Alice's Discussion on Monday

Hi, all. I've given Alice's questions below in Roman type, and my own elaborations of them in italics. In particular, I'd very much like you to consider responses to these questions with reference to specific page numbers. Also, please do print this agenda out and bring it with you to class. See you tomorrow!

Discussion Questions

1) On page 11 in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” Du Bois mentions what it feels like to live with this constant feeling of a double consciousness. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This article first appeared in 1903, do you think that the idea of having doubles in every aspect of life, as Du Bois says, is still as relevant today in the African American way life, or do you think seeing yourself through the eyes of others (constantly) is less prevalent?

Alice has homed in on an extremely famous and important passage from Du Bois here, one still widely discussed and debated today. Is double consciousness an impediment to one who experiences it, or a gift, or both? What does it mean to be able to and/or to be forced to mentally exchange places with other people? Do Joan Dayan's notions of haunting (from "Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies") resonate with this notion of a mobile subjectivity? Can groups other than African Americans experience double consciousness?


2) What do you think of James Weldon Johnson’s first poem “The Creation?” While it is very similar to the traditional Genesis creation tale, what differences strike you as odd, especially the part about creating man?

3) On page 12 Du Bois talks about poems and songs where African Americans talk of the promise land, and he equates it back to a place that is promised by God and even better than that promised to the Israelites. But he says that the promise land has not been found. What do you think about the past dreams of the promised land and how they have changed for people in Du Bois’ time (meaning around 1900s to current)?

Also, do you see any changes between images of the promised land we saw pre-emancipation and images of the promised land we see in Du Bois and Johnson?

4) What do you think of Du Bois’ ideas of the African American realizing that he must be himself in order to make a place for himself in this world? Assimilation has constantly been a tactic whites have used to try to convince other peoples it is the best way to put their foot in the door of their world, for example the Native Americans. But instead Du Bois says that African Americans want to start out without assimilating even if they must start at the bottom, which ultimately means starting from intense poverty.

What evidence have we seen in this class that whites have been interested in, or even willing to consider, black assimilation into white ranks? What’s the relationship between the idea of assimilation and the idea of separate but equal or Booker T Washington’s famous analogy, "separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand"?

5) Johnson’s poem “The White Witch” is on the face a poem about a white witch, but what or whom do you think the white witch really is, who does she stand for, and what did he mean when he says he has kissed the white witch?

How simple is this poem’s relationship to the lynching practices we read about in Wells-Barnett? Is Johnson talking literally and only about white sexual temptresses? How are we to interpret the femininity of this personification of the evils of the white hegemony?