Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?
Iranian EFL Journal 367 It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro. (Du Bois, 2007, p. 184)
Du Bois introduced the idea of African American double consciousness in the opening chapter of his famous book The Souls of Black Folk published in 1903. The book, with its newly-propounded concept, was groundbreaking and considerably influential not only in the formation of African American literature and literary criticism, but also in igniting a new sociological outlook in the United States. Du Bois (2007) defined the concept of double consciousness in the following words:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, or measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on it in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (p. 8)
The history of such oppositional binarisms goes back to the discourse of early Christianity which was greatly concerned with a putative tension between the flesh and the sacred and between nature and spirit. However, Du Bois (2002) drew upon two main sources while employing the concept of African American double consciousness: one, the themes and conventions of European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism; the other, the nineteenth and early twentieth century medical and psychological research (as cited in Allen, p. 222). Early in the nineteenth century, Goethe referred to the concept of “Angst”, very similar to Du Bois’s double consciousness, in his Faust (1808): “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast, and each is eager for a separation: in throes of coarse desire, one grips the earth with all its senses; the other struggles from the dust to rise to high ancestral spheres” (as cited in Allen, 2002, pp. 222-3). Moreover, there were many other nineteenth century writers, such as George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau and Henry James, who dealt with the concept of the divided self through literary or psychological rhetorics.
Du Bois was in fact concerned with the development of black consciousness in the capitalist bourgeois social structure of America. The structural ideology of American society engendered blackness as a social denomination for identity construction, but inhibited blacks from establishing or reproducing their structural or cultural values and conventions. The hegemonic procedure of the dominant structure, which I. M. Young called “cultural imperialism” and Emile Durkheim called the “mechanical solidarity” of human society,
Iranian EFL Journal 368 looked down on and marginalized the Other behaviors and values in order to homogenize the social practices of their society, and systematically excluded the favorable characteristics of the subaltern group not only from the memory of the sociopolitically oppressed but also from the memory of the sociopolitically dominant group (Mocombe, 2009; Schiele, 2005).
This exclusionary stance finally eventuated in the formation of an African American dual personality; a double consciousness which entailed two cultural identities, each addressing a diverse social role, one black and one white, at conflict with one another in each African American’s consciousness owing to the different implications of those identities within the mainstream American society (Rawls, 2000); that is, the American capitalist sociopolitical structure little by little compelled blacks to internalize its negative stereotypeswhich represented blacks as soul-less, poor, depraved, uncultured, irrational, and savage, a gradual process which finally eventuated in blacks’ self-hatred and their efforts to live like the powerful bourgeois whites (Mocombe, 2009). This systematic marginalization of blacks in America did not stop with the Emancipation after which blacks encountered a more sophisticated process of misrecognition on a daily basis and suffered from the white America’s general refusal to accept their humanity. According to Du Bois (2007), this
“disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation” generated an “all- pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black” (p. 12); that is to say, the weight of the racist stereotypes was so unbearable that gave rise to a malignant process of excessive self-surveillance and self-interrogation within African American psyche. Du Bois (2007) contended that
from the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century, - from this must arise a painful self- consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to presence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism. (p. 136)
In other words, there were two different communities with distinct conventions and purposes on either side of what he called the “Veil”; individuals on the black side of the veil
Iranian EFL Journal 369 owed a commitment to their segregated community that white individuals did not. As a matter of fact, the subalternized black Americans were always held accountable to two distinct communities, the fundamental inequality and inconsistency of which compelled them to adopt the perspective of the dominant white discourse toward themselves; on that account, they were uncomfortably conscious of looking at themselves through the veil: the fragmented African American self-consciousness was trapped in a “catch 22” and thus was forever incomplete (Rawls, 2000).
However, to Du Bois (2007), double consciousness was not just a bane, but also a boon. He believed that “after the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (p. 8). The gift of second-sight, very similar to the Emersonian concept of “feminine eye”, was the “message” of the “Negro blood” to the world; in his view
“the sensuous, tropical love” of the black was the only alternative to complement and save
“the cool, cautious New England reason” (Du Bois, as cited in Mocombe, 2009, p. 46). He argued that African Americans had developed a weltanschauung that was unexampled on the planet, and which, due to its race-transcending quality, had the potential to unfetter all persons.
Reprimanding Western colonization for its “carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law”, and thus spurring on “war, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 111), he viewed progress as “necessarily ugly” (p. 51) and privileged the African primitive lifestyle over the Western mechanical capitalist society. He regarded “the innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing” as the saving grace of withering American society which had for long ignored the gift and the message of the black race (p. 9); that is to say, “the Apollonian virtues” of Western civilization could not bring world eternal peace and joy without “the Dionysian attractions” of black culture (Adolph L. Reed, Jr., as cited in Allen, 2002, p. 221). Critiquing the dominant institutors of the American society and yet believing in and adhering to its democratic ideals and promises, Du Bois (2007) offered the African American gift of second-sight as an idiosyncratic feature through which they could recreate their self-realization, self-consciousness and self-respect and prove their potential abilities and worth to the white society and find a way into what he called “the kingdom of culture”. As Du Bois (2007) writes:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer
Iranian EFL Journal 370 self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (p. 9)
In other words, the dual African American identity endeavors to embrace Africa as a reservoir of historical identity and aesthetic values while maintaining Western conventions, customs and values for more practical reasons.
In short, Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness was practically both a lament of the consistent deprivation of American Negroes of their rights of equality, and at the same time a eulogy of their “gift” which not only was of great service to the formation of African Americans’ unique vision, but also could help America to rejuvenate herself by replacing
“her brutal dyspeptic blundering”, “coarse and cruel wit” and “vulgar music” with African Americans’ “humility”, “loving jovial good-humor” and “soul of the Sorrow Songs” (2007, p. 14).