The Epistemic Crisis of African American Studies: A Du Boisian Resolution

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. For me the notion of historical phenomenology is what Sartre in Search for Method ([1963] 1968) refers to as joining historical materialism and existentialism. I do not seek to link Du Bois’s historicism with Hegelian phenomenology, but to propose something more radical, i.e. to link Du Bois’s concerns with the African lived world – and his phenomenological method of investigating that world – to his concerns with African and world histories. Africans are enmeshed in the histories they make, hence as Sartre insists in Critique of Dialectical Reason ([1960] 2004: 71), “necessity [i.e. history], as the apodictic structure of dialectical investigation, resides neither in the free development of interiority nor in the inert dispersal of exteriority; it asserts itself, as an inevitable and irreducible moment, in the interiorisation of the exterior and in the exteriorization of the interior.” As for dialectical logic, it is the method and logic of investigating phenomena in movement, in time and as totalizing structures. As Sartre suggests, dialectics is the logic and method that investigates concrete realities from the perspective of the developmental unity of single processes ([1960] 2004: 15). Within the Marxian tradition there are several approaches to dialectics, among them E.V. Ilyenkov 1982, 2008). See also Aleksandrov 1980, Oizerman 1979, Schmidt 1982. For a non-Marxist interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, see J.N. Findlay's foreword to Hegel (1977).

2. In “Sociology Hesitant” (1905), he draws attention to the theoretical poverty of existing social science and its inability to unite the objects of research with the subject of knowledge. He criticizes its turn to positivism as against what he did to apply the phenomenological method as a way to transcend the problem of objectification. In The Autobiography (1968: 205), he says that while at Harvard and the University of Berlin “I began to conceive the world as a continuing growth rather than a finished product.” And he speaks of social science as engaged in “fruitless word twisting.” As he faced “the facts of my own social situation and racial world, I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the conditions and problems of my own group.” Of the white world, he says in Dusk of Dawn that it was “thinking wrong about race, because it did not know” ([1940] 1986: 596).

3. I have argued (Monteiro 2006, 2007a) that Du Bois must be viewed outside of the conventional framework of a “Negro thinker” concerned only with “Negro Problems.” His epistemology and logic disrupted the conventional social science of his day, as it does that of the present. His ways of knowing the world were shaped not only by his African identity (a radical and subversive identity in the American life world of the early twentieth century), but also by his radical political ontology.

4. It is too often claimed that Du Bois was Eurocentric. Molefi Asante, Cornel West (1999), and Kwame Anthony Appiah are examples of this stance. Du Bois, however, thought differently. In On The Souls of Black Folk, he said that he wrote The Souls of Black Folk as an African (see Du Bois [1904] 1996: 305). In “The Conservation of Races” ([1897] 1986) he locates black folk as Africans and part of a civilization rooted in Africa. See also Dusk of Dawn ([1940] 1986: 639–46) for references to the African civilization foundations of African Americans and African American culture. His studies of the black church (e.g. Du Bois [1899] 1995) point out African cultural foundations and modes of organization and administration of human relationships. In The Souls of Black Folk chapter “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” ([1903] 1986) he locates black religious practices in Africa and the Sorrow Songs as originating in African melodies transformed through the transatlantic slave trade.

5. The Veil of race is a metaphor invented by Du Bois for the color line and racial inequality. It appears for the first time in The Souls of Black Folk in the “The Forethought” and in the chapter “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” Speaking of an incident during his primary school days when a white student refused a greeting card from him he says, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” ([1903] 1986: 364). Speaking of the intellectual perspective from which he wrote Souls, he says that he left the white world and “stepped within the Veil” ([1903] 1986: 359). The Veil has social and epistemological significance; it is the existential standpoint from which Du Bois writes Souls and from which he constructs his unique approaches to social and human science. It informs his African centeredness. See also Monteiro 2000.

6. See Du Bois ([1904] 1996), where he says he wrote The Souls of Black Folk as an African: “In its larger aspects the style is tropical – African. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraints of my training and surroundings” (305).

