James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961),
and The Fire Next Time (1962) are each autobiographical to greater or lesser extents,
and each speak to the vocation and responsibility of the black writer, Baldwin does
not figure in Spillers’s account here.
20. I use this term as it was developed in writings by Linda Hutcheon: The
Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989) and A Poetics of Postmodernism
(New York: Routledge, 1988).
21. See Judy’s “Writing Culture as Nonrecuperable Negativity” in (Dis)form-
ing the American Canon, p. 92–98.
22. Naomi Zack’s work on mixed race identity has been critiqued by Michele
Elam as celebrating racial hybridity, seeing it as racelessness. Elam’s 2011 book, The
Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford:
Stanford University Press), works to counter simplistic, congratulatory perspectives
on mixed race identity as the treasured result of the Civil Rights gains of America.
Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993)
and the edited volume American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).
Chapter 3
1. Page numbers refer to Hawkes, Metaphor. London: Methuen, 1972.

2. In the Norton Critical Edition of the Narrative, Werner Sollors includes a
helpful selection of contemporary and early nineteenth-century reviews of Equiano’s
work. Pertinent to my point here are assessments that appeared in the Monthly
Review (1789), the General Magazine and Impartial Review (1789), and a review
of the Interesting Narrative by Mary Wollstonecraft (1789). Sollors also includes
later reviews by the Abbé Grégoire (1808) and Lydia Maria Child (1833). Please
see The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
African, Written by Himself. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Norton, 2001. 295–302.
3. David Punter, Metaphor. New York: Routledge, 2007. 71.
4. A quick sampling of titles supports this point. The inclusion of the phrase
“interesting narrative” was popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies on both sides of the Atlantic. It and another phrase that draws so much
attention when appended to memoirs and autobiographies by former slaves, “writ-
ten by himself,” was also used with some frequency by whites who were in no way
part of the tradition of slave literature, but who wished to underscore the fact of
their authorship. Such titles number in the hundreds, and are hardly dominated by
writers of African descent. I will list only a few and will limit this list to titles that
appear close to the publication date of Equiano’s Narrative and that were published,
like Equiano’s work, in London: The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures
of David Doubtful by Henry Brooke (London: n.p., 1798); An Interesting Narrative
of the Travels of James Bruce, Esq. into Abyssinia, to Discover the Source of the Nile by
James Bruce (London: Printed for H. D. Symons, 1800); An Interesting Narrative
of the Voyage, Shipwreck, and Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Drake Morris by Drake
Morris (London: John Abraham, 1797); An Authentic and Interesting Narrative of
the Late Expedition to Botany Bay, as Performed by Commodore Phillips, . . . and Safe
Arrival on the Coast of New Holland: With Particular Descriptions of Jackson’s Bay &
Lord Howe’s Island, . . . Written by an Officer just Returned (London: printed by W.
Bailey, 1789); and The Authentic Memoirs and Sufferings of Dr. William Stahl, a Ger-
man Physician. Containing His Travels, Observations, and Interesting Narrative during
Four Years Imprisonment at Goa, . . . Written by Himself, by Wilhelm Stahl (London:
printed for J. Barker, 1792).
5. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Moder-
nity. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Vincent Carretta’s biography of Equiano,
entitled Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2005), contains a full discussion of portraits used by Equiano’s
eighteenth-century African contemporaries.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from The Geneva Manuscript. In The Nationalism
Reader, ed. Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (New Jersey: Humanities Press,
1995), 22–26.
7. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals. In The Nationalism Reader,
38–47.
8. David Hume, “Of National Characters.” In David Hume: The Philosophical
Works. Vol. 3. Ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (Scientia Verlag
Aalen, 1964), 248.
9. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf,
1966–69), 410; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2nd ed. Ed. Peter Laslett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Baron de Montesquieu, De
l’esprit des lois, (Paris: Garnier, 1945). Locke’s text was originally published between
1684 and 1689; Montesquieu’s appeared in 1748.
10. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 110–11.
11. Père Labat was the author of nineteen volumes of travelogues that docu-
mented the years he spent as a missionary in the West Indies. He published Voyage
du père Labat aux îles de l’Amérique in 1724.
12. Please see “Author’s Note,” The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano. Ed. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), xix–
xxviii. Page references to Equiano’s Narrative are drawn from this edition.
13. Richard Steele, [“Brunetta and Phillis”]. The Spectator Vol 1 No 80 ( June
1, 1711). Ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: J.M Dent, 1897), 302–305. Image taken
from Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900, by Richard D.
Altick. The painting, titled simply “Brunetta and Phillis” (1803) and completed by
Thomas Stothard, was inspired by Steele’s vignette. Stothard avoids Steele’s explicit
dressing of the slave in an undergarment of the same fabric as Brunetta’s gown, an
even more daring insult than the portrayal he gives here. This image from Steele’s
vignette, and the attendant dialectic of the black body in European apparel, was
quite popular, as it was rendered again as a painting in 1853 by a Mr. A. Solomon.
Solomon’s rendering was first displayed at the Royal Academy in 1853, and again
at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts.
14. There were a number of translations of Homer’s Iliad in the early eigh-
teenth century. Prominent among them was a translation undertaken by Anne Daci-
er in 1711; Houdard de la Motte published what was considered to be a distorted
version of the Iliad in 1714, to which Dacier replied with disdain. Pierre Marivaux,
well known for his novel La vie de Marianne (1731–1741), but also respected as a
playwright and an essayist whose work is compared to that of Addison and Steele,
also responded derisively to this translation in a tract entitled “L’Homère travesti, ou
l’Iliade en vers burlesques” (1717). Pope devoted six years’ work to his 1720 trans-
lation of the Iliad when he was but twenty-five years old; his translation, though
unfaithful to the Greek in the literal sense, was widely respected in his day because
it was deemed foremost among the translations that permitted one to read the
Iliad as a poem rather than as a cultural artifact. In her 1985 evaluation of Pope’s
translation (the second edition of which was published in 2002), Felicity Rosslyn
maintains that Pope’s translation “remains the best available,” even considering what
she calls its “defects.” Please see Pope’s Iliad: A Selection with Commentary. 2nd Edition.
Ed. Felicity Rosslyn. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2002: xii.
15. Under the Spanish Asiento, Spain contracted with non-Spaniards to man-
age the slave trade between Spain, Africa, and the Spanish American Empire. The
contractors were originally Genoese. From 1595 to 1640, they were Portuguese; from
1702 to 1713, French, and from the Treaties of Utrecht in 1713 to 1750, British.
16. Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest” in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope.
Ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 76.
17. Spectator 69, 1711.
18. “The Royal Exchange.” In The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol.
1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2027–29. Addison employs metaphors
that reflect his interest in the interwoven nature of humankind, facilitated by the
burgeoning capitalistic system that was growing during his era. He uses metaphor
as well as synecdoche in conveying his thoughts.
19. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol 2. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin
and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 6.
20. See Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House that Race Built (New York:
Pantheon, 1997), 3–12.
21. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Minneapolis:
The University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 15.
22. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. London:
Verso, 1985: 160–163.
23. Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772). In Slave Narratives (New York: Library of America),
11–12.
24. Interesting Narrative, 64. Equiano was obviously mistaken. He felt that
he was free because of his baptism at St. Margaret’s Church in 1759. Although
the baptism of blacks, a growing community in seventeenth and eighteenth-century
England, was not an irregularity, such a sacrament still caused a stir of disappro-
bation among those who supported slavery. James Walvin writes, “From the early
arrival of Africans in England, their religion (or apparent lack of one) was a sensitive
issue. The 1601 Elizabethan Proclamation, ordering the expulsion of early black set-
tlers in England, was linked to their heathenism.” The debate continued throughout
the seventeenth century: “a number of seventeenth-century legal cases had suggested
that the ‘heathenism’ of imported blacks confirmed their bondage” (An African’s
Life [London: Continuum], 43). Christianity and slavery were held to be mutually
exclusive; for a time, blacks who had been baptized felt that under English law, they
were essentially freed through the ritual. However, pro-slavery forces actively worked
against any such claims, and English courts, not willing to endanger the stability of
the plantation society upon which the colonial system was built, were careful not
to allow challenges to slavery on English soil to go unchecked. They understood
that to condemn slavery in the metropole would clearly spell imminent doom for
slavery in the colonies. A ruling in 1729 by the Attorney and Solicitor General
(stating that “baptism doth not bestow freedom [on a slave], nor make any altera-
tion in his temporal condition in these kingdoms”) appeared to settle the matter,
and it was confirmed once more by Yorke (Lord Hardwicke) in 1749. However, as
Equiano’s remarks indicate, the mythic connection between baptism and freedom
persisted. See Walvin’s An African Life, 43. Also see Anthony J. Barker, The African
Link (London: Frank Cass, 1978), 67–68; and Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History
of Black People in Britain (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), 23–24.
25. As Pascal concludes the sale of Equiano to Captain James Doran, he
makes clear his conviction that Equiano, being his slave, possessed nothing, not even
the coat he wore to ward off the December winter on the day of his sale. Pascal
took Equiano’s only coat from him.
26. For more on the African cultural elements that remain legible in Equia-
no’s text, see April Langley, The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of
Eighteenth-Century African American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2008).
27. The word “Bible” is derived from the Greek “biblia,” meaning small books.
The Christian community, of course, prefers “The Book” to “The Books,” and did
so in Equiano’s time after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the ascension of
James I, who commissioned the King James Version, completed in 1611.
28. Equiano does not actually quote from the 126th Psalm, as he states he
does, but instead adapts verses from Ephesians 1: 12–13, which reads: “That we
should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ. In whom ye also
trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in
whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise.”
The 126th Psalm, a short chapter of 6 verses, bears no semantic resemblance to the
verses from Ephesians, but shares an emphasis upon placing one’s trust in the Lord.
29. The account of Peter’s liberation to which Equiano refers comes in Acts
12:1–9: Peter “wist not that it was true which was done by the angel; but thought
he saw a vision.” The translators of the King James Version link this passage from
Acts to Psalms 126, to which Equiano likewise alludes here, though he does not
cite it directly.
30. This metaphor is, of course, taken up and repeated in the work of Wright
and Ellison, where it is secularized and rationalized by way of Freudian thought.
31. Matthew 25:41 reads: “Then shall he say also unto them on the left
hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and
his angels.”
32. Quite symbolic here would be the telling of Equiano’s life in three evolu-
tions, using the number three to symbolize perfection of existence, as in the Bibli-
cal perfection of “God in three persons.” This, however, is not a narrative strategy
Equiano chooses to employ.
33. Luke 4:16–20 tells of the beginnings of Christ’s ministry, when he went
into the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read from the Book of Isaiah
[given in the New Testament as “Esaias”]: “And there was delivered unto him the
book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place
where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed
me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to
preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering sight to the blind, to set at liberty
them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’ And he closed
the book, and he gave it again to them minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all
them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto
them, ‘This day is scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ ” This passage is taken from the
King James Version; italics reproduced here are given in the original.
34. Micah 6:8.
Chapter 4
1. See James Weldon Johnson’s Preface to the first edition of The Book of
American Negro Poetry, rev. ed. (1922; repr., San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 26.
See also J. Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North
Carolina Press, 1939), 40–43.
2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen
Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press, 1990);
Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American
Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993); Hazel V. Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and
Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State Univ.
Press, 1994).
3. Smith Foster, introduction to Harper, Brighter Coming Day, 19–20.
4. See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
5. Patricia Liggins Hill, “ ‘Let Me Make Songs for the People’: A Study
of Frances Watkins Harper’s Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 15.2 (Sum-
mer 1981): 60–65; “ ‘We Are Rising as a People’: Frances Harper’s Radical Views
on Class and Racial Equality in Sketches of Southern Life.” American Transcendental
Quarterly 19.2 ( June 2005): 133–53.
6. Frances Smith Foster lends interesting texture to our understanding of
this period. She writes: “Harper knew that nineteenth century popular audiences
preferred poems with rhymes and rhythms that were easy to memorize and to
recite. The aesthetics of popular poetry also required familiar verse forms such as the
sonnet and the ballad, simple and didactic metaphors, and readily comprehensible
word order” (A Brighter Coming Day 28). Poets of Harper’s day who practiced these
aesthetics included the so-called “Fireside poets”: Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier
figured among their numbers. Since Harper wanted to succeed with the same audi-
ence that read these poets, Smith Foster argues, she employed the popular aesthetics
of her day in order to best reach this audience.
7. The rhythm of the poem may also be traced to a source earlier than that
of Howe. Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a hymn based not only on
the popular song “John Brown’s Body,” but also the African American camp song,
“Say Brothers, Can You Meet Me?,” a song that actually predates “John Brown’s
Body.” Thus Harper may be seen to signify multiply here. She was friends with John
Brown and, according to William Still’s The Underground Railroad, corresponded
with Brown’s wife as Brown and his comrades awaited execution. Further, Still
points out, Harper spent two weeks with Mrs. Brown “at the house of the writer
[Still] while she was awaiting the execution of her husband, and sympathized with
her most deeply” (Still 762).
8. It was again during the Reconstruction period that Harper published
what I see as her most striking work of poetry, Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869). A
book-length narrative poem divided into nine chapters, this work is a sharp depar-
ture from Harper’s earlier compositions. In it, she neglects the form of rhyming
quatrains that had characterized so much of her poetry in favor of a free verse form.
Moses, a Christian archetype who appears in a number of Harper’s works, aided
her in formulating a symbolic system in her poetry, whereby the plight of African
Americans was allegorized through the plight of the Hebrews. Harper’s poetics shine
forcefully in this work. It is, perhaps, the pinnacle of her compositions. Its analysis
remains a project to undertake at another time.
9. Harper referenced Stowe’s work through at least two additional poems
that appeared shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Eva’s Farewell,”
and “To Harriet Beecher Stowe” were directly inspired by Stowe’s novel.
10. See Graham’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper.
Ed. Maryemma Graham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xxxiii–lvii.
11. The late Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes
and develops this term in Poetics of Relation (Trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1997), 5–37.
12. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 33, 12. Readers famil-
iar with Agamben’s text will note the influence of his thought upon this chapter.
13. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art
and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1995), 94.
14. Morrison, “Site of Memory,” 92, 95, 97.
15. Martin Heidegger’s use of this term in “The Origin of the Work of Art”
defines it as a narrative clearing that functions doubly; it is both an opening in the
midst of a textual locus (from which an imaginative, possible world is set forth),
and an illumination of the events of the past. This essay, first delivered in 1935 as
a lecture titled Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, is translated and reprinted in Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001),
15–86.
16. Heidegger, “Origin,” 44.
17. Heidegger, “Origin,” 51–52.
18. I find it useful here to underscore Michel Foucault’s definition of episteme
as a way of referring to the ideologies that shape the perception of knowledge and
the act of knowing in any particular period of history.
19. My use of the term “semiotic” follows the work of Julia Kristeva. Drawing
on the word’s Greek etymology, Kristeva defines it as a distinctive mark or trace
that exists prior to the symbolic, the relational space governed by rules of syntax,
categorization, and structure. The semiotic, through its inclusion in the genotext
(the energies Kristeva sees as bringing a text into being, including the vitality of
the language user’s body), leaves its imprint on the phenotext (Kristeva’s term for
the physical literary work that, in its correspondence to the symbolic, conforms to
the rules of language and categorization). See Revolution in Poetic Language (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 25.
20. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sketches of Southern Life, repr. in Complete
Poems of Frances E. W. Harper, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1988), 117, 118; hereafter cited parenthetically as SL.
21. It is only in this final poem that we learn Chloe’s last name, the use of
which a number of nineteenth-century writers, including William Wells Brown
in his Narrative (1847), emphasize as a significant mark of social recognition and
respect. When Wells Brown takes on the name of his Quaker benefactor in chapter
14 of his autobiography, he purposefully quotes this “good Quaker friend,” who tells
him, “Since thee has got out of slavery, thee has become a man, and men always
have two names.” See The Narrative of William Wells Brown, in Slave Narratives, ed.
William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America,
2000), 420.
22. Luke 2:25–30; esp. 2:25, 2:28–30 (King James Version).
23. We see this concern at work in the short story “The Two Offers,” a tale
of morals Harper published in 1859. The poem “Vashti” (1857), which revises the
Biblical story found in the book of Esther, is equally concerned with contemplation
coupled with moral action. For other instances, see the poem “An Appeal to the
American People” (1871), which calls upon the American people to demonstrate
their democratic, moral sensibilities; “An Appeal to My Country Women” (1894), a
patriotic poem written in the same meter and accent pattern as “The Star-Spangled
Banner” (1814); and “Woman’s Political Future,” a speech given in 1893 at the
World’s Columbian Exposition. Christianity, temperance, family, and human rights
are all themes that Harper forcefully explores in this essay, which is one of her finest.
24. Grant’s tenure was marked by scandal and lavish living. Yet he sup-
ported freedmen’s rights and won passage of the KKK Act of 1871, one of a
number of “Force bills” passed between 1870 and 1875 to protect rights granted
to African Americans by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. W. E. B. Du
Bois discusses these acts in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York:
Atheneum, 1935), 682–84.
25. See Harper’s essay “Christianity,” published in Poems on Miscellaneous Sub-
jects (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1857), 40–44. I discuss this essay fully
in chapter 8 of this study.
26. Many writers construe Harper as a woman from the North. Though she
was, in fact, freeborn, she was born in the state of Maryland, one of the fiercest
states of the Confederacy and the home state of Frederick Douglass. Harper was
indeed a southerner; even her experiences in the northern state of Ohio could
not take her far from slavery’s reach. Harper’s poetic memorialization of Margaret
Garner, whose infanticide in the face of slave catchers has been commemorated and
celebrated in works ranging from Harper’s own poetry to Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning 1988 novel, Beloved, was set on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, a
mere river’s span away from the slave-holding state of Kentucky.
27. This community of free African Americans was established after the
American Revolution. A strong community based largely in religious activism and
attentive to the benefits of education, this free community was one to which Fred-
erick Douglass’s wife, Anna Murray, belonged. Complex labor relations existed in
Baltimore through the Civil War, and it was not uncommon for enslaved and free
blacks to work side by side. Further, the free population increased as the slave
population decreased; that is, the free black population in Baltimore tended to rise
with the manumission of slaves once their period of indentured servitude came
to an end. This shift only exacerbated race relations of the time; it was likely the
impetus behind Maryland’s statute of 1853. See Delano Greenidge-Copprue, “Bal-
timore, Maryland, Slavery in.” Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895:
From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass. Ed. Paul Finkelman. See
also Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave. Ed. David W. Blight. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Douglass writes:
“I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference,
in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city
slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much
better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on
the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to
curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon
the plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his
nonslaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave. Few are willing to
incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master; and above all
things, they would not be known as not giving a slave enough to eat. Every city
slaveholder is anxious to have it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well; and it
is due to them to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to eat. There
are, however, some painful exceptions to this rule” (64–65).
28. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).
29. Agamben argues that there is an “intimacy” to the relation of subject and
consciousness in testimony (Remnants, 146). The intimacy of the two is inseparable.
We might speak of the relation of Harper to Chloe in these terms.
30. See chapter 2, pages 76–83, for a discussion of this concept.
31. Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 10.
32. Heidegger, “Origin,” 35, 43.
33. Agamben, Remnants, 147–48.
34. Agamben, Remnants, 146.
Chapter 5
1. For instance, Robert Bernasconi, in his 2009 essay “ ‘Our Duty to Con-
serve’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context,” argues that Du Bois’s
essay is less a contribution to the debate over the validity of the concept of race,
and more of an intervention in the debate over the impact of racial mixing on
African American political solidarity. He provides a useful rebuttal of the charge
of essentialism leveled against Du Bois by Anthony Appiah, and while our work
shares a similar perspective on Du Bois’s philosophy of history, my study uses that
historicist foundation to erect an argument that draws the metaphorics of “Conser-
vation” into relation with those of Souls. Bernasconi’s essay, which is a testament to
the continued interest in “Conservation” among humanists, appears in SAQ: South
Atlantic Quarterly 108.3 (Summer 2009): 519–540.
2. Moses defines classical black nationalism as an “ideology whose goal
was the creation of an autonomous black nation-state, with definite geographical
boundaries—usually in Africa” (1). He rightly argues that “ ‘The Conservation of
Races’ reveals how concepts of black independence and racial destiny were present
in [Du Bois’s] thinking from the beginning of his career” (228). In an incomplete
memorandum to Paul Hagemans, the consul general of Belgium who was sta-
tioned in Philadelphia during the years Du Bois spent there undertaking sociologi-
cal research that would be published as The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, Du Bois
inquired whether it might be possible for the government of Belgium to work with
the American Negro Academy in determining whether the Congo Free State might
be an appropriate locale for the establishment of a colony of “skilled, intelligent
[American Negro] colonists which the Congo Free State needs” (48). Although Du
Bois would early on contemplate the possibilities that lay in repatriating Americans
of African descent to Africa, he does not propose such in “The Conservation of
Races” either directly or indirectly. Thus the essay itself does not aptly serve as the
example of classical black nationalist thought that Moses intends to demonstrate.
Herbert Aptheker dates Du Bois’s memorandum to Hagemans as 1897, but does
not specify whether the note was ever sent to or received by the consul general.
The memorandum does make clear, however, that some months after the ANA’s
founding, Du Bois did indeed consider such expatriation to be a viable solution for
some, if not in fact all, of America’s Negro population. He advocated the selection
of a “small but steady stream . . . of emigrants who could go to Africa, knowing
the conditions, equipped for meeting them and desiring to work to the credits of
the Congo Free State.” “On Migration to Africa.” 1897. Against Racism: Unpublished
Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: The University
of Massachusetts Press, 1985. 43–49.
3. In her book, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), Silvia Mantiglio writes that muthos denotes “an oratorical performance
that takes place in public. Muthos is speech in action, that is, speech viewed from
the standpoint of the speaker who is seeking to act upon his audience through
a lengthy display of his authority” (65). In his introduction to Logos and Muthos:
Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), William Wians
writes that muthos may be defined as “literary, usually poetic, texts” (1), some of
which may be mythical in nature, that relate demonstrable or even undemonstrable
philosophical truths. In my usage of the term, I intend it to denote both speech
and writing of a conceptual, denotative sort, as is the case in “The Conservation

