Made to Speak: Du Bois and Helen Keller

• In Event: Du Bois Lately: Emergent Critiques of W. E. B. Du Bois at 150

Abstract

Perhaps the most famous of Du Bois’s figurations of racialized experience in the U.S. are couched in terms of the sensorium, especially vision and hearing, from the “second-sight” of double consciousness to the auditory power of the sorrow songs. What happens to our account of the sensory logic of Du Bois’s thinking when it is approached in conversation with disability studies (and even more specifically, Deaf-Blind studies)? Suggesting a historical line of response to this question, this paper tracks and interprets a sequence of interactions between two contemporaneous public intellectuals who, in the scholarly record, are seldom put in conversation except in passing curiosity: Du Bois and Helen Keller.

Though infrequent, their exchanges recurred for more than half a century, from the 1890s to the 1950s. They were often relatively casual in nature—as when Du Bois has a Brailled copy of Darkwater sent to Keller, or when Keller sends warm wishes for his ninetieth birthday. Whether despite or because of this casual, offhanded amicability, these moments of exchange between the two thinkers often point to significant areas of intersection and of friction between discourses of race and disability in the first half of the twentieth century.

For instance, in his contribution to the 1931 volume Double Blossoms, a collection of celebrations of Keller’s life (mostly in verse, though Du Bois chooses to write prose), Du Bois writes that his sense of connection with Keller was based in a potential link between her sensory experience and the visibility of racial categories. That is, he was first interested in her “perhaps just because she was blind to color differences in this world.” Here Du Bois imagines that Keller’s disability makes her, in a sense, innocent, and by this virtue a strong intersectional ally, as when she supported the NAACP at a controversial moment in 1916.

But there are also points of friction between the theories of embodiment and sensation that each thinker develops over the decades of their correspondence. Du Bois writes that Keller has been “made to speak without words, and understand without sound”—but many of Keller’s own writings suggest that she herself would strongly dispute those descriptions of her experience. With an eye both to their affinities and to these points of philosophical friction, this paper centers on Du Bois’s contribution to Double Blossom, drawing on his correspondence with editor Edna Porter in order to show the ways that massive problems of identity, experience, and intersectionality can be revealed in the revision of a phrase.

Author

• Alex Benson, Bard College