'The World and Us': Toward a post-nationalist articulation of racial consciousness, 1884--1937 (W. E. B. Du Bois, William Archibald Dunning, Frederick Jackson Turner, Pauline Hopkins, Oscar Micheaux)

From January to July of 1922 W. E. B. Du Bois included a regular segment in his opinion column for The Crisis entitled “The World and Us.” The segment directly relates world events to black US experience, forming the basis of a critical link between racialization and international relations—a link within which the fortunes of black people are caught up in the global stirrings of anti-colonial struggle. However, “The World and Us” is but one of many examples of internationally informed racial consciousness that oppose the expression of race as a purely domestic issue. Within the temporal bookends that bracket my dissertation, the establishment of the American Historical Association in 1884 and the final serialized installment of George S. Schuyler's Black Empire in 1937, I propose a counter-history which tracks diverse forms of black US commentary on race and imperialism. My dissertation intertwines analyses of historiography and popular culture to address the creativity, fantasy and daring of black US responses to bewildering systems of racial categorization that differentiated groups on the basis of “color.” Such responses contribute to the development of a specifically post-nationalist racial consciousness, or a way of understanding nationally structured racial experience as both an effect and a source of global projects of racialization. Post-nationalist racial consciousness contributes, in turn, to criticism of ideologies and institutions that strategically collapse and erect difference to secure the highly exclusive category of whiteness, erase the ethnic and national specificity upon which rests the category of blackness, and ignore the complex network of relationships that exist in excess of the binary between black and white. My inquiry into post-nationalist racial consciousness focuses on: W. E. B. Du Bois, William Archibald Dunning and Frederick Jackson Turner's considerations of the implications of Reconstruction for US imperialism; the role of mixed-race heroines in melodramas by Pauline Hopkins and Oscar Micheaux that chart the impact of US conceptualizations of opportunity on its domestic and international practices of racialization; and commentary on US imperialism by black writers' complex deployment of Orientalist imagery.