Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois’s Religiously Inflected Poetry and Creative Fiction

Abstract

In religious studies, W. E. B Du Bois is familiar as a sociologist of religion and as a Black intellectual and activist. He is less known as a poet and speculative fiction author and certainly not at all as a Romantic author. I present Du Bois as a radical Romantic poet and speculative fiction author who employs religious forms and motifs to reveal and combat anti-Black racism among other forms of oppression. This portrait of Du Bois will no doubt surprise many. Romanticism is usually understood as a specific, delimited period of artistic and intellectual history—a period that Du Bois does not belong to chronologically nor (as most would assume) ideologically. But by bringing attention to Du Bois the radical Romantic, we see religious thought employed as a vehicle to depict the pain, humiliation, and cruelty of racist oppression in North America as well as the possibilities of social change.