of Races.” Here, I use this term to underscore Du Bois’s reliance upon the modes
of epic narrative as he presents a complex argument deconstructing the validity of
race as a biological concept.
4. See Gates’s introductory essay in “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–20. Entitled “Writing ‘Race’ and the
Difference it Makes,” it reads, in part: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the
biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction. When we speak of
‘the white race’ or ‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in
biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors” (4).
5. Blumenbach submitted his doctoral thesis, De generis humani varietate
nativa, to the medical faculty at the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1775, “as
the minutemen of Lexington and Concord began the American Revolution. He then
republished the text for general distribution in 1776, as a fateful meeting in Phila-
delphia proclaimed our independence. The coincidence of three great documents
in 1776—Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (on the politics of liberty), Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations (on the economics of individualism), and Blumenbach’s
treatise on racial classification (on the science of human diversity)—records the
social ferment of these decades, and sets the wider context that makes Blumenbach’s
taxonomy, and his decision to call the European race Caucasian, so important for
our history and current concerns” (Gould, 1996, p. 402).
6. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion
of Race.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986, 21–37.
7. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York:
Henry Holt, 1993); Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular
History (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998); Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House:
Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).
8. In fact, this study presumes the articulations of the text itself to be suf-
ficient evidence against the willful misreadings of the sort indelibly marked in the
thought of Anthony Appiah, which I have discussed fully elsewhere. Please see
Rebecka R. Rutledge, “Metaphoric Black Bodies in the Hinterlands of Race; Or,
Towards Deciphering the Du Boisian Concept of Race and Nation in ‘The Con-
servation of Races.’ ” In Race and Ethnicity: Across Time, Space, and Discipline. Ed.
Rodney D. Coates. Boston: Brill, 2004. 331–349.
9. Hans Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975); Mikhail
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
10. On this point, I express my gratitude to Dr. Donald H. Matthews, without
whose dogged pursuance of the connection between Du Bois and Dilthey I would
not have seen fully the importance of a specific concept of “understanding” in the
former’s work.
11. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writ-
er’s Literary Tradition.” In Napier (Ed.) African American Literary Theory: A Reader
(New York: NYU Press): 350.
12. “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), which I have already mentioned,
will be discussed in the following chapter, as it is virtually indistinguishable from
the later form in which it appears in Chapter One of The Souls of Black Folk as “Of
Our Spiritual Strivings.”
13. Parenthetical page references for “Woman’s Political Future” are drawn
from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1st ed. (New York: Norton,
1997), 436–439.
14. Andrew Carnegie, “Value of the World’s Fair to the American People,”
Engineering Magazine 6.4 (1894), 417–422.
15. “The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the Columbian Expo-
sition,” Chicago, 1893 (rprt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
16. Philosophy of History, 1831, 2nd ed. (London: Colonial Press, 1900).
17. One remarkable omission in Hegel’s overview of Africa’s place in world
history is the question of color. Earlier philosophers writing during the time of the
Enlightenment, such as Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, regularly hearkened
to the color of the African’s skin in their conclusion that Africans were not world
historical beings and, thus, could not aspire to national belonging, to the sort of
national “becoming” to which Hegel refers in the passage I cite above. Enlighten-
ment philosophers such as Jefferson, writing in his Notes on the State of Virginia
(1804), was willing to abandon the economic crutch of slavery, but strongly doubted
that blacks would ever “fit in” in America’s landscape due to their “veil of black-
ness,” the essential difference that would forever render them outsiders. An extended
discussion of this question may be found in chapter 3 of this study.
18. Kristeva discusses this point in “Throes of Love: The Field of Metaphor,”
Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987):
267–279.
Chapter 6
1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Review of The Souls of Black Folk. The Independent
vol. 57, Nov. 17, 1904.
2. Hebrew nationalism holds a special place in the history of nationalist
thought. Hans Kohn writes in Nationalism: Its Meaning and Its History (1965) that
the concept of modern nationalism originated in three essential tenets espoused by
the Hebrews: “the idea of the chosen people; the emphasis on a common stock
of memory of the past and hopes for the future; and finally national messianism”
(11). John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, editors of Black National-
ism in America (1970), point out that black religious nationalism, a close relative
of cultural nationalism, not only entails the establishment and administration of
churches by blacks, for blacks; it may also claim that Jesus and God are Black, and
extend itself into messianism with the assertion that African Americans are the
chosen people (xxvii).
3. Du Bois does credit Native Americans with developing folklore in story,
but reserves the creation of American song for African Americans. His reasoning
behind this is less than clear. Perhaps due to the language barrier, or the perceived
insular nature of American Indian culture, the contributions of Native Americans
to American song culture were less apparent to him, even though Native Americans
attended historically black colleges such as Hampton Institute.
4. I am thinking here of the relation between the slaves’ embodiment—their
blackness—and the sort of Western phenomenology (which descends from Plato’s
notions of “the good” and moral understanding) wherein blackness is theorized as
absence, ahistorical, comedic, ugly, unknowing, and unknowable. See Plato’s Republic,
Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, and Hegel’s The
Philosophy of History.
5. See Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); and Donald H. Matthews: Honoring the
Ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
6. A sampling of work by these authors includes Erskine Peters’ Lyrics of
the Afro-American Spiritual: A Documentary Collection (Westwood, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1993) and “The Poetics of the Afro-American Spiritual” in Black American
Literature Forum (23.3 Autumn 1989): 559–578; Jon Michael Spencer’s Protest and
Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); and Ster-
ling Brown’s “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs”
in Phylon (14.1, 1st Qtr, 1953): 45–61. Alain Locke has written interestingly but
somewhat conservatively on “The Negro Spirituals” in his seminal 1925 anthology
The New Negro. In his 1928 pamphlet, A Decade of Negro Self-Expression ( John F.
Slater Fund Occasional Papers, No. 26), Locke described The Souls of Black Folk as
a “classic of intimate spiritual interpretation of the Negro.”
7. W. K. McNeil. Introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, p. 9.
8. Du Bois’s underscoring of mourning here recalls for me Fred Moten’s
work on mourning (in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition),
and its relation to the primal scream, such as that which is rendered by Frederick
Douglass’s Aunt Hester and described in his Narrative. The distinction between
sound and language at work there seems to have been effaced here, though the
sounds that the slaves made find their interpretation in a world system beyond the
one in which they lived. It seems quite logical to construct an empiricism of an
imagined world when the phenomenological world that surrounds one is—day after
day—alienating and horrific.
9. Canto II, lines 673–676.
10. Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave. In Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia
Griffiths. Boston: John P. Jewett and Co, 1853. 174–239. <http://docsouth.unc.edu/
neh/douglass1853/douglass1853.html>
11. Wright seems to have had a penchant for ironically naming institutions he
founded after conservative and even racist white organizations. In addition to the States
Rights Sentinel, whose name would undoubtedly evoke images of southern segregation-
ists, he founded in Philadelphia, upon retiring from the presidency of Georgia State
Industrial College, the Citizens and Southern Bank, which was named after a bank in
Georgia where his daughter had been disparaged. The Booker T. Washington Papers, 115.
12. In another version of the poem, of which there are a number, Whittier
wrote, “Massa, tell ’em we’re rising.”
13. Wright’s support of Washington’s policies went only so far, however. He
fell out of favor with Georgia State Industrial College trustees when he decided to
include Classics among the curricular offerings there. He and Washington nonethe-
less maintained good relations.
14. See Genesis, ch 10.
15. For an extended discussion of Du Bois’s views on sociology at the turn
of the century, please see Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, “Cultural Artifacts and the
Narrative of History: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exhibiting of Culture at the 1900
Paris Exposition Universelle” (Modern Fiction Studies 51.4 [2005]). See also W. E.
B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community. Ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D.
Driver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
16. Such is most visible in the final stanza of “The Brute,” where Moody
writes:
Then, perhaps, at the last day,

