- Jahrgang 62 (2017)
- Vol. 62 (2017)
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- Ausgabe 4
- Nr. 4
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- Seiten 567 - 584
- pp. 567 - 584
‘Race’ as a Function of Capitalism and Imperialism
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Appropriation of Marxian Ideas in ‘The Black Flame’
Seiten 567 - 584
open-access
The extent to which the African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois was a Marxist is a highly controversial issue in Du Boisian scholarship. The following paper argues that he seriously grappled with Marxism and socialism throughout his life. This article’s focus is on the much-neglected trilogy of historical novels, ‘The Black Flame’, written in the 1950s. Designed as a sequel to his renowned Marxist revisionist study ‘Black Reconstruction’ (1935), Du Bois’s ambitious narrative project covers the eight decades of American history between 1876 and the mid-1950s. Using “the method of historical fiction,” Du Bois creates highly complex texts that combine various literary subgenres and styles with essayistic and scientific prose to offer a nonorthodox Marxian economic perspective on U.S. and international history. The three novels, ‘The Ordeal of Mansart’ (1957), ‘Mansart Builds a School’ (1959), and ‘Worlds of Color’ (1961), tell the life story of the black educator Manuel Mansart and his extended family. In a wide-ranging educational process meant to be shared by the reader, the protagonist eventually overcomes his provincial view of the “Negro problem” and gains a clear understanding of the role of the colored peoples of the world in global capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
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