7. Ronald Judy's “On W.E.B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking” (2000) is by far the best effort at explaining Du Bois's philosophy of science and his practice of science. He shows him breaking with positivism in the Comtean sense of searching out ‘facts’ to justify metaphysical statements and the British empiricism that held that the facts were everything. Judy says, “For Du Bois not only are facts products of complex social and historical processes, but science as a particular activity is a moment in the social process of production and is not self-sufficient. The fact that concerns Du Bois above all others is the Negro, his status as an object of analysis within the particular and various field of science, both physical and social” (29).

8. “Problem” for Du Bois corresponds to what we understand by crisis. I understand the famous phrase “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” to mean that the crisis of the twentieth century is the crisis produced by, to use Du Bois’s language, “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” ([1903] 1986: 372). However, we see in the chapter “Of the Dawn of Freedom” in Souls that in the post-Civil War period, race produced a crisis for bourgeois or liberal democracy. Du Bois advanced this perspective in Black Reconstruction in America. He periodizes the crisis produced by slavery and racial oppression as lasting from 1860 to 1880: a long and profound crisis of the democratic system, from which the nation and bourgeois democracy never recovered and which it never transcended. I have argued this point in Monteiro 2003 and 2007b.

9. See especially Du Bois “The Hands of Ethiopia” ([1920] 1986), Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 1992), The World and Africa (1947).

10. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is considered one of the founders of twentieth century phenomenology. Phenomenology for him was a scientific method of inquiry. He believed his method to be a turn away from idealism, especially Hegelian idealism, and towards the concrete. I don't believe that Du Bois and Edmund Husserl knew one another or were aware of each other's work. However, there are significant parallels to how they viewed philosophy as a scientific and practical endeavor. Husserl, though essentially concerned with thinking about logic and the relationships between the subjective dimension of knowledge and the objects of knowledge, acknowledged the existence of the social world of human relationships that were not mere mental pictures and psychological constructs. Moreover, he sought to deploy philosophy in practical ways as part of the scientific understanding of the world. Du Bois in his effort to apply philosophy to history in order to understand the social world (or as he put it to create sociology) is deploying philosophy as part of scientific investigation. Both Du Bois and Husserl displaced speculative metaphysics, the method that characterized Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, with scientific investigation. Each proposed that phenomenology was a method of investigating living things. For Husserl, phenomenology was about thinking, but thinking as relational and intersubjective. Du Bois’s phenomenology was of the concrete world, the social world. In this respect his phenomenology of race relations anticipates the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon's (see Moran's Introduction to Husserl 2001: xxxvii; Heidegger [1927] 1996: “Introduction”; [1935] 2000: “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”; 1992: “Emergence and Initial Breakthrough of Phenomenological Research”; Sartre [1943] 1984: “Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger”).

11. Marx begins with social relationships, proceeds to time and history and finally imbeds social structures in time and history. “The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse,” Marx asserts (1973: 101). The diverse of which he speaks is the social relational. Sartre ([1960] 2004) articulates this point in his idea that human relations of production are the concrete materiality that concerns historical materialism. Sartre, like Du Bois, sought to make philosophy practical by joining existentialism and historical materialism (see Dusk of Dawn where Du Bois says he sought to make philosophy practical by joining it to history). The effect in both cases was to move philosophy beyond ontology and epistemology to concerns with social relations: in the case of Marx and Sartre, relations of production; in Du Bois’s case, race relations.

12. Contemporary chaos theory parallels this understanding in the sense of its explanation of change, fluidity, infinite mutability, and effects that occur from points that are far from equilibrium states. It is my contention that Du Bois, working from the margins of US and European intellectual life, saw behavior as far less determined than did mainstream social thinkers. He was beginning to see the world and human behavior more dynamically. His idea of chance is a suggestion of variation, multiple outcomes, and unintended consequences. While he does not abandon the notion of Law, i.e. those levels of determination that constrain the individual's freedom to choose and act, he suggests that Chance occupies an equal status in understanding human action. This is a critical break with positivism and what he termed the speculative character of social science as it existed at the time he began his sociological research.

