Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism” Next To the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W.E.B Du Bois Eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum. Minnesota UP (2007): 96-123


Project:
    “This essay suggests how a Du Boisean obsession with interracial romance became constitutive to the substance and success of his antiracist, anti-imperialist, internationalist politics in the 1920s” (97).
    “The aim of this essay is thus twofold: first, to demonstrate the centrality of representations of interracial romance to Du Bois’ political project during the 1920s; second, to demonstrate Du Bois’ repeated deployment of “the stuff of Romance” as a form of propaganda that conjures a black imperialist response to both U.S racism and Euro-American imperialism” (101).


Weinbaum rereads and recontextualizes Du Bois’ famous passage from “The Criteria for Negro Art” in which he declares, “all art is porpoganda and ever must be.” In so doing, Weinbaum reads that statement as a culmination of a larger argument for internationalist solidarity, especially through miscegenation. There is also a distinction between “romance” and “Romance” to be made; Du Bois leaves the former term “uncapitalized and thus colloquial,” while the latter is capitalized and elevated “to the status of a literary genre with roots in narratives of heroic conquest, and back further still in the chivalric tradition” (100). The latter, Weinbaum argues, is the key genre in which Du Bois articulates a larger project for interracial international solidarity.

“Of all the generic forms that he might have elected as his principal vehicle for propoganda, Romance is the logical and natural choice. Romantic themes and Romantic forms are germane to expression of black life in the United States and black insurgent activity in the world. Romance is the idiom and romance the content in which black life is expressed and lived in rebellion against Jim Crow and imperialism the world over” (100).

On Darkwater:
    “As he suggests, the whiteness produced in the context of U.S. racial nationalism is part and parcel of a world straddling imperial whiteness that seeks to establish itself as a world economic power” (102).
    A close reading of the stories “The Comet,” in which heterosexual union trump race to give birth to “the race to be,” and “The Princess of Hither Isle.” The latter presents imperial conflict “as racial conflict that is in turn subtended by sexualized racial violence such that the consummation of interracial romance amounts to the symbolic resolution of global race war” (107).

On Dark Princess:
    The text “gazes outwards toward emerging struggles for decolonization, while simultaneously working to position African Americans as participants in such historical world events” (108). The focus is now on those factors that prevent solidarity between various colonized peoples, namely the “color line within the color line.”
    Weinbaum’s close reading of this text reaches a peak when she reveals an “affective logic” to black internationalism, one that refuses the symmetry of Pan Africa and Pan Asia but sensitive to the shared structure of feeling; “they together reveal the lineaments of a form of consciousness that connects all the world’s darker people into a single, world shaping force” (112).
    Du Bois’ suggestive articulation of this affective logic is unprecedented in his writing, Weinbaum continues, and sheds new light on his thinking through international solidarity movements. Indeed, these thoughts are shaped by and intervene in the communist debates that linked both the “Negro question” to the “colonial question.” Weinbaum finds traces of this context in the novel’s language.

The Problems:
    Thankfully, Weinbaum does not close the essay without noting the elephant in the room. In Dark Princess, Du Bois glosses over centuries of “Brahmin caste prejudice against blacks,” posits elitism and heterosexual reproduction as the means to overthrow imperialism. The novel relies heavily on Orientalist tropes rather than undercutting them and uses “ a form of legitimation by reversal––a mere revamping of the racial nationalism that undergrids an array of propagandistic works of art produced in the interwar period by nativists, restrictionists, eugenicists and white supremacists…”
    Noting these limitations is a scholarly responsible move, but one that unfortunately restricts the stakes of her essay to a slight rethinking of Du Bois scholarship. Unlike the high point of the essay, when Du Bois seemed to offer an affective axis of solidarity, its conclusion points to the treacherously essentialist ground one treads in thinking through these issues. Dark Princess, it seems to me, is more notable for its limitations and as an index of a particular historical moment; it reminds us how not to think.