They will whistle him [the Brute] away,
Lay a hand upon his muzzle in the face of God, and say:
“Honor, Lord, the Thing we tamed!
Let him not be scourged or blamed.
Even through his wrath and fierceness was thy fierce wroth world
reclaimed!
Honor Thou thy servant’s servant; let thy justice now be shown.”
Then the Lord will heed their saying, and the Brute come to his
own,
‘Twixt the Lion and the Eagle, by the arm-post of the throne.
17. The most focused commentary by Du Bois on the Exposition appears

in “The American Negro at Paris” (The American Monthly Review of Reviews. Nov.
1900: 575–77). A more concise reflection on the Paris Exhibit is found in The
Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (np: International Publishers, 1968), p. 220–221.
18. Du Bois writes in Darkwater that he was in attendance at the Crystal Pal-
ace for “one of the earliest renditions of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” (194), but writes
mistakenly in The Autobiography that he attended the first rendition of Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast at the Crystal Palace during his time in London with the Coleridge-
Taylors (219). Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was completed and delivered to the pub-
lisher Novello in the spring of 1898 and was first performed at the Royal College
of Music on November 11 of that year. The complete Hiawatha trilogy, including
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, actually premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on March
22, 1900, a few months before Du Bois arrived in Europe. Du Bois likely attended
a performance of either the entire suite or a portion of it during the summer of
1900. The Crystal Palace performance drew high critical praise as well as a strong
appreciative reaction from the audience. See Avril Coleridge-Taylor, The Heritage of
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (London: Dennis Dobson, 1979), p. 40; Geoffrey Self, The
Hiawatha Man: The Life and Work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Hants, England: Scolar
Press, 1995), 70–72; “Mr. S. Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Hiawatha.’ ” The Musical Times and
Singing Class Circular 41.686 (April 1, 1900): 246–247.
19. Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Passe Rose (London, Sampson Low, Marston,
Searle, & Rivington), 1889.
20. William Sharp authored a biography of Robert Browning, first published
in 1890, the year following Browning’s death. He writes there: “Though there are
plausible grounds for the assumption, I can find nothing to substantiate the com-
mon assertion that, immediately or remotely, his people were Jews. As to Browning’s
physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him
were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality,
in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his superficial expansiveness
and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic
race for whom he has so often of late been claimed. What however is more to the
point is that neither to curious acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to
Jews nor Gentiles, did he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and
sprung of a Puritan stock” (Life of Robert Browning [London: Walter Scott, 1897],
pp. 15–16). Sharp would have been slow to believe that, as Du Bois asserted often,
Browning was partly of African origin.
21. See Mrs. William A. Sharp, “Bibliographic Note.” Poems and Dramas by
Fiona Macleod (William Sharp) (New York: Duffield and Co., 1911): 454.
22. Please see “The Religion of the American Negro” in New World: A Quar-
terly Review of Religion, Ethics, and Theology 9.36 (December 1900): 614–625.
23. Du Bois’s letters to his wife Nina, which he would have written during
this period and which might have chronicled some of his leisure activities that
summer, have not survived, according to David Levering Lewis (Biography of a Race,
247). And, as I have mentioned, his writings on his time in Paris and London are
few outside of his brief mentions of the Paris Exhibit, the London Conference, and
his outing with the Coleridge-Taylors.
24. Du Bois would also focus upon African American religion as the central
theme of the 1903 Atlanta University Conference.
25. As I discuss in chapter 5, such anarchy was obvious not only in the
assassination of William McKinley at the 1901 Pan-American exposition in Buffalo,
NY, for example, but also in the rampant lynching that tainted America’s social
atmosphere in the 1890s and the early twentieth century.
26. Please see The Negro Problem (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003).
27. See Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Athenum, 1992).
28. See John 1: 20–21. Du Bois will reference John the Baptist again in
chapter 13 of Souls, “Of the Coming of John.”
29. Mark 9:4
30. Quoted in Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and
British Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 184. Homans points
out that Idylls of the King was written as an encomium to the recently deceased
and beloved husband of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and reports that the Queen
found great solace in the verse of Tennyson, her poet laureate. She was likewise
a great admirer, as her husband had been before his passing, of the poem “In
Memoriam, A.H.H.,” which had been penned in 1850. This poem is quoted—quite
often—by Du Bois throughout his oeuvre.
31. For an excellent discussion of such sedimentation in Du Bois’s, please see
Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Economy of Desedimentation: W. E. B. Du Bois
and the Discourses of the Negro” Callaloo 19.1 (Winter 1996): 78–93.
32. See Matthew 3: 13–17.
33. The libretto originally reads : Treulich gefürht, ziehet dahin” (“Faithfully
led, move along”).
Chapter 7
1. See, for instance, Joyce Ann Joyce, Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1986); Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Sub-
ject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);
and Eugene E. Miller, Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright ( Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1990). Joyce sees an “ideological relationship” (13)
between the naturalism and existentialism that generally serve as interpretive lenses for
much of Wright’s fiction, and tragedy, which she feels “extends the limits of existen-
tialism” (14). Seeing Wright, and rightly, I think, as preeminently concerned with the
human and human expression, Joyce argues that Wright’s art of tragedy “not only finds
meaning in human existence but also celebrates it” (14). Yet Joyce concerns herself
with the Western traditions of tragedy in ways that diverge sharply from my intent;
while she purports to read Wright primarily through Aristotelian notions of tragedy,
feeling that this is the most advantageous approach to Wright’s work, I examine
the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenology (that is, ways and categories of
perceiving and knowing as aspects of consciousness or being) that undergird Wright’s
art of metaphor. JanMohamed’s study addresses the “ways in which ‘subjectivities’ are
bound and hence formed by the threat of death” (4) and, indeed, as he draws upon
the notion of “social death” promulgated by Orlando Patterson (in Slavery and Social
Death [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), he somewhat problematically
uses the terms “slave and black interchangeably to refer to the black man or woman
living in the South between 1900 and the 1950s as well as to Wright’s characters” (5).
Wright was, as many critics have noted, preoccupied with the depiction of death, yet
JanMohamed argues that many of Wright’s critics, including Paul Gilroy, “overlook the
agency of death in Wright’s work” (11). For JanMohamed, the “ ‘willing acceptance of
death’ functions as the most viable form of liberation in the fiction of Wright” (22).
I see the trope of death to be at the center of the novella’s concerns, yet,
surprisingly, neither of these critics focuses to any extent on The Man Who Lived
Underground. Joyce, though her book is titled Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy, does
not focus on Wright’s oeuvre at large, but solely upon Native Son. No mention is
made of Underground, nor is any but passing mention made of Wright’s other works
of long fiction. JanMohamed, who moves with chronological acuity through Wright’s
major works (from Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) to The Long Dream (1958)), gives no
critical attention whatsoever to the novella, though it would seem quite germane to
the thrust of his book (he explains this omission briefly in a footnote, p. 303ff15).
Miller’s Voice of a Native Son remains focused on Wright’s poetics (gleaned through
an examination of Wright’s published and unpublished manuscripts) throughout its
pages. Drawing upon Wright’s own words, Miller underscores the ways in which
Wright sought to push art “ ‘beyond mere contemplation. In short its expression
must become an objective act, having immediacy as its aim’ ” (xviii). This sort of
understanding of Wright’s poetics is central to reading The Man Who Lived Under-
ground, and accords with my analysis of the novella, since I view Wright as moving
the reader toward a sense of moral outrage at the murder of his protagonist, an
outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader
toward constructive social action. However, Miller views guilt as the unifying “sym-
bol” of Underground, a reading I cannot support firstly because guilt itself cannot
be a symbol, though it may be a major theme that is symbolized in various ways.
Further, I see the novella proposing a number of critical and conceptual metaphors
(existentialist guilt among them) that emerge from the symbolic opposition of chaos
and cosmos, as I argue here. Though his method is quite different from mine, Hous-
ton Baker’s reading of the novella in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), which insists upon a “tropology” of the
“black (w)hole,” and thus a metaphorics of consciousness, echoes my intention here.
2. Indeed, in the past decade, The Man Who Lived Underground seems to
have fallen out of critical favor: as I completed this study, my review of current
bibliographies on Wright revealed very few analyses of the novella published during
the first decade of this century. This is a serious oversight in Wright scholarship,
one I attempt to ameliorate through this contribution. Certainly in light of Wright’s
centennial, which was celebrated in 2008, additional studies of this text will emerge.
3. See, for instance, Robert Bone’s early study, Richard Wright (Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press, 1969), which is exemplary in this regard. Bone argues
that Underground is one of three enduring texts by Wright (the others are Native Son
[1940] and Black Boy [1945]) that will lead the reader to a discovery of “the central
thrust of Wright’s imagination” (14). Yet Bone’s perspective on the pessimism in
Wright’s work is clear. As he concludes, “Wright’s subterranean world is a symbol of
the Negro’s social marginality. Thrust from the upperworld by the racial exclusiveness
of whites, he is forced to lead an underground existence. Wright was groping for a
spatial metaphor that would render the Negro’s ambiguous relationship to Western
culture. In Native Son, seeking to express the same reality, he hit upon the metaphor
of No Man’s Land. It conjures up a bleak and sterile landscape in which a hapless
soldier crouches, in constant danger of annihilation by enemy or friend” (26). In Bone’s
reading, the Negro, and by extension the reader, is left without sanctuary or reprieve.
4. My use of the term “ek-static” draws upon readings in both Heidegger
and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre adapts Heidegger’s concept of “ek-static temporality”
to refer to the quality (rather than the quantity) of “lived” time. The emphasis here
would be upon the situational and existential conditions faced by the slave. Also of
concern would be the care for others exhibited in the Spirituals, as well as action
described and prescribed in their lyrics.
5. Wright’s idea that the blues were an urban form of the Spirituals—
expressed in an introduction to Southern Exposure (a three-album recording of folk
songs by Josh White)—certainly accords with the perspective on this point that most
musicologists who study the subject embrace. It is striking that though Wright calls
the blues the “spirituals of the city” (qtd. in Fabre, Unfinished Quest 238), he does
not draw upon the blues in the urban setting of Underground.
6. I am using “sublimation” in the psychoanalytic sense of this term, such
that cathexes that might be seen as the motility behind black folk expression such
as Spirituals and “dialect poetry” would be redirected towards other more “socially
acceptable” avenues of affect and utterance. Du Bois might characterize such cathex-
es as emanating from an instinct to live and thrive, requiring no such redirection;
Wright might seem them as coming from the death drive, demanding their own
transcendence. Though he does not give pointed attention to The Man Who Lived
Underground, Abdul JanMohamed explores at length the poetics of what he calls
the “death-bound-subject” which, he argues, is central to the “teleological structure
of [Wright’s] work.” See JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject, 2. These points
merit further discussion, especially given Wright’s deep investment in psychiatry and
Freudian psychoanalysis, but I do not have space to pursue them here.
7. See Johnson’s Preface to the Book of American Negro Poetry (1922); I
discuss this preface and Johnson’s perspective below.
8. “Moral” is used here to underscore the morality that was expounded as
a central aspect of the concept of freedom in eighteenth and nineteenth century
continental philosophy.
9. I discuss “Criteria of Negro Art” more fully in my essay, “The Anatomy of
a Symbol: Reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess: A Romance,” in CR: The New
Centennial Review. Special issue, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another
World.” Vol 6 no 3 (Winter 2006). There as here, I investigate Du Bois’s poetics
and theory of literature as stated in “Criteria,” and evaluate his ability to achieve
his own criteria in Dark Princess.
10. Inspired by the New Critics I. A. Richards, author of many books, including
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and T. S. Eliot, renowned poet and critic who
lectured on metaphysical poetry, Leavis maintained that cultural analysis and critique
should grow out of close readings of cultural artifacts emanating from the folk. He
would write in Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933):
What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture
it embodied. Folk song, folk dances, Cotswald cottages, and handicraft
products are signs and expressions of something more; an art of life,
a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of
intercourse, and a responsive adjustment growing out of immemorial
experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year. (1–2)
11. Of course, a number of scholars have argued that the conclusion of the
Harlem Renaissance was marked by the 1929 crash of the stock market and the
subsequent drying up of philanthropic support for the literary arts in Harlem and
elsewhere. Yet just as many scholars regularly include Their Eyes Were Watching God
on undergraduate and graduate syllabi for courses on the Harlem Renaissance. Any
study of this period would be incomplete without consideration of this second novel
by Hurston, which most critics consider her finest work of long fiction. I have not
included Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) in my discussion
here because for all of Hurston’s indispensable analyses of Negro speech and cultural
aesthetics—such as the aesthetics of private domestic spaces among the folk, danc-
ing, bodily styling, and so forth—she does not discuss literature, as such. This is a
striking and, one must assume, purposeful omission on Hurston’s part. A treatment
of “Characteristics” appears in chapter 2.
12. This is my reading of Wright’s positionality, but as my colleague John
Charles reminds me, Wright’s strategy as I describe it here resonates well with
William James’s version of pragmatism. Wright was a devoted reader of James, and
quoted him in his introduction to Black Metropolis as philosophical support for his
own feelings and experience.
13. Two excerpts from the final section of the novella—the section that
appears in Eight Men (1961) and that was also published in Cross Section—appeared
in 1942 in the magazine Accents (Spring 1942 pp. 170–176), according to Michel
Fabre (Unfinished Quest 242). The Man Who Lived Underground went through a
number of versions, and began as a 150-page manuscript that Wright gradually
trimmed down to suit the interests of publishers. The third section of the novella
was published as a short story in Cross Section by Seaver (who had tried to help
Wright publish the full text), and is the version most widely read today. It is to this
version that my reading refers, and it has become customary for scholars to refer to
this short version as a novella. I continue that convention here. For readings that
reference earlier versions, see Fabre (239–243) and Miller (95–124).
14. See, for instance, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1994), in which Deleuze upholds what he sees as Nietzsche’s rejec-
tion of the dialectical opposition between chaos and cosmos, embracing instead a
“chaosmos” (299).
15. Here I am thinking of the Prologue to Ellison’s Invisible Man, where
the protagonist, after having been slipped “a reefer,” which he sat enjoying in his
underground hole, slips “into the breaks” of the “swift and imperceptible flowing of
time” he hears “vaguely” in Louis Armstrong’s music. Armstrong’s music “demanded
action,” the narrator tells us, “the kind of which I was incapable, and yet had I
lingered there beneath the surface I might have attempted to act” (8; 12). Ellison
comments directly on Wright’s underground story and speaks to the subversive
potential provided by such heterotopic, chaotic spaces. The spaces are formative for
both main characters: Daniels’ unorthodox artistic production and the invisible man’s
memoir alike prepare each “to emerge,” as Ellison puts it.
16. The eighteenth-century philosophes foresaw the idea of the European Union
in their vision of a European internationalism, which was fostered by the rise of the
nation-state as feudal and religious institutions began to decline. Jean-Jacques Rous-

