The Phantasmagoria of Du Bois

• In Event: Centering Body, Mind, and Spirit for Radical Transformation in Racial and Ethnic Sociology

Abstract

The work of black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers has received little attention among sociologists, with Roderick Ferguson's Aberrations in Black and other critical works of black feminist and queer studies standing out from the crowd. Even then, most engagements focus on her conceptualization of how racial slavery produces the "body/flesh" distinction. Spillers has received less engagement across all fields with regards to her work on psychoanalysis and deployment of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. I argue that Spillers provides a novel reading practice from which to understand the modes of speculative racial inquiry in the works of both luminary black thinkers. This paper interrogates Spillers’ psychoanalytic reading of Du Boisian double consciousness as the basis for understanding even the early Du Bois as a radical theorist of blackness particularly rather than race more generally. Put differently, double consciousness indexes the mark of racial slavery on the black body, psyche, and spirit in ways that prefigure Fanon’s later work on sociogeny. As the concept of sociogeny is antidisciplinary, this work calls into question sociology’s disciplinary claims on Du Bois’ thought. This work continues the fraught meeting between blackness and psychoanalysis inaugurated most centrally by Fanon.

Author

• Semassa Boko, University of California-Irvine