Gothic Ontology and Vital Affect in W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk

Abstract

This essay turns to the writing of William James in “A Word of Pure Experience” as a methodological framework for reading The Souls of Black Folk. While most readings of Souls emphasize the unfolding of black consciousness, or the mind, this essay brings the body into critical focus, specifically in tracing the ways in which Du Bois appeals to the plasticity of bodies—their ability to affect and to be affected—as a creative textual means of redressing racial strife and crisis. To this end, I argue that Souls both diagnoses what I am calling a “gothic” ontology of racial division (after James) and appeals to moments of vital affect which overspill and thus critically challenge the boundaries of such racial disjuncture endemic to modernity and race relations at the dawn of the twentieth century. My reading thus resituates Souls in a literary-philosophical genealogy running from James to Du Bois, yet one that emphasizes their convergence via James’s “radical empiricism” rather than his more familiar pragmatism.

Keywords: James; Du Bois; Ontology; Affect; Racism; Radical empiricism.