seau went so far as to envision a world federation (see his “Judgment on Saint-Pierre’s
Project for Perpetual Peace” in The Nationalism Reader [1995]). The philosophy of
Immanuel Kant is especially instructive in this regard, as he theorizes the foundations
for a new international commerce that was peaking along with the transatlantic slave
trade. In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant developed a perspective that placed
newly emerging national entities into relation with a burgeoning international com-
munity. On the question of the commerce that would necessarily arise among them,
Kant proposed the term “cosmopolitan” as an apt descriptor: “Thus all nations are
originally members of a community of the land. . . . It is a community of reciprocal
action (commercium). . . . Each may offer to have commerce with the rest, and they all
have a right to make such overtures without being treated by foreigners as enemies.
This right, in so far as it affords the prospect that all nations may unite for the purpose
of creating certain universal laws to regulate the intercourse they may have with one
another, may be termed cosmopolitan (ins cosmopoliticum)” (44).
17. Romans 6:23 reads, “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is
eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Writing to the faithful in an effort to
exhort their rejection of sin and embrace of the salvation of Christ, Paul works to
convince them that even as they were baptized in the name of Christ, they were
baptized into Christ’s death as much as into his salvation. In the narratives of the
New Testament, the sacrificial figure of Christ is essential to salvation, making guilt,
sin, and death the nucleus of innocence, purity, and rebirth. In drawing upon this
striking metaphor, Wright conveys to his reader the absolute necessity of the artist,
whose sermon of enlightenment might bring about his own death, but through
whose death the people might be lifted up. All of this Wright does by hearkening
to the folk wisdom familiar to his African American readers, even though his aim
is the surpassing of such religious dogma.
Chapter 8
1. Parenthetical page references are drawn from Invisible Man (New York:
Quality Paperback Book Club [Book-of-the-Month Club], 1994); hereafter refer-
enced by page number parenthetically as Invisible Man.
2. Juneteenth gains only scant notice from Ellison’s two major biographers,
Lawrence Jackson and Arnold Rampersad. Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of
Genius (2002) mentions the novel only in its preface (ix), and, in fact, Jackson’s
treatment of Ellison’s life stops with the publication of Invisible Man. Arnold Ramp-
ersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2007) chronicles
Ellison’s life from his childhood to the very day of his death, briefly mentioning not
the publication of Juneteenth the novel, but “Juneteenth” the story, which appeared
in 1965 (422). John S. Wright aptly sums up the feeling of many critics, including
the present author, toward Juneteenth when he refers to its publication as the “vexed
matter of Ellison’s unfinished novel  .  .  .  published  .  .  .  at Fanny Ellison’s request and
with John Callahan’s editorial existence” (Shadowing Ralph Ellison [ Jackson: Univer-
sity of Mississippi Press, 2006], 8). Juneteenth attests at various moments to Ellison’s
continued brilliance as a writer, but does not cohere as a novel. It is, rather, a set
of fragments drawn from Ellison’s later work, and should by most critical accounts
be approached in this manner. Three Days before the Shooting (New York: Random
House, 2011) seeks to provide avid readers and scholars of Ellison’s fiction with
a more complete portrait of his narrative vision, method, and form by gathering
a good portion of the fragments of Ellison’s unfinished novel, though it does not
pretend to present a completed work.
3. Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Dissent 10 (Autumn, 1963).
4. Though Wright is credited with introducing Ellison to communism in
the mid 1930s, Wright’s most forthright statement on his ultimate rejection of
communism is found in the essay “I Tried to be a Communist,” which appeared in
the August–September 1944 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
5. Please see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Referring to Lacanian
psychoanalysis, he writes: “I’m after a way of rethinking the relation between the
mirror stage and the fascinum/baraka of the gaze, to think the gaze as something
other than necessarily maleficent, but not by way of a simple reversal or inclusion
within the agencies of looking; rather within another formulation of the sensual,
within a holoesthetic nonexclusionarity that improvises the gaze by way of sound,
the horn, that accompanies the blessing, that has effects that Lacan cannot anticipate
in part because of his ocularcentrism, because of the way his attention to language
is always through an implicit and powerful visualization of the sign [. . .]” (183).
For Moten, the prologue of Invisible Man “would set the specifically musical condi-
tions for a possible redetermination of the ocular-ethical metaphysics of race and
the materiality of the structure and æffects of that metaphysics” (68). While Moten
focuses upon the sonic aspects of Ellison’s writing that he rightly feels are capable of
redirecting the metaphysics of race, my focus is upon the metaphorical discourse that
Ellison crafts in response to Western metaphysics, a discourse that he draws from
African American vernacular speech and thought, and that he brings to bear upon
the metaphysics of Western bio-politics in an analogous redeterminative gesture.
6. See, for example, “Society, Morality, and the Novel” (1957), and “The
Novel as a Function of American Democracy” (1967).
7. Of course, this phrase resonates with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s use of
it in his many speeches and writings. Many scholars attribute its early usage to W.
E. B. Du Bois’s Harvard philosophy professor, Josiah Royce. As it was espoused by
King through his readings in the Christian realist philosophy of Richard Niebuhr,
among others, the beloved community was conceived as the “subsequent transfor-
mation of the social landscape [through] love (agape) and directed by the Creator
with integration as its final goal” (Richard W. Wills, Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Image of God [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]: 158).
8. CR: The New Centennial Review 6.3 (Winter 2006): 7–28. This essay is
discussed at length in chapter 2 of the present volume.
9. See “A Critical Look at Ellison’s Fiction and at Social and Literary Criti-
cism by and about the Author.” Black World 20.2 (December 1970): 53–59, 81–97.
10. See Baker’s “A Forgotten Prototype: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man and Invisible Man,” in Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), 17–32.
11. Nicole Waligora-Davis, “Riotous Discontent: Ralph Ellison’s ‘Birth of a
Nation,’ ” in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50.2 (Summer 2004), 386.
12. Dorothy E. Roberts, “The Meaning of Blacks’ Fidelity to the Constitution”
in Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies, ed. William N. Eskridge and
Sanford Levinson (New York: New York University Press, 1998): 227.
13. Douglass’s early anti-constitutional stance is conveyed in his article, “The
Constitution and Slavery” in The North Star 2.12 (March 16, 1849): 2. He explains
his disunionist perspective with vigor and conviction: “All attempts to explain [the
Constitution] in the light of heaven must fail. It is human, and must be explained
in the light of those maxims and principles which human beings have laid down
as guides to the understanding of all written instruments, covenants, contracts and
agreements, emanating from human beings, and to which human beings are parties,
both on the first and second part. It is in such a light that we propose to examine
the Constitution; and in this light we hold it to be a most cunningly-devised and
wicked compact, demanding the most constant and earnest efforts of the friends of
righteous freedom for its complete overthrow. It was ‘conceived in sin, and shapen
in iniquity.’ But this will be called mere declamation, and assertion—mere ‘heat
without light’—sound and fury signify nothing.—Have it so. Let us then argue the
question with all the coolness and clearness of which an unlearned fugitive slave,
smarting under the wrongs inflicted by this unholy Union, is capable. We cannot
talk ‘lawyer like’ about law—about its emanating from the bosom of God!—about
government, and of its seat in the great heart of the Almighty!—nor can we, in
connection with such an ugly matter-of-fact looking thing as the United States
Constitution, bring ourselves to split hairs about the alleged rule of interpretation,
which declares that an ‘act of the Legislature may be set aside when it contravenes
natural justice.’ We have to do with facts, rather than theory. The Constitution is
not an abstraction. It is a living, breathing fact, exerting a mighty power over the
nation of which it is the bond of Union. . . . Slaveholders took a large share in
making it. It was made in view of the existence of slavery, and in a manner well
calculated to aid and strengthen that heaven-daring crime.”
By the time of My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; New York: Library of
America, 1994), Douglass would moderate this stance. To his mind, as he had writ-
ten in 1849, such an about face was not self-contradiction, but an intellectual course
dictated by his steadfast principle of honesty and truth. In “The Constitution and
Slavery,” Douglass had written that the “only truly consistent man is he who will,
for the sake of being right today, contradict what he said wrong yesterday.” To this
end, it seems, he opined in 1855: “My new circumstances compelled me to re-think
the whole subject, and to study, with some care, not only the just and proper rules
of legal interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of
civil government, and also the relations which human beings sustain to it. By such a
course of thought and reading, I was conducted to the conclusion that the constitu-
tion [sic] of the United States . . . could not well have been designed at the same
time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery; especially
as not one word can be found in the constitution to authorize such a belief. Then,
again, if the declared purposes of an instrument are to govern the meaning of all
its parts and details, as they clearly should, the constitution of our country is our
warrant for the abolition of slavery in every state in the American union” (392–393).
14. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
15. Here I borrow from the title of Ellison’s well-known 1948 essay, “Harlem
is Nowhere,” published in Shadow and Act (1964): 294–302.
16. Studies that recognize this point include, for instance, Helen Vendler’s
Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2006); Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas:
Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977, trans. 1993); and the aforementioned
work by Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
as well as that of Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning
in Language (1975; trans. 1977). Ricoeur, of course, upholds a separation between
poetic metaphors and philosophical metaphors, although he allows that significant
conceptual metaphors that appear in creative works can create and introduce new
meanings in society.
17. Ellison discusses the importance of ritual to American culture and society
in many of the essays included in Shadow and Act (1964), as well a number of those
appearing in Going to the Territory (1984).
18. Abdul JanMohammed has put forward a particularly compelling read-
ing of Wright’s poetics in this regard in The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s
Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
19. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” Shadow
and Act, 35.
20. As Claudia Tate has pointed out in “Notes on the Invisible Woman in
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook, ed. John
F. Callahan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]: 253–66), the novel’s Mary
Rambo is an underdeveloped character when compared with her fuller portrayal in
the short story “Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar,” published in Soon, One
Morning: New Writing by American Negros, 1940–1962 (New York: Knopf, 1963).
“Out of the Hospital” was excised from the final version of Invisible Man.
21. Even Matty Lou, the daughter Trueblood rapes in his sleep, and True-
blood’s wife, Kate, are presented as maternal figures. Each woman—impregnated
alike by Trueblood—is far along in her pregnancy when the invisible man and Mr.
Norton encounter them.
22. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987.
23. While Derrida (in Positions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981]:
75, 106n39) has critiqued the concept of the chora for what he sees as its ontological
essence, Kristeva’s description of the chora seems to have anticipated such a critique.
Disallowing the chora any consistent stasis, she adapts it from Plato’s Timaeus “to
denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by
movements and their ephemeral states” (2170). For her, the concept of chora can be
deployed as one that “precedes” the “evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporal-
ity” so necessary to the ontological, and so should be differentiated from “a disposition
that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial
intuition, and gives rise to a geometry” (2170). The chora as Kristeva describes it, may
lend itself to a concept of mapping or a topology of the psyche and of discourse, “if
necessary.” Yet it is neither a sign nor a signifier, but a propadeutic to the very pos-
sibility of signification, metaphorization, and specularity. “Neither model nor copy,
the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous
only to vocal or kinetic rhythm” (2170). “Revolution in Poetic Language” in The
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001): 2169–2179.
24. These two essays, along with an excerpt of the 1923 piece The Ego and
the Id, are reprinted in The Freud Reader (ed. Peter Gay, New York: Norton, 1989).
Each of these pieces is pertinent to Ellison’s conception of the invisible and the
motility of the repressed. Freud’s essay on repression was published in the same year
as his essay “The Unconscious,” which specified that the repressed is a mobile part
of the unconscious. It is in this essay, with which Ellison also seems familiar, that
Freud describes the topography and dynamics of repression.
25. Quoted in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1977):
97. See the chapter entitled “The Constituting Metaphor of the Unconscious,” in
which Lemaire takes exception with a number of Laplanche and Leclaire’s inter-
pretations of Lacan’s theory where metaphor is concerned. Lemaire’s correction was
sanctioned by Lacan, who wrote the preface to her study. A number of Lacan’s ideas
on repression, metaphoricity, and love are found his The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI (New York: Norton, 1988),
where Lacan also responds to Laplanche and Leclaire’s misreading of his formula
of metaphor (248–53), though he points out that the importance of their work in
this regard is the underscoring of metaphor as an effect of secondary repression,
rather than primary repression.
26. Freud wrote three papers focusing on the role of love in psychoanalysis,
specifically in the clinical context and (drawing upon the comments Freud makes
in the essay “Observations on Transference-Love”) from the perspective of the ana-
lyst rather than the analysand. He published these papers in 1918 under the title
Contributions to the Psychology of Love (New York: Penguin, 2007) in Series IV of
his papers on neuroses. Freud sees himself as taking from the realm of poetry and
fiction the authority to describe, define, and analyze “the necessary conditions for
loving” (387). Freud felt that creative writers were not fully qualified to define love,
for while they take great pains to depict love’s unfolding in “the hidden impulses
in the minds of other people” and exemplify “the courage to let [their] own uncon-
scious speak,” they nevertheless “are under the necessity to produce intellectual and
aesthetic pleasure, as well as certain emotional effects.” Thus, they are quite unable,
he argues, “to reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but must isolate portions of
it, removing disturbing associations, tone down the whole and fill in what is missing.
These are the privileges of what is known as ‘poetic license’ ” (387). Since writers
“can show only slight interest in the origin and development of the mental states
which they portray in their completed form,” it is left to science to take up the
slack, Freud argues. “These observations will, it may be hoped, serve to justify us in
extending a strictly scientific treatment to the field of human love. Science is, after
all, the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental
activity is capable” (387–88). Of course, Freud seems a bit hasty here in vaunting
the methodology of “science” over that of humanism, but the idea that he insists
upon a science of love without first defining the object of his study (love itself )
must be duly noted. And his comments are limited to the “abnormal” love expressed
by neurotics, a point not unrelated to Ellison’s depictions of love in Invisible Man.
Interestingly in Freud’s text as in Ellison’s, the focus is upon “masculine love” and
its preconditions, and he generally analyzes love in terms of sexuality rather than
emotional or moral commitment.
27. Invisible Man, 122.
28. Ibid., 228.
29. See Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 172–199.
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Index
Academy. See American Negro Richard Wright and, 287, 309, 319,
Academy 386n1
Acts of the Apostles, 91, 99, 128, 129, slave narrative and, 60
135, 375n29 allegory
Addison, Joseph, 96, 112–14, 142, Frederic Jameson on, 115
374n18 and The Souls of Black Folk (Du
aesthetic tradition, African American, Bois), 224, 241, 251, 279
60, 292 Allegory of the Cave (Plato), 299
aesthetics, 23, 36, 46, 50, 145–46, American Festival of Negro Arts
376n6. See also specific topics (AFNA), 326
Black Aesthetic, 57–58, 325, 326, American Negro Academy (ANA),
328 172, 178, 180, 183, 186, 194,
Black Arts, 159 200–201, 203, 204, 207, 240, 292,
Africa 380n2
Hegel on, 61, 75, 197–99, 202, analogy, 17, 18, 26, 316. See also
382n17 metaphor(s)
slavery in, 198–99 Anderson, Benedict, 205, 207
African Blood Brotherhood, 329 aphasia, 40–41
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect Appiah, K. Anthony, 178–79, 204, 380
(Turner), 364n14 Aptheker, Herbert, 65, 325–26, 328,
“Afro-Americanitude,” 210 380n2
Agamben, Giorgio, 143, 157–58, 166, Aristotle
169, 309, 377n12, 379n29 Alexander Pope and, 364n15
agape, 338, 342, 345, 346, 391n7 Clive Cazeaux and, 16
agency on democracy, 330
and action in African American Homer and, 17, 25, 364n15
philosophy, 73, 74 on metaphor, 12, 16–21, 23, 25, 26,
Du Bois and, 75, 80, 173, 247, 267, 48–49, 116, 218, 279, 286
279 on nature, 278–79
embodied, 33, 81 Paul Ricoeur on, 48–49
Hortense Spillers and, 80, 81, 173 Poetics, 17, 18, 23, 25, 48, 49, 175,
Olaudah Equiano and, 89, 145 286
407
408 Index
Aristotle (continued) navigating the undulating waters of,

