The True Romance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess
Loading...
Permanent Link
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Tamara Bhalla, The True Romance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, S&F, Issue 14.3, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-and-queer-afro-asian-formations/the-true-romance-of-w-e-b-du-boiss-dark-princess/
Rights
© 2018 S&F
Subjects
Abstract
W.E.B Du Bois’s 1928 novel Dark Princess has had a long and contradictory reception. On the one hand, scholars admire how it offers a prescient model of the possibilities in our own time of intergroup solidarity as well as astute commentary on hierarchies and constructions of race on a global scale. Such accounts recognize it as a central text in African American literary history, key to illuminating “how resistance, particularly to Eurocentric discourses of race, led to the radical recasting of Afro-Asian relationships as central to twentieth-century world revolutionary struggle.” On the other hand, most contemporary criticism on the novel begins with an assessment of its aesthetic failings, echoing the assertions of the white reviewers who were Du Bois’s contemporaries by noting that it is sentimental, melodramatic, and bewildering. In this vein, the critical record is best summed up by Amritjit Singh’s conclusion that “Dark Princess is undoubtedly more important as a social or political document than as literature.” A central element of this contradictory reception has been the perceived incongruence between Du Bois’s erudite, radical, and groundbreaking transnational politics and his arguably less successful depiction of those political investments through tropes of romance, sentiment, and desire