Dubois Double Consciousness

Superior Essays
Talal Almas

FWIS 194—Americans Abroad
Dr. A Seglie
Rough draft
In the book Souls Of The Black Folk, W.E.B DuBois pitches his notion of “double consciousness” as a form of personal identity that is divided into multiple facets. For DuBois, double consciousness is “….a peculiar sensation [this double consciousness], of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”. It is the “…two-ness of the two [American and “negro”] souls; two thoughts; two un-reconciled strivings” (DuBois 2—3). By constructing Matthew’s self-exile to Berlin, his transition to Chicago and his eventual relocation to the south in The Dark Princess, DuBois positions proletariat travel as a vehicle for delineating the identity conflict between Matthew’s “negro” and American identities. In doing so, DuBois divulges how travel serves to both accentuate ambivalent racial identities and provide outlets for radically resolving racial inequalities that pervasively plague parts of the United States even to this day. W.E.B DuBois’ The Dark princess charts a course between the localized political maneuverings in New York, Chicago and the American south, with the anticolonial radicals amassed in the cosmopolitan Berlin. In the melodramatic and operatic opening scene, Matthew Towns lingers on the deck of the Orizaba bound to leave for Europe after he is coerced to leave medical school because he is barred from registering for obstetrics. Capitalizing on travel from the East to Europe as a means of escaping the American racism, Matthew reflects on his acerbic exchange with the dean: “Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies?” (DuBois 3–4). As soon as the reader indulges in the novel, an overarching sense of racial discrimination is portrayed through this exchange. Acting as the venerated producers of the United States, white women are presented as an illicit and prohibited terrain for black hands. On the contrary, Matthew Towns’s southern mother is presented as the paradigmatic ancestress, who in giving birth to Matthew enables the birth of the darker races of the world as a transnational family. As part of this transnational black race, Towns transitions to berlin and soon falls in love with Kautilya, the daughter of a maharajah, and joins the force—literally and symbolically— in which the people of color unite against the white imperialism. It is here that Matthew starts to view himself in an escalated light of self worth that he does not know previously existed. Matthew’s opinions suddenly start to matter and cause an effect. Like a seed, uprooted from the oppressing soils of the United States and re-rooted in the cosmopolitan Berlin, Matthew assimilates himself within the Europeans. Yet, as Matthew starts to understand the culture in Berlin, he sees that “there were differences [between Germany and the United States]—differences he [Matthew] felt with a tingling pain” (DuBois 7). Here, Matthew views himself through the lens of the Germans and becomes exceedingly cognizant of the vast opportunities that exist for the blacks in Germany, where there is less racial discrimination. These
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DuBois posits that African American can be Americans without being necessarily subjugated. Through enlightening the reader on how the “strength” of the African Americans keeps them from being “torn asunder,” he expounds that despite the white supremacy’s incessant efforts to subordinate the blacks, most African American resort to finding unifying ties between different cultures through travel and by developing alternative self-defined schemas of their identity. Although the reader realizes that “he (Matthew) has also left America—all that he loved and knew,” (DuBois 7) Matthew’s travel to Berlin, while it leads to his incongruous African American identity, also in turn conjures the idealized image of a utopian community where the blacks are held at the same pedestal as the whites. thereby emanating a new hope for himself and more so for his black fellows. When Matthew discovers the Dark council’s attempt to take the princess’s letter at any cost, Matthew summons, “if [he goes] out of [his room] dead [he] won’t be the only corpse” (DuBois 32). The princess Kautilya has indeed inspired Matthew to a deep extent. By taking the stand for his love, his passion, the princess kautilya, Matthew demonstrates that he and the blacks as a whole can rise against the white supremacy if need

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