poetry and, 25, 364n15 278–80
on rhetoric, 48–49. See also The in the occasion of discourse, 179–85
Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle terminology, 9
simile and, 17, 18, 20, 364n18 Being and Race ( Johnson), 47–48, 51,
on technê, 48, 49 53
Armstrong, Louis, 337 Being-in-the-world, 7–11, 36, 74, 90,
Arthur, King, 263, 272–75. See also 283, 306, 317
Idylls of the King Bellamy, Edward, 200
Aunt Chloe poems/Aunt Chloe cycle, Benezet, Anthony, 116, 119, 125
144–50, 153–56, 159–71, 196, 289 Bhabha, Homi, 101, 361n2
Christianity and, 289 Bible, 91–93, 98–101, 116–25, 129,
metaphor, black being, and Aunt 134, 135, 138–42, 163, 165, 237,
Chloe’s structure of poetic 249–51, 254, 270–73, 278, 375n33,
memory, 156–69 390n17. See also Christianity;
narrative structure, 158, 159 Equiano, Olaudah; Isaiah; Paul
voting and, 196 the Apostle; Word of God; specific
Austin, J. L., 181–82 books
autobiography. See also specific Frances Harper and, 288–89
autobiographies terminology, 139, 237, 375n27
the historical, metaphorical effect of, veils and the, 136, 137, 248, 250,
116 251
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The Biblical discourse, 95, 96, 98, 122,
( Johnson), 21–22, 28, 290, 327–28 142
Biblical metaphors, 90, 92, 95, 96,
Baker, Houston A., Jr., 37, 79, 327, 100–101, 121, 141, 142, 150,
339, 349, 350, 363n12, 387n1 156, 163, 221, 250. See also under
Baker, Ray Stannard, 202 Equiano, Olaudah
Bakieva, Gulnara, 77 bio-political metaphors, 105, 117
baptism, 297 Black Aesthetic/Black Arts aesthetics.
of blacks, 374n24 See aesthetics
Jesus Christ and, 256, 276, 390n17 black being. See also being; specific topics
metaphors of, 256, 276, 297, 304 vs. black identity, 6–7
Olaudah Equiano’s, 119, 125 Du Bois, black culture, and the
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 256–59, contemporaneity of, 76–86
277 and the meaning of being black,
Barthes, Roland, 97–98 204, 206–7, 215. See also Souls of
Beaufret, Jean, 10, 362n5 Black Folk
Beckett, Samuel, 24 a philosophy of ordinary, 23–52
being. See also black being; specific topics poetics of, 1–12
defined, 9, 36 crafting a, 74–76
metaphors of, 8–9, 12, 89, 91, a question of, 7–12
96, 105–6, 160, 179. See also black cultural nationalists, 324–25. See
metaphor(s): being and also black nationalists
Index 409
black experience, 57 Spirituals and, 20, 284, 286

black historicity, 75 Zora Neale Hurston and, 364n13
interpretation of. See “Conservation blues, 19, 20, 23, 34, 363n8
of Races”: historical context Billie Holiday and, 20, 363n9
black identity. See identity as font of racial wisdom, 35
Black Metropolis (Drake and Cayton), Houston Baker on, 37, 339
Richard Wright’s Introduction to, Ralph Ellison and, 22, 326
281, 299, 304–5, 370n13, 389n12 Richard Wright and, 35, 284, 388n5
black nationalism, 380n2. See also as urban form of Spirituals, 388n5
nationalism Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
black folk culture and, 284, 291, 294–95 Literature (Baker), 37, 349, 387n1,
defined, 267, 380n2 395n29
Du Bois and, 172, 174, 177, 184, Blumenbach, Johann, 177, 196, 381n5
204–7, 209, 212, 266, 267, 285, Boas, Franz, 27–28, 365n16
292, 344 body politic, 104–7, 202, 206, 207, 212,
manhood, patriarchy, and, 202 213, 368n32
religion and, 205, 284, 382n2 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 144, 146
Richard Wright and, 284–85, “Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard”
290–96 (Spiritual), 251–52
Spirituals and, 285 Britain. See England
black nationalists, 328, 329. See also brotherhood, human, 172, 174–76
black cultural nationalists (singular) ideal of, 63, 178, 184,
blackness 223–24, 280, 293, 322
“the black as unknowable” universality of, 203, 204, 214, 219
( Jefferson), 368n32 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. See
critical ontology of, 39, 50, 57, 63, Barrett Browning, Elizabeth
69, 72, 76–84. See also critical Browning, Robert, 262, 273, 385n20
ontology of race “Brunetta and Phillis” (Steele), 109–11,
defining, 325 373n13
Blassingame, John, 58–60 “Brute, The” (Moody), 252–54, 384n16
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” Byron, George Gordon, 240–41
(Wright), 23, 35, 56, 282, 284,
298, 301, 310 Canticle of Canticles. See Song of
African American religion and, Solomon
292–93 Carby, Hazel, 144
black nationalists and, 290 care, 7–9, 20, 298, 306, 342, 388n4. See
context of, 288–96 also Heidegger, Martin; love
Du Bois and, 23, 286, 292 Carnegie, Andrew, 195
“major weakness of,” 293 cave, 299, 301, 302, 305, 307, 309–11
metaphor and, 22, 282 Cazeaux, Clive, 16, 217–18
on Negro writers/artists, 305, 309, Aristotle and, 16
310 Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 83, 90, 217,
racial wisdom and, 35, 284, 301, 369n1, 386n31
304 chaos-world, 223, 224
410 Index
“Characteristics of Negro Expression” 72, 75, 84, 85, 90, 103, 106, 172,
(Hurston), 11, 15, 155, 366n21, 218, 222, 271, 282, 314–16, 321,
389n11 333, 344, 387n1, 393n16. See also
and a philosophy of ordinary black specific concept-metaphors
being, 23–52 defined, 1–9
Chesnutt, Charles, 156, 200 conceptual vs. technical language, 28
chora, 342, 394n23 condensation (psychoanalysis), 41–43
Christian songs, 162. See also Sorrow “Conservation of Races, The” (Du
Songs; Spirituals Bois), 292, 380nn2–3
Christianity, 288–89. See also The and blackness as political tool, 322
Interesting Narrative of the Life of civilizationist overtones, 203
Olaudah Equiano; Jesus Christ concept of race in, 5, 176–79, 206–7,
Frances Harper and, 162, 163, 195, 210–12, 215, 258, 264
196, 288–89, 377n8 critical ontology of race in, 72,
history and, 93–94 171–79, 214–15, 315. See also
Olaudah Equiano and, 91, 94, 96, critical ontology: of race
99, 103, 116–19, 121–23, 126, and the hermeneutics of race,
133–39, 141, 163, 165, 374n24, 203–15
375n28 historical context of, 189–203
slavery and, 134, 233, 249, 374n24 historical narrative and, 179–85
“Church Building” (Harper), 167–68 Hortense Spillers on, 78
Civil Rights movement, 57, 81, 331 human brotherhood and, 223, 280.
civilization, defined, 202 See also brotherhood
Clarke, John Henrik, 325–26 illimitable black being and, 54
clearing, narrative, 158–60, 377n15 and the metaphorization and
Cole, Bob, 200 deconstruction of race, 62–63
Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 260–63 Souls of Black Folk and, 219
color-line, 21, 75, 175, 274, 338. See conservatism, 331
also Souls of Black Folk “conserving” races, 65, 67, 187. See also
black being and, 2, 4, 75, 172, 224, “The Conservation of Races”
227 Constitution, U.S., 331–33
as concept-metaphor, 5, 205, 338 contemporaneity
“The Conservation of Races” (Du Derrida on, 77–78
Bois) and, 5, 205 Gulnara Bakieva on, 77
defined, 5 of the non-contemporaneous
as global phenomenon, 180, 227, 285 (Mannheim), 77
problem of the, 1 Cook, Will Marion, 200
Spirituals and, 227 “Creation, The” ( Johnson), 16
and Wright’s and Ellison’s creative universality, 73
metaphors, 8 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A
Columbian Exposition. See World’s Historical Analysis of the Failure of
Fair: Columbian Exposition Black Leadership, The (Cruse), 79,
Columbus, Christopher, 196 325
conceptual metaphors, 1–9, 11–12, “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-
15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 35, 51, 56, 61, Date, The” (Spillers), 79–82
Index 411
critical ontology of race, 83. See also dialect poetry, 146, 155, 363n13, 388n6
blackness: critical ontology of Dilthey, Wilhelm, 183–84, 381n10
Du Bois’s, 204, 210–11, 322. See also “Dim Face of Beauty” (Sharp), 259–65,
under “The Conservation of Races” 267, 268
in Du Bois’s “The Conservation of discourse, being in the occasion of,
Races,” 72, 171–79, 214–15, 315 179–85
Richard Wright’s, 22, 297, 336, 337 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 326
Crummell, Alexander, 75, 193, 201–3, double consciousness, 5, 21, 80, 85,
257, 263, 264, 268, 272–76, 278 298, 344. See also Souls of Black
Cruse, Harold, 79–81, 325–26, 371n19 Folk
Cuddon, J. A., 365n15 black being and, 2, 4, 75, 172, 205,
cultural revolution, 82–85 224, 265
cultural workers, 79, 84–85 “The Conservation of Races” (Du
culture. See also black cultural Bois) and, 205, 264
nationalists; Spillers, Hortense J. and the nation-state, 5
black, and the contemporaneity of “Negro Problem” and, 264
black being, 76–86 Ralph Ellison and, 8, 21, 22, 72, 344
corrective potential of, 84 Richard Wright and, 8, 298
defined, 82–84 in Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 172,
kingdom of, 85 222, 224, 238, 264, 265, 272
Cunard, Nancy, 23–24 doubled metaphors, 233–34, 240
doubled voice, 228
Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, Douglass, Frederick, 61, 196, 332,
254, 260, 371n19, 384n18 379n27, 383n8
Dasein, 7–9. See also being; Being-in- anti-constitutional stance, 332, 392n13
the-world; Heidegger Booker T. Washington and, 241
Dathorne, O. R., 209–10 Chicago World’s Fair and, 194, 196
Davis, Charles T., 58, 61 death, 197, 241
death drive, 345, 359, 388n6. See also democratic philosophy, 332
Freud, Sigmund; JanMohamed, Du Bois and, 75, 193, 210, 215, 241
Abdul R.; Kristeva, Julia Frances Harper and, 147, 148, 196,
death wish, 338 378n26
democracy. See also Ellison, Ralph; Ralph Ellison and, 326–28, 332
Invisible Man on slavery, 241, 332, 379n27
blackness, the uncanny maternal, and writings, 196–97, 241, 326–27
American, 336–40 Dove, Rita, 79
defined, 331 dreams
Du Bois on, 5, 173, 238, 285–86 in The Interesting Narrative of the Life
principle of moral, 319 of Olaudah Equiano, 126–30, 132,
Ralph Ellison and American, 313–60 133
democratic freedom, 257 in Invisible Man (Ellison), 313, 314,
democratic inclusion, 316 339, 341–43, 348–53, 357–58
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 46, 77–78, 173, in The Man Who Lived Underground
190, 362n7, 367n30, 394n23 (Wright), 282, 297, 307–9
Dett, Nathaniel, 227, 233, 239 psychoanalysis and, 41–43, 343
412 Index
Du Bois, Burghardt Gomer, 268, 271 Dvorak, Antonín, 200, 260

Du Bois, Nina, 268, 270, 385n23
Du Bois, W. E. B., 5, 12. See also Eagleton, Terry, 116
specific topics “earnest of the Spirit,” 136
autobiographical writings, 22, 80, Egypt, ancient, 248–52. See also Jews:
187, 212, 254, 371n19. See also in Old Testament
specific writings “ek-static,” 284, 387n4
black nationalism and, 172, 174, 177, Eliot, T. S., 253–54, 291, 326, 388
184, 204–7, 209, 212, 266, 267, Ellison, Ralph, 23
285, 292, 344 on art and protest, 50
critical ontology of race, 204, biographies of, 390n2
210–11, 322. See also under black being and, 34
“Conservation of Races” black body and, 34
Frances Harper and, 5, 85, 171–73, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
190, 210, 215 (Hurston) and, 23, 34
Frederick Douglass and, 193, 210, on conflict within, 184
215 Du Bois and, 5, 8, 21, 34, 184, 225
historical imaginary, 189–93 feminism and, 317, 338, 339, 345,
historiography and, 172–74, 190–91 349
Hortense Spillers and, 76, 80–82, 85, Frederick Douglass and, 326–28,
173, 190 332
metaphorization of race, 62–63 Freud and, 5–6, 359, 394n24,
metaphors of being, 8–9 395n26
Olaudah Equiano and, 85, 144, 172, on Harlem Renaissance writers,
184, 225, 322, 323 363n12
philosophical example of crafting a on home, love, and democracy,
poetics of black being, 74–76 34–35
poetics of, 1–2, 5, 74–76, 156, 184, on “inner eyes,” 55
190, 220, 225, 291 invisibility metaphor, 21, 34–35, 72,
Ralph Ellison and, 5, 8, 21, 34, 184, 218, 297–98, 394n24. See also
225 Invisible Man
Richard Wright and, 5, 8, 22, 23, on love, 9, 395n26
225 metaphysics and, 391n5
slavery and, 74, 75, 177, 191, 233, nation-states and, 314, 317, 321, 322,
240, 247, 249–52, 255, 265–68, 331, 334, 335
278, 279, 283 nationalism and, 316, 319, 326, 328,
on Sorrow Songs, 19, 35, 73, 221, 335, 347
225–27, 229, 231, 237, 270, 274, on patterns, 184
275, 323 possibilities and, 8
uses of metaphor, 1–5, 8–9, 12, 20, psychoanalysis and, 316, 318, 343,
22, 23, 57, 62, 72, 75, 85, 171–85, 355, 359, 394n24, 395n26
190, 195, 205–7, 213–15 on quest for self-conscious being and
in Souls of Black Folk, 217–83 free identity, 60
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 21, 144, 146, on repression, 42, 340–46, 359,
147, 155, 156, 200 394n24
Index 413
Richard Wright and, 6, 35, 184, 286, onto-theological metaphorics, 85,

