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612-822-4611
Tales from Du Bois: The Queer Intimacy of Cross-Caste Romance

Tales from Du Bois: The Queer Intimacy of Cross-Caste Romance

Paperback

Series: Suny Multiethnic Literatures

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1438488181
ISBN13: 9781438488189
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Oct 2 2022
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

Tales from Du Bois brings together critical race theory, queer studies, philosophy, and genre theory to offer an illuminating new comprehensive study of W. E. B. Du Bois's fiction from 1903-1928. Erika Renée Williams begins by revisiting Du Bois's tale of being rebuffed by a white female classmate in The Souls of Black Folk, identifying it as a failure of what she calls cross-caste romance-a sentimental, conjugal, or erotic relation projected across lines of cultural difference. In Du Bois's text, this failure figures as the cause of double consciousness, the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. Far from being unique to Souls, the trope of cross-caste romance, Williams argues, structures much of Du Bois's literary oeuvre. With it, Du Bois queries romance's capacity to ground nationalism, on the one hand, and to foment queer forms of Afro-Diasporic reclamation and kinship, on the other. Beautifully written and deftly argued, Tales from Du Bois analyzes familiar works like Souls and Dark Princess alongside neglected short fiction to make a case for the value of Du Bois's literary writing and its centrality to his thought more broadly.

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Williams, Erika Renée

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Literary Criticism