13. Lee Baker (1998: 26) argues that anthropology, in its early, mainly physical focus, provided a “scientific” cover and justification for slavery and genocide against Native American peoples. Speaking of the three founding fathers of American anthropology, Baker points out that each articulated an evolutionary paradigm imbued with notions of racial progress and racial inferiority. Their views supported US imperialism and Jim Crow racism. However, the biological approach best expressed in the eugenics movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century insisted that the best way to study black folk was through some type of biological model. The point was to prove black inferiority (see McKee 1993: 57). The race essentialist stance, paraded as new biology of race or eugenics, was viewed as the method by which to study ‘inferior races’ (see Barkin 1992: 142, 151). If social science was the way to study ‘civilized races’ then biology would suffice for the ‘uncivilized.’ Physical anthropology and eugenics tended to come together as a ‘scientific research agenda’ wherein anthropology would take up the measurement of the brain, the skull, height and other dimensions of inferiority or superiority. Of course whites, and mainly Northern Europeans, were believed to represent the normal physical type. There was a counter trend represented by Franz Boas in anthropology and Lester Ward and Charles Horton Cooley in sociology. Yet, it was Du Bois who made the strongest arguments against racism in the social sciences.

14. It has been argued that in understanding dialectical processes, rather than Hegel's Science of Logic (1969), it is better to go directly to Marx's own writings on dialectics and temporality. Guglielmo Carchedi (2008: 416) points out that the dialectical method which was concretized by Marx is a social research method that inquires into the origin, present state and further development of social phenomena. Du Bois, for his part, increasingly viewed African Being as emerging from historical and dialectical processes. The importance of this is that Du Bois was not a race essentialist and did not view Africans outside of world history (see Monteiro 2006).

15. J.N. Findlay observes that Hegel did not desire to step out of his time and his own thought situation. Says Findlay “To seek to transcend one's time is only, he [Hegel] says, to venture into the ‘soft element’ of fancy and opinion” (Hegel 1977: vii). The Hegelian method with respect to the phenomena of history surely influenced Du Bois, especially in this sense of historical specificity and situatedness. Furthermore, the sense of the unique is highly developed in Du Bois’s writing, i.e. that the historically concrete must be accounted for in historical research. Du Bois would have never countenanced Hegel's universalizing whiteness and trivializing the rest of humanity. Nor could Du Bois accept Hegel's casual dismissal of Africa. He opposed not only Hegel's racism, but also the racist metaphysic that informed his theory of history. Moreover, Du Bois did not view an existing historical sequence as the only possible historical trajectory. Hence he conceived of several possible historical futures. He increasingly stakes his claim upon an alternative to European modernity. Nor did he believe in an absolute outcome. Du Bois, unlike Hegel, placed the greatest emphasis upon human collective agency, which for Du Bois was increasingly that of the black worker and the working masses of Africa and Asia.

16. Gordon (2000) explains “the usefulness of a phenomenological analysis” in these terms: “It explores the intersubjective framework of meaning, the impact of multiple intentions and sociality, to present interpretations that at the same time do not fall into the trap of bad faith” (85). The strength of Gordon's phenomenological approach to social relationships is that it avoids the positivist trap of, in the name of science and objectivity, treating human relationships as a species of nature and hence treating them as we would treat objects of nature. There is, though, a profound difference between Gordon's phenomenological attitude – his privileging of the subjective (albeit as “intersubjective”) – and Du Bois’s and Sartre's (1960, 1963) linking dialectics, historicism, and materialism. The latter approach brought Sartre into the Marxian intellectual zone and Du Bois to a more radical epistemology, which was not Marxian, yet paralleled it. For this reason I refer to Du Bois's method as a Du Boisian historical phenomenology.