297–98, 315, 319, 328, 336–38, 156, 172, 225
389n15 Pascal on, 375n25
on ritual, 393n17 phases of being: Biblical metaphorics
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) in Equiano’s narrative of
and, 5 becoming, 122–40
vital “sense” and, 6 Richard Wright and, 282, 287
writings, 390n2. See also Invisible slavery and, 102, 161, 375n25. See
Man also The Interesting Narrative of the
Juneteenth, 390n2 Life of Olaudah Equiano
Ellisonian sum (Mills), 70–72, 344 writings, 314–15. See also The
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 316–19 Interesting Narrative of the Life of
England Olaudah Equiano
blacks in, 374n24 eros, 338, 342, 345, 346
slavery and, 140, 374n24 ethnic identity and unity, 30
enjambement, 259 excipit and incipit, 220–24
epistemic openness, 75 exclusion
Equiano, Olaudah, 90f, 141–42, nationalist, 107, 172, 177, 184, 205,
375n32 285, 316, 319
as an actuated being, 140–41 racial, 69, 107, 172, 177, 192, 196,
baptism, 374n24 205, 285, 329, 330, 332, 334
being and becoming in Equiano’s existential angst, 47
use of portraiture, 97–115 existential guilt, 298, 344, 387n1
Bible and, 90–92, 94–101, 375nn27– existential phenomenology, 33–35
29, 375n32 existential possibilities, 171, 183, 215,
Biblical turn, 115–40 217
black being and, 184 existential questions and concerns,
on blackness, 322, 323 74–75, 91, 100, 284. See also
call to abolition, 165 Gordon, Lewis
Christianity and, 91, 94, 96, 99, 103, existentialism, 33, 70, 73, 74, 362n5.
116–19, 121–23, 126, 133–39, 141, See also Dasein
163, 165, 374n24, 375n28 naturalism and, 386n1
Du Bois and, 85, 172, 184, 225, 322, Richard Wright and, 33, 70, 362n5,
323 386n1
Frances Harper and, 85, 144, 145, Exodus, 248–52. See also Jews: in Old
161–63, 165, 314–15 Testament
freedom and the liminal, 125–31
Jesus Christ and, 123, 126–28, Fabio, Sarah Webster, 325
134–39, 163 Fackler, Herbert, 263
mirror stage and, 120 faith, 134–36, 295. See also “Of the
nation-states and, 4, 5, 89, 96, 102, Faith of the Fathers”
106, 120–21, 127, 142 Jesus Christ and, 135, 137, 375n28
national desire and spiritual being in feminism, 146–48
Equiano’s time, 100–115 Audre Lorde’s, 338
nationalism and, 96, 97, 118–21 black, 144, 145, 156, 336, 339
414 Index
feminism (continued) Charles Johnson and, 47–48, 51

black maternal feminism, 317–18, constructionism, 62, 67
336–46 Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and
Frances Harper and, 145–48, 156, the “Racial” Self, 38, 46–47, 61, 72,
167 283
Hortense Spillers and, 317, 339 introduction to The Slave’s Narrative,
Ralph Ellison and, 317, 338–46, 349, 47, 61
355, 393n21 Ishmael Reed and, 50–51
19th-century, 147–48 Jacques Lacan and, 45
feminist criticism, black, 144, 145, 336 Lucius Outlaw and, 62
Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the metaphor and, 48
“Racial” Self (Gates), 38, 46–47, on “race,” 38, 62
61, 72, 283 “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 62, 64
Foucault, Michel, 173, 300, 301 Ronald Judy on, 58–60
freedom, 73, 234, 238, 257, 265–66 on signification, 15, 37–38
and the liminal, 125–31 on signifiers and terminology, 30,
mapping black ontology and, 288–96 38–40, 45–46
ontological origins/foundations of, “signifying” and, 37–39
303 on slave narratives, 47, 60–61
slavery and, 74, 298 Zora Neale Hurston and, 47, 50–51
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 11, 41–43, 316, Gay, Peter, 106
318, 343 Gellner, Ernest, 320
on condensation and displacement in Genesis, 224, 249
dream-work, 41 Gilroy, Paul, 79–80
death drive, 345, 388n6 Girard, René, 355–57
on love, 344–46, 359, 394n26 Glissant, Édouard, 51, 78, 121, 157,
Ralph Ellison and, 5–6, 359, 394n24, 220, 223, 371n17, 377n11
395n26 Gooding-Williams, Robert, 370n14
on repression, 42, 343, 344, 346, Gordon, Lewis, 72–74, 91
394n24 Gould, Stephen Jay, 177
Totem and Taboo, 345, 355–56 Grant, Ulysses S., 164
From Behind the Veil (Stepto), 60 Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 365n15
Frye, Northrup, 101, 120 guilt, existential, 298, 344, 387n1
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 151 Gullah, 364n14
Garden of Eden, 224 Hall, Stuart, 63, 207, 210, 215

Garner, Margaret, 150–51 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 273–74, 281
Garvey, Marcus, 291 Harlem Renaissance, 24, 34, 292, 293,
Gass, William, 54 363n12, 365n15, 389n11
gate metaphor, 275–76 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 155,
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 46–48, 61, 72, 202, 228. See also Sketches of
283. See also Signifying Monkey Southern Life
Alice Walker and, 47, 50, 51 aesthetics, 165, 189
being and, 47, 50, 51 audiences, 376n6
Index 415
background and overview, 378n26 Du Bois and, 215, 223

black being and, 173, 184 history and, 61, 75, 76, 199, 202,
characterizations of, 378n26 382n17
Christianity and, 162, 163, 195, 196, on nation-state, 102, 105, 120, 330
288–89, 377n8 nationalism and, 120, 199, 202
Columbian Exposition and, 194–96 The Philosophy of History, 59, 197–99,
Du Bois and, 5, 85, 171–73, 190, 202, 369n5, 382n17, 383n4
210, 215 racism and, 7, 61
evolution of the vernacular poetry of, on slavery, 61, 198–99
148–56 universalist/absolutist notion of
feminism and, 145–48, 156, 167 “Being,” 9, 10, 223
focus upon religious expression and Heidegger, Martin, 10, 37, 143,
ideals, 289 158–59, 168
Frances Smith Foster and, 376n6 on (narrative) clearing, 158–60,
Frederick Douglass and, 147, 148, 377n15
196 on absolutist notions of “Being,” 9,
Heidegger and, 9, 158, 160, 166, 168 10
James Weldon Johnson and, 290 on art, 158, 168
John Brown and, 376n7 on care/caring, 8, 306
Olaudah Equiano and, 85, 144–45, on Dasein and Being-in-the-world,
161–63, 165, 314–15 7–11, 36, 283, 306
onto-theological metaphorics, 4, 5, on dissembling, 166
156, 171–73, 185, 225, 259 on ek-static temporality, 387n4
Richard Wright and, 282, 287–89, on essence, 9
293–95 Frances Harper and, 9, 158, 160,
slavery and, 148–52, 171, 173, 315, 166, 168
378n26 on humanism, 9–10
“Women’s Political Future” (speech), Jean Beaufret and, 362n5
194–95 on language, 2
writings. See also Sketches of Southern on metaphor, 11, 218
Life “The Origin of the Work of Art,”
Moses: A Story of the Nile, 377n8 168, 377n15
“The Two Offers,” 378n23 on poetry, 168, 310
Hart, Albert Bushnell, 235 on possibilities, 8, 217, 218
Harvey, David, 299, 302 on “primordial” man, 10
Hassan, Ihab, 43–45 racism, 7
hate, 275, 313, 314, 359 Richard Wright and, 7, 361n3,
Hawkes, Terence, 16, 93, 94, 105, 218 362n5
Hebrew nationalism, 382n2 hermeneutics
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, 9, Du Bois and, 178, 179, 182, 183,
120, 142, 215, 330, 371n15 186, 203, 206, 219
on Africa, 61, 75, 197–99, 202, Frances Harper and, 157, 159, 171
382n17 of race, 203–15
Christianity and, 96 vernacular, 157, 159, 171
416 Index
Hesse, Barnor, 67–68 Howard, Otis Oliver, 244, 247. See also
heterotopias, 300–303, 308. See also “Howard at Atlanta”
Wright, Richard “Howard at Atlanta” (Whittier),
defined, 300 244–48
Hetherington, Kevin, 300 Hughes, Langston, 24, 47, 144, 147
Hiawatha trilogy (Coleridge-Taylor), humanism, 7–9, 12, 92–93, 121, 145,
260–63, 384n18 157, 184, 204, 395n26. See also
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (Coleridge- humanitas
Taylor), 384n18 critical, 117, 157, 159, 160, 167, 184,
Hill, Patricia Liggins, 145 293
historicism, 101 Du Bois and, 173, 204, 219, 342
historiography, 145, 194 Frances Harper and, 145, 157, 159,
autobiography and, 116 160, 167, 171
Du Bois and, 172–74, 190–91 global, 173, 293, 295
Henry Louis Gates and, 58–60 Heidegger on, 10, 362n6
metaphor and, 59, 116, 194 Olaudah Equiano and, 93, 117, 121,
Sketches of Southern Life (Harper) as, 142, 145
144, 146, 148, 163, 168 pluralistic, 10
slavery and African American, Richard Wright and, 286, 289, 293,
58–60, 191 295
history universal, 10, 142
philosophy of, 59. See also Hegel, humanitas, 9, 10, 85, 175
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: The humanity and being human, 66
Philosophy of History Hume, David, 105, 107–8, 113–14
writing of, 115–16 Hurston, Zora Neale, 4, 11, 144, 287,
Hitler, Adolf, 299–300 292, 295, 365n16, 366n21, 389n11.
Hogan, Ernest, 200 See also “Characteristics of Negro
Holiday, Billie, 20 Expression”
Holloway, Karla F. C., 35–37 Alice Walker and, 50–51
Holy Ghost, 162 black being and, 50
Holy Spirit, 44, 134, 136, 137, 289 “Characteristics of Negro
“Home” (Morrison), 6, 333–34 Expression,” 15, 23, 34, 155,
home/house metaphor, 34–35, 102, 366n21
113, 114, 130, 321, 333–37 on double descriptives, 155
Homer Henry Louis Gates and, 47, 50–51
Alexander Pope and, 111–12, Ishmael Reed and, 50–51
364n15 life history and overview, 365n16
Aristotle and, 17, 25, 364n15 Lorenzo Dow Turner and, 364n14
Iliad, 111–12, 121, 364n15, 373n13 metaphor and, 11, 15, 23–35, 155,
hope in narrative. See The Interesting 156, 228
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Negro: An Anthology, 23–24
Equiano “New Negro” literature and, 147
House of Usna, The (Sharp), 260–64 philosophy of ordinary black being,
houses. See home/house metaphor 23–35
Index 417
Ralph Ellison and, 23, 34 portraiture, 97–100

Richard Wright and, 9–10, 23, 33, becoming and belonging: national
34, 287, 363n13 desire and spiritual being in
on Spirituals, 228–29, 233 Equiano’s time, 100–115
“Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” 228 internationalism, 329
Their Eyes Were Watching God, 47, interpretation vs. translation, 25–26
295, 389n11 invisibility metaphor, 21, 34–35, 72,
218, 297–98, 394n24. See also
identity, 60, 238 Invisible Man
black identity vs. black being, 6–7 Invisible Man (Ellison), 21, 22, 290,
ethnic, 30 313–18, 359, 389n15, 395n26
national, as empirical sociological The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
category, 101 Man ( Johnson) and, 21
Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 263, 272, black being’s moral of love, 359–60
273, 386n30 dreams in, 313, 314, 339, 341–43,
Iliad (Homer), 111–12, 121, 364n15, 348–53, 357–58
373n13 Ellisonian sum and, 71
image the irresponsible dreamer: reveries of
defined, 97, 98 sexual love, 346–55
rhetoric of the, 97–115 love’s habitation: blackness, the
imagination, primary, 16 uncanny maternal, and American
incipit, 226, 281–87 democracy, 336–40
and excipit, 220–24 The Man Who Lived Underground
“interesting narrative,” 94, 372n4 (Wright) and, 22
Interesting Narrative of the Life of patterns and, 184
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus repression of the black maternal,
Vassa, the African. Written by 340–46
Himself, The (Equiano), 62, 90, sacrificing sexual desire, 355–59
145, 161, 184, 315 speaking for the beloved, 318–36
an actuated being, 140–42 structures of time and space in, 22
being and becoming, 89–96, 141–42 Isaiah, Book of, 135–37, 139–40, 248,
dreams in, 126–30, 132, 133 375n33
hope in narrative: Equiano’s Biblical “Itylus” (Swinburne), 268–71
turn, 115–40
phases of being and Biblical Jacobs, Harriet, 147, 148
metaphorics in, 122–23 Jakobson, Roman, 40–43, 45, 46
abjection, 131–34 on metaphor and metonymy, 40–43,
actuation, 138–40 45, 367n27
conversion and salvation, 136–38 James, Paul, 205
exile, 124–25 James, William
faith, 134–36 Richard Wright and, 70, 370n13,
freedom and the liminal, 125–31 389n12
rhetoric of the image: being and Jameson, Frederic, 101, 115
becoming in Equiano’s use of JanMohamed, Abdul R., 386n1, 388n6
418 Index
Jefferson, Thomas, 106, 330–31, on phenomenology and on

368n32, 381n5, 382n17 phenomenological prose, 53–55,
Jesus Christ, 137, 162 57
Acts of the Apostles and, 128 Johnson, James Weldon, 290–92, 295
actuation and, 139 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
baptism and, 256, 276, 390n17 Man, 21–22, 28, 290, 327–28
being in the world but not of it, 36 black being and, 291, 292
crucifixion, 56, 270–71 Book of American Negro Poetry, 290
faith and, 135, 137, 375n28 “The Creation,” 16
fictional characters compared with Du Bois and, 290–92
Bigger Thomas in Native Son, 56 Frances Harper and, 144, 146, 155
Fred Daniels in The Man Who metaphors used by, 16
Lived Underground, 304–9 Ralph Ellison and, 328
John Jones in Souls of Black Folk, Richard Wright and, 290, 293–95,
276 363n13
Holy Spirit and, 134, 136, 137 Johnson, Rosamond, 200
ministry, 137, 375n33 Johnson, Samuel, 93
Olaudah Equiano and, 123, 126–28, Joplin, Scott, 200
134–39, 163 journey metaphor, 275
salvation and, 56, 127, 136–38, 163, journeying and insight, metaphors of,
390n17 241–50
Souls of Black Folk and, 270–71, 276 Joyce, Joyce Ann, 386n1
Spirituals and, 20, 230, 232, 243, Jubilee, 255
270–72, 276 Jubilee songs and singers, 231–32, 270.
Jews See also Spirituals
Du Bois on, 225, 251, 252 Judy, Ronald A. T., 57–60, 80, 83,
Olaudah Equiano and, 121, 130 368n31, 371n21
in Old Testament, 20, 121, 124–45, Juneteenth (Ellison), 315, 390n2
250–52
Robert Browning and, 262, 385n20 Kaiser, Ernest, 324–25
slavery and, 20, 224, 249–52 Kant, Immanuel, 103
Job, Book of, 128–30, 132–33, 139, 140 Du Bois and, 212, 213
John, Gospel of, 36, 123, 134, 137, epistemology, 300–301
270–71 on geography and anthropology, 299,
John the Baptist, 272, 276 301
Johnson, Andrew, 164 Hume and, 107–8
Johnson, Charles metaphor and, 113–14, 117
Being and Race, 47–48, 51, 53–54 The Metaphysics of Morals, 104–5,
Henry Gates and, 47–48, 51 320–21, 390n16
Ishmael Reed and, 51 nation-states and, 102, 120, 212, 213,
on literature as argumentation, 330, 332
49–50 Observations on the Feeling of the
on metaphor, 48, 49, 54 Beautiful and Sublime, 107–8
on Native Son (Wright), 55–57 Olaudah Equiano and, 127
Index 419
on politics, 104–5, 212–13, 320–21, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 27–28

