Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This study is based on the premise that navigating boundaries of the self is a historical, ideological process. Up until the turn of the century, categories of race, class, and gender were seen as fixed constructions that grounded individual selves within non-negotiable spheres. The advent of modernity, however, witnessed a number of political, economic, and social changes. Reformers in the early 1900s were thus able to renegotiate the structures of American public life, using education as their primary means. By combining accepted, unifying, pragmatic principles with more radical ideas of social revolution, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and W.E.B. Du Bois were able to rethink class, gender, and race and thereby attempt to mold anew the identity of the American public. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

The rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois contributed both to a sense of group failure among blacks and a sense of individual failure. Du Bois also created a need to explain the reasons for the failure of the group, as well as that of individuals within the group, specifically those within a segment of the black population deemed the talented tenth. Today the talented tenth is more generally spoken of as those occupying positions within the black middle class. Explanations for failure among blacks as a group are generally of two kinds. The first posits that the failure blacks experience as a group is due to the failure of the talented tenth to provide adequate leadership of the race. The second posits that the failure blacks experience as a group is due to the failure of American society to commit itself to establishing not only legal equality but also social, political, and economic equality for all Americans. Members of the talented tenth, not understanding that the root of the problem lies with the impossible situation Du Bois placed them in as saviors of the race begin to attribute perceived failures among blacks to American society. Instead of questioning Du Bois's goal and the possibility for complete 'racial uplift,' members of the talented tenth begin to question American society's commitment to realize the goals of the civil rights movement. Rather than optimism, one finds pessimism among blacks in the post-civil rights era. I examine Shelby Steele, Derrick Bell, and Randall Robinson's texts as rhetorical discourses that respond to the notion of a debt owed to the race, and evidence a sense of group failure among blacks. I illustrate how David Payne's topoi of therapeutic rhetoric provide a context for understanding not only the arguments these authors make about the nature of failure among blacks, but also the possible solutions these authors pose as avenues for consolation and/or compensation.

Contained in this thesis is an annotated edition of the correspondence between the African-American leaders W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois and Washington would go on to become rivals, their philosophies of education and racial uplift diverging from one another. Du Bois favored vocal protest and higher education, while Washington preferred a gradual approach of vocational education and economic advancement. However, this correspondence sees them attempting, albeit unsuccessfully, to work together. Covering the decade between 1894 and 1904, the letters touch on a variety of political, social, and educational topics at a crucial time for race relations in America. The differences between the two men that would lead to their split - age, regional origin, education, philosophy - are seen in the correspondence, but so too is a spirit of cooperation. These themes are explored in an introductory essay, while other more specific contextual details are provided in the footnotes accompanying the letters. The many individuals mentioned by Du Bois and Washington are annotated, allowing the reader a fuller understanding of the social world of black activism at the turn of the twentieth century. Narrative material is provided to help bridge the gap between letters, and a timeline detailing the relationship between the two men is also included. While some of these letters have been published before, their presentation as part of an annotated correspondence allows for a greater understanding of this primary source material.

The Cassandra Complex is a work in the traditions of critical philosophy and psychoanalysis. In The Cassandra Complex, I examine the intersection of violence, racism, and mourning. I hold that analysis of this intersection gives birth to a critical view on the politics of memory and the politics of racism as it operates in its most discreet forms. What makes violence discreet is that it escapes identity or is continually misidentified. I call that structure of violence that escapes being identified as such "White violence" and argue that this structure of violence undermines our normative ways of addressing racist violence in the present. This creates a continual social pattern of misidentification, mistaken memory, and mistaken practices of thinking about the violence of racism, both past and present. The present form of this misidentification could be called post-raciality, but it is specific to how we understand and remember our own history of anti-Black violence. I argue that post-racial memory produces memory only to facilitate forgetting and thus is only seen as a social pathology in the public sphere. The term "Cassandra Complex" provides an identity for the type of social pathology that appears at the critical edge of political discursivity. From the analysis of this social pathology, I argue that aesthetic sorrow, allegorical memory, and a sublime sense of mourning disrupt the normative functioning of the social pathology. Indeed, I argue that aesthetic sorrow makes the present strange by making the politically unbearable aesthetically unrepresentable. This sense of loss constitutes its own history, appearing first as an aesthetics of anesthesia, then as a memory that is also an amnesia. Thus, I hold that a robust notion of allegory that can be translated into the public sphere as a way of exposing the degenerative effects of post-racial memory. Moreover, I hold that allegory allows for a social analysis of those political conditions that make public that which has gone silent. I argue that an understanding of the political significance of that continual movement of silence is the task of understanding the present form of violence in the post-racial.

