Interracial Homosocial Bonds and Interracial Heterosexual Romance in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater

Abstract

The present essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s multi-genre work, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920) and maintains that the author’s failure to see the realization of his vision for an intra-class and interracial working-class coalition in early twentieth-century United States turns him to interracial heterosexual romance for its symbolic fulfillment in the book. Observing Darkwater’s rhetorical innovation, my paper contends that its sociological segments on contemporary white male workers’ violence enacted against their black counterparts are thematically closely related to its romantic story, “The Princess of the Hither Isles.” Thus, this essay suggests that Du Bois’s frustration over the destruction of interracial working-class male bonds encourages him to seek an alternative discursive space in which he is allowed to map out his sexualized and gendered vision of anti-racist solidarity. I also note Du Bois’s anxiety-ridden negotiation of male discourses as a black man who simultaneously occupies disempowered racial and empowered gendered positions.