Cosmopolitanism in the Fictive Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois by Doku Samuel O.;

Author:Doku, Samuel O.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 6

Beyond the Color Line

Black Cosmopolitanism as a Thematic Design in The Black Flame

W.E.B. Du Bois’s last effort at fiction writing when he was almost a nonagenarian resulted in the publication of his trilogy, The Black Flame. It is a historical fiction that traces the history of African America through the Mansart family, especially Tom and Manuel, from the Revolution of 1876, which also marked the end of Reconstruction to 1954, the year of Brown versus Topeka Board of Education, a landmark case that desegregated public schools in the country. The Black Flame is in three volumes: The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color published in 1957, 1959, and 1961, respectively. Because of activities that allegedly tied him to communism, Du Bois was labeled an enemy of the nation in the 1950s, and his passport was confiscated. As a result, no publisher was willing to publish any of his works until historian Herbert Aptheker stepped in as his editor. Against all odds and armed with the leverage as Du Bois’s editor, Apthteker was able to publish The Black Flame in his journal, Masses and Mainstream. In a lot of ways, the trilogy reveals more about Du Bois’s persona—his evolving philosophies and ideologies—than his three autobiographies, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920), Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography (1940), and The Autobiography (1968).1

Essentially, Du Bois defines his raison d’être in writing the trilogy as white America’s strategic dilution and coloration of facts pertaining to America’s antebellum blight: “In the great tragedy of Negro slavery in the United States and its aftermath, much of documented history is lacking because of the deep feeling involved and the fierce desire of men to defend their fathers and themselves.”2 Toward that end, Du Bois tried by the “method of historical fiction to complete the cycle of history which has for half a century engaged [his] thought, research, and action.”3 In such a historical fiction, Du Bois implies that because history is impure, the result of its documentation from the memories of men, he would utilize the fiction of hermeneutics “to make a reasonable story” with the hope that the volumes would have “more history than fiction, more fact than assumption, much truth, and no falsehood.”4 Martin Luther King, Jr. poignantly notes the interpellation of black inferiority that passionately occupied Du Bois’s consciousness and informed the subjects of his dialectics: “Black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient and deservedly doomed to servitude. . . . So assiduously has this poison been injected into the mind of America that its disease has infected not only whites but many Negroes.”5 Indeed, if Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) is an economic study of the South, The Black Flame is the opus of that study, and in it, Du Bois critiques capitalism in the United States, imperialism and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as the mother of all woes.

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