This essay explores early twentieth century African American literature to investigate issues related to identity formation. It uses W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to introduce and define the socio-psychological concept of the moment of knowing, an original component of this work. The concept is composed of two occurrences: alienation and self-alienation, which can be observed and examined in nonictional and fictional texts. Within the framework of multicultural theory, the moment of knowing along with double-consciousness are explored in a close reading of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing. In conclusion, the moment of knowing is shown to be a significant part of African American identity formation, and the central characters in Larsen’s work are revealed as psychologically and socially scarred as a result of their inability to cope with their African American identity.

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Using DuBoisian Phenomenology, a holistic methodological approach, this thesis examines race and gender in the context of DuBois' seminal essay "The Damnation of Women". "The Damnation of Women" demarks the emergence of a new dialectic and practical approach to the liberation of humanity. To that end, this study is heavily undergirded by DuBoisian scholarship. Inevitably, this research shows the connections between race, gender, the dialectic and the African Worldview to reveal the common through line of DuBoisian philosophy. / African American Studies

This dissertation explores embodiments of citizenship in three historical pageants of 1913. As historical pageantry reached the height of its popularity in the early twentieth century, the form was criticized by those who felt it represented a limited understanding of community and citizenship. Historical pageants came to prominence at a time in the nation’s history when lynching plagued the south, women agitated for the right to vote, and labor unions organized to demand better working conditions. Popular historical pageants presented a history which ignored these pressing social issues and supported the status quo. As a result, while pageants gained popularity the form was taken up by groups seeking to use pageants for different political purposes. My dissertation interrogates embodiments of citizenship in Progressive Era pageantry through three case studies: W.E.B. Du Bois wrote and staged Star of Ethiopia, devoted to re-telling African-American history; John Reed organized members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for a performance of The Paterson Strike Pageant to aid laborers on strike; and Hazel MacKaye staged Allegory in support of women’s suffrage. While each pageant aimed to promote diversity, once each pageant’s historiography landed on live bodies, the gaps between what the pageant argued for and who the pageant simultaneously excluded were made visible. Allegory crafted an argument for white women’s suffrage by excluding recent immigrant and women of color; Du Bois sought to promote the African American middle class by denigrating the working classes; John Reed painted an image of the IWW as a fully united working class while ignoring the racial and ethnic differences that had led to tensions among the group. Despite their progressive intentions, once each pageant moved its political arguments on stage, the choices they made in performance belied their inclusive aspirations. / text

This paper examines assimilation and double-consciousness in the poetry of Charles Simic, Marilyn Chin, and Susan Atefat-Peckham. Each of these three poets writes in English in an American setting but has a different heritage. Simic is a native Yugoslavian (Serbia) who fled Europe during WWII. Chin arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong as a child, and Atefat-Peckham is a first-generation American raised by Iranian parents. Each of these poets expresses some degree of assimilation and double-consciousness (as described by various theorists including W.E.B. Du Bois and Werner Sollors, among others) through the form and content of their poetry. This paper compares the three poets' work, attempting to draw inferences on how double-consciousness and assimilation is expressed in their poems and to what degree. This study argues that Simic is the least assimilated (as his poetry portrays the most severe double-consciousness), Chin is in-between and Atefat-Peckham the most assimilated.

O presente trabalho tem como intuito analisar como a representação visual de afroamericanos foi empregada pela revista The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races, durante sua primeira década de existência (1910-1920), com o objetivo de promover uma nova maneira de apresentar a imagem do negro para a sociedade estadunidense. Este periódico, mecanismo de protesto e propaganda da maior organização para a promoção de direitos civis dos Estados Unidos, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP), esteve por vinte e quatro anos sob a editoração do intelectual e militante afro-americano William Edward Burghardt Du Bois e foi intrinsicamente influenciada pela forma como seu editor entendia as relações raciais, criando, muitas vezes, impasses e atritos entre ele os demais membros da NAACP. Em uma sociedade em que predominava uma imagem distorcida do afroamericano de forma a denegri-lo, pode-se dizer que a produção visual em The Crisis procurou alterar aquela antiga representação erigindo ideologicamente um senso de autoafirmação. / This study aims to analyze the visual representation of African Americans in the journal The Crisis The Record of Darker Races from 1910-1920, as part of its objective to promote a new way of displaying images of blacks to American society. This journal was the principal organ of the largest organization for the promotion of civil rights in the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For twenty-four years it was edited by the prominent black intellectual and militant William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and was intrinsically influenced by how he understood race relations, often creating friction between him and other members of the NAACP. In a society in which a distorted picture of African Americans prevailed, the visual production in The Crisis sought to alter such representations by ideologically affirming a sense of self-affirmation.