A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk

Extract

A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk. By Eugene Victor Wolfenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 192p. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

It has been a long time coming, but political theorists (at least a few) are finally paying attention to The Souls of Black Folk, described by Eugene Victor Wolfenstein as “one of the masterworks in the African-American/American literary canon” (p. 1). Published in 1903, Souls includes nine previously published articles among its 14 chapters. This accounts for the prevailing tendency to view the text as a compilation or collection of discrete pieces, and the related inclination to focus on specific parts and themes rather than the whole. Hence, W. E. B. Du Bois is widely credited (rightly) for the concept of double-consciousness, but such appropriation tends to pluck the singular treasure from its setting. And this constitutive setting, the text conceived as “an intricate and coherent narrative, indeed as an organic whole and even at times as a living presence” (p. 2), is what Wolfenstein proposes to reconstruct.