332 Lewis, David Levering, 179, 201, 260,
race and, 7, 103, 108, 212, 321 370n12, 385n23
religion and, 96, 120 liberalism, 5, 64, 65, 84, 92, 329, 331,
Richard Wright and, 300–301 332
on the sublime, 127 liberation, 73
universalist/absolutist notion of liberty, 331. See also freedom
“Being,” 9 life experience vs. theory, 295
Khayyam, Omar, 249 Lincoln, Abraham, 153, 164, 201, 246,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 76 247
Killens, John O., 325–26 literary archeology, 158
kingdom of culture, 85 Locke, John, 106
Kingdom of God, 133, 135–38, 278 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 147,
Kohn, Hans, 320 260, 376n6
Kristeva, Julia, 82, 169, 206, 207, 316, Lorde, Audre, 47, 156, 317, 338, 361n2
342, 344–45, 359, 377n19, 382n18, love, 9, 21, 123, 251, 298, 313–14,
394n23 316–18, 337, 338, 341–42, 350. See
on death drive, 345, 359 also care; Invisible Man
black being’s moral of, 359–60
Lacan, Jacques democracy as, 23, 34, 317, 334, 345,
Fred Moten on, 317, 391n5 360
“From Interpretation to the invisibility and, 35, 317–22, 344
Transference,” 366n26 psychoanalysis and, 342–46, 359,
Henry Louis Gates and, 45, 46 394nn25–26
Jean Laplanche and, 42, 366n26, Ralph Ellison on, 9, 313, 314,
394n25 316–22, 335, 337, 338, 342, 344,
on metaphor and metonymy, 41, 42, 346–47, 359, 395n26
343, 366n26, 394n25 Richard Wright and, 298, 303, 304
on mirror stage, 120, 391n5 Toni Morrison on, 336
ocularcentrism, 317, 391n5 Lovett, Robert Morss, 254
on repression, 42, 343, 394n25 Lowell, James Russell, 256
Roman Jakobson and, 41, 42, 45 overview, 234–35
on signifiers, 343–44, 366n26 “The Present Crisis,” 234–38
Laclau, Ernesto, 330–31 Lubiano, Wahneema, 80, 333, 335–36
language. See also specific topics Luke, Gospel of, 162, 375n33
money and, 26 lynching, 197, 202, 353–56
philosophy of ordinary, 4, 11, 23, 26, defined, 356
32, 33, 35 literary, 339
“primitive,” 26–28 ritual of, 356
race, ethnicity, and, 29–30 symbolic, 357–58
similarity and contiguity, 40, 41. See
also metaphor(s): metonymy and Machiavelli, Niccolò, 330
Laplanche, Jean, 42, 366n26, 394n25 Macleod, Fiona. See Sharp, William
Leavis, F. R., 291, 388n10 Maid of Orleans, The (Schiller), 242–44
420 Index
Malraux, André, 326 definitions, 15–18, 25, 42, 48

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An doubled, 233–34, 240
American Grammar Book” liveliness of, 19
(Spillers), 338, 340 “mere”/”fancy,” 15–16
mammy archetype, 153–54, 339. See metonymy and, 17, 18, 40–45, 136,
also Aunt Chloe poems/Aunt 367n27, 394n25
Chloe cycle modes of, 17
Man Who Lived Underground, The as movement from the literal to the
(Wright), 184, 283, 287, 288 figurative, 99
and being underground, 296–311 ontology and, 19. See also onto-
black being and, 144 theological metaphorics
care as theme in, 9 paradoxical nature of, 19–20
dreams in, 282, 297, 307–9 phenomenological presence and, 19
and effects of the soulless city on a philosophical, 1–4, 7, 9, 12, 15–16,
black underclass, 291 22, 23, 33, 37, 48–49, 51–52, 54,
Invisible Man (Ellison) and, 22 56, 72, 86, 90, 218, 316, 318,
metaphors in, 22, 282–83, 311 393n16
poetics, 282, 287, 288, 310, 387n1 semantic theory of, 16
Ralph Ellison and, 286 vernacular, 5, 11, 16, 23, 26, 33–34,
recently fallen out of critical favor, 40, 48, 144, 146–47, 155, 159,
387n2 168, 171, 218, 391n5
Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) and, 313 metonymy and metaphor, 17, 18,
Spirituals and, 284 40–45, 136, 367n27
versions and publications, 389n13 Jacques Lacan on, 41, 42, 343,
Mannheim, Karl, 76–77 394n25
“March On” (Spiritual), 248–51 Micah, Book of, 123, 141
Marcuse, Herbert, 85 Miller, Eugene E., 386–87n1
maternal feminism, black, 317, 336–39, Mills, Charles W., 68–69, 84
341–42, 393n21 Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy
maternal figures and maternal and Race, 66–67
metaphors, 150, 153, 270, 318, the Ellisonian sum, 70–72
332, 393n21. See also under on personhood vs. subpersonhood,
Invisible Man 69–70
Matthews, Donald H., 229, 381n10, “mirror stage,” textual, 120, 391n5
383n5 Mitchell, W. J. T., 97
McKinley, William C., 246 modernism vs. postmodernism, 43, 44f,
Megillot, 250–51 45
Metamorphosis (Ovid), 269 Montesquieu, Baron de, 106
Metaphor (Punter), 94, 95 Moody, William Vaughn, 252–56,
metaphor(s), 11–12, 15–16, 48. See also 384n16
specific topics Morrison, Toni, 6, 79, 80, 115, 143,
being and, 15–22. See also being: 145, 157–58, 190, 333–36
metaphors of; Sketches of Southern Moses: A Story of the Nile (Harper),
Life 377n8
Index 421
Moses, Wilson J., 179, 380n2 national identity as empirical

Moten, Fred, 82–83, 391n5 sociological category, 101
Mouffe, Chantal, 330–31 nationalism, 107, 192, 199, 205. See
mourning, metaphors of, 232–41 also black nationalism
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 65 Benedict Anderson on, 205, 207
muthos, 175, 189, 380n3 capitalism and, 285, 295
defined, 380n3 cohesion and, 266
as cultural artifact, 207, 209
narcissism, 317–18, 344–45, 359 democracy and, 319
Nation Formation ( James), 205 Hebrew, 382n2
nation-state(s), 66, 114, 206, 329, 330, Hegel and, 120, 199, 202
336 humanism and, 121
Age of Reason and, 93 Olaudah Equiano and, 96, 97, 118–21
black autonomous, 380n2 Ralph Ellison and, 316, 319, 326,
and the Church, 93, 142 328, 335, 347
defined, 205, 206 nationalist discourse, 97, 101, 105, 106,
democracy and, 330 205, 209, 215, 320
discourse of, 105–6 nationalist exclusion. See exclusion
Du Bois and, 5, 176, 177, 179, 192, nationalist metaphors, 96, 205, 207
205–7, 210 nationalist terminology, 206, 207
Enlightenment era and, 177 nationalist thought, history of, 382n2
exclusionary, 322, 329, 330, 332, 336 Native Americans, 383n3
Hegel on, 102, 105, 120, 330 Native Son (Wright), 55–57, 281–82,
as home, 317, 321 387n3
Hume and, 102, 107 Négritude, 326
internationalism and, 329 “Negro Problem,” 75, 191–92, 204,
Kant and, 102, 120, 212, 213, 330, 332 227, 252, 253, 264
metaphor and, 89, 96, 102, 105, 179, “New Negro” literature, 24, 147
205–6, 332 Northern and Southern United States,
nationalism and, 96, 105, 205–6 contrasted, 265, 267
Olaudah Equiano and, 4, 5, 89, 96, Noyes, Alfred, 262
102, 106, 120–21, 127, 142
race and, 96, 106, 107, 176, 177, ocularcentrism, 317, 391n5
179, 192, 206, 207, 210, 213, 317, “Of the Faith of the Fathers” (Du
320, 321, 333, 334 Bois), 259–67. See also “Religion of
Ralph Ellison and, 314, 317, 321, the American Negro”
322, 331, 334, 335 onto-theological metaphorics, 4, 5, 85,
revolution and, 5, 65 156, 171–73, 185, 225, 259
rise of, 4, 5, 93, 142, 176, 177, 207, ontological conditions of experience, 217
213, 317, 320, 389–90n16 ontological metaphorics, 72, 147, 156,
Rousseau and, 105 171, 172, 174, 184–85, 190, 215,
terminology, 105, 206 220
United States as, 38, 65, 177, 179, in Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 72,
192, 199, 210, 317, 329, 330 91, 172, 180, 190, 215, 380n1
422 Index
ontological metaphors, 5, 6, 8, 23, poetry. See also specific writings

72, 105, 106, 172, 174, 177, 183, primary/“primitive” epic, 25
218–19, 283 Pope, Alexander, 111–14, 364n13,
ontology, 98. See also blackness: critical 373n14
ontology of; critical ontology of postmodernism, 43, 45, 51, 66, 82,
race 371n20
mapping black, 288–96 “Present Crisis, The” (Lowell), 234–35,
metaphor and, 19. See also onto- 237
theological metaphorics “President Lincoln’s Proclamation of
para-ontology, 83 Freedom” (Harper), 153
of slave being, 146, 148, 149, 230 psychoanalysis, 42–43, 316, 359, 388n6.
of the slaves, 230–32 See also Freud, Sigmund; Kristeva,
Outlaw, Lucius, 62, 66, 67 Julia; Lacan, Jacques
on Du Bois, 63–65 dreams and, 41–43, 343
on race, 62–67 love and, 342–46, 359, 394nn25–26
Ovid, 269 Ralph Ellison and, 316, 318, 343,
355, 359, 394n24, 395n26
Pan-African Conference, 260 repression and, 42, 343, 344, 346,
para-ontology, 83 394n24
paratext, 230, 234, 241–44, 247, 250–52, Totem and Taboo (Freud) and, 345,
256, 258–65, 268, 270, 272–77 355–56
poem and. See Spirituals: and the Punter, David, 94, 95
strivings of black being
in Souls of Black Folk, 276, 277 race. See also specific topics
parodic signification, 15 as a construction, 64, 65, 67, 68, 72,
Paul the Apostle, 128, 129, 134, 136, 174, 176, 193, 320, 335
138 deconstruction of, 62–64, 72, 173,
Peter, Saint 174, 177, 207, 210, 220, 322,
liberation in Acts of the Apostles, 381n3
375n29 defined, 62, 176, 179, 211–12, 258,
Petrino, Elizabeth, 145–46 264
phenomenology, 33, 159 “eight distinctly differentiated”
defined, 53 historical races, 211
existential, 33–35 nation-states and, 96, 106, 107, 176,
philosophers, African American, 59, 62 177, 179, 192, 206, 207, 210, 213,
philosophy, African American, 53, 317, 320, 321, 333, 334
69–73. See also black being; specific reconstruction of, 209
topics Race and Philosophy (Outlaw), 62
Philosophy of History, The (Hegel), 59, racial exclusion. See exclusion
199, 369n5 racial spirit, 292
Plato, 16, 298–99, 330, 368, 383n4, racism, 7, 8, 108. See also specific topics
394n23 Ramus, Peter, 93
Poetics (Aristotle), 17, 18, 23, 25, 48, rape, 1, 269, 274, 332, 339, 351,
49, 175, 286 354
Index 423
Reconstruction era, 144, 315. See also on history, 115

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins: on metaphor and metonymy, 32, 42,
evolution of the vernacular poetry 43, 48, 49, 177, 316, 367n27
of Michael Silk and, 367n27
Redding, J. Saunders, 144, 146–47, 155 on phenomenology and language, 33
Reed, Ishmael, 50–51 on reason and rationality, 310
Rejai, Muhammed, 330–31 on rhetoric, 48–49, 369n34
religion. See also Bible; Christianity; The Rule of Metaphor, 33, 42, 48, 49,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life 367n27
of Olaudah Equiano on text, 182, 183, 185
black nationalism and, 205, 284, on transcendence within immanence,
382n2 114
Kant and, 96, 120 on understanding, 183
mythopoetics of metaphor in African “Romance of the Ganges, A”
American, 259–68 (Browning), 277
Paul Ricoeur on, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 104–6, 113,
“Religion of the American Negro, The” 213
(Du Bois), 262–63. See also “Of Rule of Metaphor, The (Ricoeur), 33, 42,
the Faith of the Fathers” 48, 49, 367n27, 393n16
repression, 42, 343, 344, 346, 394n24.
See also under Ellison, Ralph; salvation, Jesus Christ and, 56, 127,
Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques 136–38, 163, 390n17
return, theme of, 336–38 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 303, 325, 361n4,
“Reunion, The” (Harper), 162 387n4
Revelation, Book of, 132, 133, 139, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28–31, 32, 46
141, 232, 237, 252, 254, 255, 276, Henry Louis Gates and, 39–40, 45
278 Ihab Hassan and, 45
rhetoric, 369n34 Jacques Lacan and, 45
all literature as argumentation, 47–48 language, linguistics, and, 37, 39–40,
“death” of, 49 45, 361n2
defined, 48 Roman Jakobson and, 40, 45
of the image, 97–115 Zora Neale Hurston and, 27–29,
metaphor and, 48–49 31–32
nature of, 49 Schiller, Friedrich von, 242–44
Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, The Searle, John R., 181–82
(Aristotle), 18, 116 self-love, 317–18. See also narcissism
Richards, I. A., 369n34, 388n10 semiotics, 38, 99, 148, 159, 342, 377n19
Ricoeur, Paul, 2, 188 sexual abuse, 314
on alienation, 186 sexual assault, 1, 269, 274, 332, 339,
on Aristotle, 48–49 351, 354
on discourse, 181–82 sexuality, 317–18, 332, 342, 345, 346.
Du Bois and, 182, 185 See also under Invisible Man
on Hegel, philosophy, and religion, Shakespeare, William, 283. See also
120 Hamlet
424 Index
Sharp, Granville, 130–31 slave narrative(s), 46–47, 58–61, 191,

