The Rhetorical Roots of Du Bois's Double Consciousness

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from W. E. B. Du Bois's education, I argue that rhetoric is an important, yet overlooked, source of his concept of double consciousness. Du Bois transposed ideas of a divided self as a source of both power and anguish from classical rhetoric to the experience of racial oppression. I show how rhetoric supplies the 'causal mechanism' of double consciousness; readThe Souls of Black Folk as superimposed addresses to doubly- and singly-conscious audiences; and argue that Du Bois's 1930s turn to black-separatist cooperativism represents an attempted escape from double consciousness — and a recognition of rhetoric's limits under systemic injustice.