Sharp, William (“Fiona Macleod”), 372n4. See also The Interesting
259, 261–64, 273, 385n20 Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
“Dim Face of Beauty,” 259–65, 267, Equiano
268 Slave Songs of the United States, 231–32
Shelby, Tommie, 63 slave trade, suppression of, 189
signification, 93 slavery, 8, 38, 39, 199, 374n24. See
of black being, 148–49 also Du Bois, W. E. B.; Harper,
parodic, 15 Frances Ellen Watkins; Invisible
Roland Barthes, signifieds, and, Man
97–98 abolition of, 134, 191, 199. See also
signifiers “President Lincoln’s Proclamation
Ferdinand de Saussure on, 30, 37–39 of Freedom”
intersignification, 192, 193 in Africa, 198–99
Julia Kristeva on, 344 in the Bible, 20, 224, 249–52
metaphors and, 344 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron)
racial, 39, 207, 209, 210 and, 240, 241
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African- Christianity and, 134, 233, 249, 374n24
American Literary Criticism, The in cities vs. in the country, 379n27
(Gates), 37, 45–47 Constitution and, 392n13
Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) and, 51 Du Bois and, 74, 75, 177, 191, 233,
pursuit of being and, 283 240, 247, 249–52, 255, 265–68,
Silk, Michael, 367n27 278, 279, 283
Simeon (Gospel of Luke), 162 England and, 140, 374n24
similarity. See metaphor(s) exhibition space for descendants of,
simile, 17–18, 20–21, 24, 26 196
as “full-blown” metaphor, 21, 365n18 Frances Harper and, 148–52, 171,
Sketches of Southern Life (Harper), 171, 173, 315, 378n26. See also Sketches
184, 218 of Southern Life
as historiography, 144, 146, 148, 163, Frederick Douglass on, 241, 332,
168 379n27
metaphor, black being, and Aunt freedom vs. enslavement, 298
Chloe’s structure of poetic Hegel on, 61, 198–99
memory, 156–69 “Howard at Atlanta” (Whittier) and,
metaphor and being in, 144–48 244–47
slave being, 145, 147, 168, 171, 191, impact on black families, 255
230, 315 Jews and, 20, 224, 249–52
indeterminate nature of, 166 Lewis Gordon on, 74
ontology of, 146, 148, 149, 230 Olaudah Equiano and, 315
typology of, 158, 159 Spirituals and, 20, 191, 224, 226, 228–
Slave Community, The (Blassingame), 32, 249–50, 265–68, 278–80, 283
58–60 “The Present Crisis” (Lowell), 235,
“Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio, 236, 238
The” (Harper), 149–51 types of, 253, 255
Index 425
slaves “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” 234,

existential thought and yearning for 238
freedom, 74 “Of the Faith of the Fathers,”
the Spiritual and the ontology of, 259–67. See also “Religion of the
230–32 American Negro”
Slave’s Narrative, The (Davis and “Of the Meaning of Progress,”
Gates), 47 241–44
introduction to, 47, 61 “Of the Passing of the First
Smith, Valerie, 326 Born,” 230, 236, 255, 268, 273
Smith Foster, Frances, 144, 146, 151 “Of the Quest of the Golden
social problems, defined, 191 Fleece,” 252, 253, 255, 256
Song of Solomon, 250–52 “Of the Sons of Master and
Sorrow Songs, 19, 228, 229. See also Man,” 256, 257
Jubilee songs and singers; Spirituals “Of the Sorrow Songs,” 225, 227,
Du Bois on, 19, 35, 73, 221, 225–27, 237, 270, 275
229, 231, 237, 270, 274, 275, 323 “Of the Training of Black Men,”
as resource for social and political 248–50
critique, 227 “Of the Wings of Atalanta,”
Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) and, 244–48
19, 35, 73, 221, 225, 227–29, 231, color-line given in, 1, 2, 5, 172,
237, 270, 274, 275, 323 220–22, 224, 227, 234, 235, 257,
Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), xiii, 1, 2, 271, 272, 285
85, 202, 221, 223, 225, 243, 257, “The Conservation of Races” (Du
276, 285, 290, 315 Bois) and, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180,
bars of music prefacing essays in, 204, 207, 219, 380n1
283 double consciousness in, 172, 222,
black being and, xiii, 144, 180, 204, 224, 238, 264, 265, 272
206–7, 215, 217, 223, 224, 280, figure, form, and, 217–20
315 Frances Harper and, 149, 172
and blacks existing in state of metaphor and, 179, 217, 219, 220, 224
liminality, 178 Biblical metaphors, 224, 250, 254
Booker T. Washington and, 327 concept-metaphors, 5
brotherhood and, 223–24 journey metaphor, 275
central theme, 204 metaphors of journeying and
chapters insight, 241–50
“Of Alexander Crummell,” 263, metaphors of perceiving, knowing,
264, 268, 272, 275, 276 and mourning, 232–41
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington,” metaphors of the temporal and
239–41, 327 atemporal, 250–59
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 74, metaphors of transition and
217, 226, 382n12 transcendence, 268–78
“Of the Black Belt,” 250, 251 and mythopoetics of metaphor in
“Of the Coming of John,” 268, African American religion,
276, 277 259–68
426 Index
Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) Herbert Marcuse and, 82, 85

metaphor and (continued) “The Idea of Black Culture,” 79, 82,
ontological metaphorics, 72, 91, 89, 323
172, 180, 190, 215, 380n1 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 338,
Spirituals and the possibility of 340
metaphor, 278–80 metaphor and, 82, 85, 90, 91, 338
Olaudah Equiano and, 91, 144, 172 Olaudah Equiano and, 89–90
ontological concerns in reading, 221 Ralph Ellison and, 340–41
ontological conditions of experience on the value of black culture, 82–85
and, 217 spiritual metaphors, 96
and quest for self-edification, 241 Spirituals, 19–20, 271
question of being in, 210 Jesus Christ and, 20, 230, 232, 243,
Richard Robert Wright, Sr. and, 244, 270–72, 276
247 and the possibility of metaphor,
Richard Wright and, 5 278–80
Robert Gooding-Williams on, slavery and, 20, 191, 224, 226,
370n14 228–32, 249–50, 265–68, 278–80,
Sorrow Songs and, 19, 35, 73, 221, 283
225, 227–29, 231, 237, 270, 274, as Sorrow Songs, 35, 225, 228. See
275, 323 also Sorrow Songs: Du Bois on
spiritual singers in, 313 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) and,
Spirituals and, 19, 228–32, 239, 240, 19, 228–32, 239, 240, 262, 279–80,
262, 279–80, 285, 290 285, 290
theory of identity, 238. See also and the strivings of black being,
double consciousness 224–29
unveiling project in, 207 state, 206. See also nation-state(s)
veils and, 207, 221–24, 226, 228, “Steal Away,” 259, 261, 264, 265, 267,
238, 250, 251, 271, 283, 315, 327 268
worlding of, 223 Steele, Richard, 106, 109–11, 114,
Southern and Northern United States, 373n13
contrasted, 265, 267 Stellardi, Giuseppe, 16
Spillers, Hortense J., 78–80, 82, 317, Stepto, Robert, 58, 60
340 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 154–55
Audre Lorde and, 338 stream of consciousness, 307–8
black creative intellectuals and, 76, Stuckey, Sterling, 211
79–82, 89 “Study of the Negro Problems, The”
on black women, 338 (Du Bois), 191–92
contemporaneity and, 76, 77, 80, 81, sublimation, 388n6
173, 190 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 268–70
on cultural revolution, 82–85 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
denial and, 340 (Spiritual), 20, 272, 274–76
Du Bois and, 76, 80–82, 85, 173, 190 symbols, 99. See also Lacan, Jacques;
Fred Moten and, 82 specific topics
Harold Cruse and, 79–81 defined, 99
Index 427
Symons, Arthur, 233 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) and,

207, 221–24, 226, 228, 238, 250,
taboo 251, 271, 283, 315, 327
defined, 355 “We Wear the Mask” (Dunbar) and,
Freud on, 355–56 21
“Talented Tenth, The” (Du Bois), 187, “veil of blackness,” 368n32, 382n17
264 “Vision of Poets, A” (Browning), 256–59
technê, 48, 49
defined, 48 wage slavery, 253
telos, 114, 115 Wagner, Richard, 277–78
Tennyson, Alfred, 258–59, 268, 272–73 Waligora-Davis, Nicole, 328
thanatos. See death drive; death wish Walker, Alice, 50–51
Their Eyes Were Watching God Washington, Booker T., 193, 348
(Hurston), 47, 295, 389n11 American Negro Academy (ANA)
theory vs. life experience, 295 and, 201, 240
thought, “primitive,” 26–28 Du Bois and, 239–41, 247–48, 265,
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 345, 355–56 327
transcendence, 19, 35, 44, 45, 132, 164, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and
285, 300, 305, 359, 388n6 Others” (Du Bois), 239, 240, 327
within immanence, Paul Ricoeur on, Ida B. Wells and, 197
114 Richard Robert Wright, Sr. and, 246,
metaphors of, 268–78 247
transition and transcendence, Up from Slavery, 327
metaphors of, 268–78 Watts, Jerry G., 328
translation vs. interpretation, 25–26 Weheliye, Alexander, 229, 383n5
tropes, Aristotle on, 17–18 Wells, Ida B., 193, 196–97
Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 364n14 West, Cornel, 80
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 147, 244–48,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 147, 154 256, 376n6, 384n12
Williams, Raymond, 84
veil, 5, 75, 85 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11
and the Bible, 136, 137, 248, 250, woman-centered principle, 36
251 women, maternal. See maternal figures
Booker T. Washington and, 327 and maternal metaphors
Christianity as lifting the, 288 women’s literature, 36
Civil Rights movement and, 57 “Women’s Political Future” (Harper),
collision of the worlds within and 194–95
without the, 2 Word of God, 123, 137–39, 163,
“The Conservation of Races” (Du 235–37, 288–89
Bois), 205 World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition
gift of second sight among those (1893), 194–97, 199, 203
living within the, 304 Wright, John S., 390n2
habitation of, 86 Wright, Richard, 336–37, 342, 363n13,
invisibility and, 72 386n1, 390n17
428 Index
Wright, Richard (conitnued) underground, 281–87

on African American folklore, 35 Ralph Ellison and, 184, 315, 319,
black being and, 6, 23, 57, 361n3 328, 336–38, 389n15
on black folk expression, 35 Robert Bone on, 387n3
black nationalism and, 284–85, Sartre and, 362n5
290–96 on Spirituals, 35, 388n5
on blues, 35, 284, 388n5 underground man, 319, 336, 349
Charles Johnson and, 55–56 William James and, 70, 370n13,
Christianity and, 390n17 389n12
on communism, 391n4 writings. See also “Blueprint for
critical ontology and critical Negro Writing”; The Man Who
epistemology, 22, 336, 337 Lived Underground
death, violence, and tragedy in the “Between the World and Me,”
work of, 56, 386n1 56
death wish in the fiction of, 338, Black Boy (autobiography), 6
388n6 Introduction to Black Metropolis,
Du Bois and, 5, 8, 22, 23, 225 281, 299, 304–5, 370n13,
existentialism and, 70 389n12
Frances Harper and, 282, 287–89, Native Son, 55–57, 281–82, 387n3
293–95 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois)
Heidegger and, 7, 361n3, 362n5 and, 5
Hortense Spillers on, 80 Uncle Tom’s Children, 364n13
James Weldon Johnson and, 290, Zora Neale Hurston and, 9–10, 23,
293–95, 363n13 33, 34, 287, 363n13
Joyce Ann Joyce on, 386n1 Wright, Richard R., Jr., 246
on love, 342 Wright, Richard Robert, Sr., 244–47,
metaphor and, 8, 22, 55, 56, 86, 281, 383n11
386n1, 387n3
Olaudah Equiano and, 144 Yale School, 58
poetics, 57, 86, 225, 282, 336, 371n1 “You May Bury Me in the East”
and the poetics of being (Spiritual), 226, 278

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HABITATIONS

REBECKA RUTLEDGE FISHER

© 2014 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production by Eileen Nizer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge.

Introduction: The Poetics of Being Black 1

1 Being and Metaphor 15

2 African American Philosophy and the Poetics of Black Being 53

3 Being and Becoming: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of

4 Remnants of Memory: Metaphor and Being in

5 A Technology of Modern Black Being: “The Conservation of

6 Habitations of the Veil: Souls, Figure, Form 217

7 Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground 281

8 A Love Called Democracy: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 313

Love’s Habitation: Blackness, the Uncanny Maternal,

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in ESQ: A Journal of the American

The Poetics of Being Black

In this study, I draw upon Du Bois’s conceptual uses of metaphor in

Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston (specifically viewing “Characteristics of

Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of consciousness posed to conventional West-

importance in this study. Even as I suggest the importance of the semantic

A Question of Black Being

At this point, it would be good to take a moment to expand further upon

Dasein’s facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always

In short, a crucial characteristic of Dasein is its “care,” or “concern,” which

metaphors of being do not emerge sui generis, as I argue above. Indeed,

critically in light of the thought of Richard Wright. Later in his oeuvre,

Your question not only presupposes a desire to retain the word

Although Heidegger claims the project of conceptualizing a “primordial”

conceptualization of being—which still holds its place as the preeminent

Metaphor, which Heidegger ultimately rejected as locked within an outmoded

Inhabiting the Veil

Being and Metaphor

This conjunction between poetics, ontology, and epistemology explains

Indeed, in the Rhetoric, he concludes that “simile is also a metaphor; the

(contiguity) of another conceptual image whatever its semiotic distance,

“full blown” metaphor—between love and a faucet, as a humorous trope

every coloured man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of

Ellison, whose protagonist likewise suffers from a multiple sense of

A Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s

Wright would, of course, implicitly (though not explicitly) distance himself

as it is written, interpretation refers to language as it is spoken. Thus by

players in a market, because it largely eliminates intermediaries or “middle

last paragraph becomes very apparent when one observes that

Lévi-Strauss’s conclusions, of course, appeared in 1962, well after the

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of

Having addressed the question of linguistic value, and being duly

to issues of race and ethnicity in relation to language. He felt certain that

[E]verything in diachronic language is diachronic only by virtue

before it is accepted for general use. . . . the new form, repeated

It is useful to return to Hurston with Saussure’s words in mind. As

qualities, in which metaphor performs acts of verbalization that exemplify

with phenomenology and the black body with metaphorical expression,

to extract from lived experience the essential meanings and

I take Ricoeur’s assessment of the relation between phenomenology

before it is accepted for general use. . . . the new form, repeated

The preceding table draws on ideas in many fields . . . aligned

raises ironic self-reflective, metatheoretical questions.  .  .  .  Because