Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:51:36.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Du Bois's Dark Princess, Kautilya's Arthashastra, and the Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2021

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess (1928) has become a paradigmatic text for left internationalism and Afro-Asian solidarity. Du Bois's hybrid progressivism enchants the American welfare state by giving it an intellectual genealogy that emphasizes Eastern political thought. Dark Princess engages with the Arthashastra, an ancient work of political theory that was ostensibly written by the chief adviser to Chandragupta, who unified the Indian subcontinent. The Arthashastra, and the legend concerning its composition, stimulated a Du Boisian fantasy of global leadership, one that parallels the contemporary recuperation of the Arthashastra for power politics. However, the Arthashastra's discussion of social programs and infrastructure also introduces the concept of the welfare state. Interweaving the Arthashastra with Black life in Chicago, Du Bois gives the progressive activist Sara Andrews a surprising agency. Today the most important aspect of Dark Princess is its vision of an antiracist and culturally syncretic New Deal.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Ahmad, Dohra. Landscapes of Hope: Anti-colonial Utopianism in America. Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyaya, Narayan Chandra. Kautilya; or, An Exposition of His Social Ideal and Political Theory. R. Cambray, 1927.Google Scholar
Barkin, Kenneth D. “‘Berlin Days,’ 1892–1894: W. E. B. Du Bois and German Political Economy.Boundary 2, vol. 27, no. 3, 2000, pp. 79101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. “The Black Savant and the Dark Princess.The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations, edited by Trivedi, Harish, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 4162.Google Scholar
Boesche, Roger. The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His Arthashastra. Lexington Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Byerman, Keith E. Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois. U of Georgia P, 1994.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V. Race Men. Harvard UP, 2002.Google Scholar
“Chanakya's Arthashastra Relevant to Understand Strategic Culture: Shivshankar Menon.” India Today, 9 Oct. 2013, www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/chanakya-arthashastra-relevant-to-understand-strategic-culture-shivshankar-menon-213738-2013-10-09.Google Scholar
Davies, Philip H. J. “The Original Surveillance State: Kautilya's Arthashastra and Government by Espionage in Classical India.Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage outside the Anglosphere, edited by Davies, Kristian C. Gustafson, , Georgetown UP, 2013, pp. 4962.Google Scholar
Drake, St. Clair, and Cayton, Horace R.. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1945. U of Chicago P, 2015.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. 1968. Oxford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. 1935. Oxford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “[Celebrating His Twenty-Fifth Birthday.]” Du Bois, Souls, pp. 192–95.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. Dark Princess. 1928. UP of Mississippi, 1995.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. Letter to Robert Morss Lovett. 17 Oct. 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries, MS 312.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Possibility of Democracy in America.” Circa Mar. 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries, MS 312.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Present Condition of German Politics (1893).” Central European History, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 171–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Reconstruction and Its Benefits.” The American Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 4, 1910, pp. 781–99.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Edited by Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Oliver, Terri Hume, W. W. Norton, 1999.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Talented Tenth.The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day, edited by Washington, Booker T., James Pott and Company, 1903, pp. 3176.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. Worlds of Color. 1961. Oxford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Edwards, Erica R. Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. U of Minnesota P, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Goyal, Yogita. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goyal, Yogita. “The Transnational Turn and Postcolonial Studies.The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, edited by Goyal, , Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 5371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grant, Philip A. “The 1950 Campaign of W. E. B. Du Bois for the United States Senate.Reevaluating the Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey: Escapist Fantasy or Relevant Reality?, edited by Conyers, James L. Jr., Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 8595.Google Scholar
Jha, V. N., editor. Kautilya's Arthaśāstra and Social Welfare. Sahitya Akademi, 1999.Google Scholar
Jones, Andrew F., and Singh, Nikhil Pal. “Guest Editors’ Introduction.” Positions, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 19.Google Scholar
Kanwal, Gurmeet, editor. The New Arthashastra: A Security Strategy for India. HarperCollins, 2016.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Harvard UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Kissinger, Henry. World Order. Penguin Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Kohli, Ritu. Kautilya's Political Theory: Yogakshema—The Concept of Welfare State. Deep and Deep, 1995.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Madhumita. “World Romance: Genre, Internationalism, and W. E. B. Du Bois.” Callaloo, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, pp. 537–52.Google Scholar
Law, Narendra Nath. Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity (Based on the Arthasastra of Kautilya). Vol. 1, Longmans, Green, 1914.Google Scholar
Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. Henry Holt, 1993.Google Scholar
Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. Henry Holt, 2000.Google Scholar
Manjapra, Kris. Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire. Harvard UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, Forrest. Insull. U of Chicago P, 1962.Google Scholar
Merriam, Charles Edward. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois. 27 Oct. 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries, MS 312.Google Scholar
Mishra, Suresh Chandra. “A Historiographical Critique of the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 70, no. 1/4, 1989, pp. 145–62.Google Scholar
Misra, Maria. “The Indian Machiavelli: Pragmatism versus Morality, and the Reception of the Arthasastra in India, 1905–2014.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 310–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms. Pennsylvania State UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Mullen, Bill V. W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary across the Color Line. Pluto Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Olivelle, Patrick. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra: A New Annotated Translation. Oxford UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Onishi, Yuichiro. Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa. New York UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Platt, Harold L. The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930. U of Chicago P, 1991.Google Scholar
Rai, Lajpat. The Problem of National Education in India. George Allen and Unwin, 1920.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. 1976. Schocken Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. “Du Bois's Passage to India: Dark Princess.W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, edited by Bell, Bernard W. et al., Routledge, 1996, pp. 161–76.Google Scholar
Rasberry, Vaughn. Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination. Harvard UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Ray, Hemchandra. “Economic Policy and Functions of the Kautiliyan State.” Journal of the Department of Letters of University of Calcutta, vol. 13, 1926, pp. 130.Google Scholar
Ray, Hemchandra. “Was State-Socialism Known in Ancient India? (A Study in Kautilya's Arthaśāstra).Sir Asutosh Mookerjee Silver Jubilee Volumes, Calcutta UP, 1922, pp. 429–46.Google Scholar
Reed, Adolph, Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois: A Perspective on the Bases of His Political Thought.” Political Theory, vol. 13, no. 3, 1985, pp. 431–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. “The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive.” Boundary 2, vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, pp. 2533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Cedric J. “W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty.Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, edited by Lemelle, Sidney and Kelley, Robin D. G., Verso, 1994, pp. 145–57.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Harvard UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Benoy Kumar. “The Futurism of Young Asia” and Other Essays on the Relations between East and West. Julius Springer, 1922.Google Scholar
Serby, Benjamin. “New York's Last Socialist Congressperson.” Jacobin, 20 Dec. 2018, jacobinmag.com/2018/12/vito-marcantonio-socialist-congress-puerto-rico-civil-rights.Google Scholar
Shamasastry, R. Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya. 1909. 4th rev. ed., edited by Vidwan, N. S., Venkatanathacharya, U of Mysore P, 1960.Google Scholar
Shoham, Dany, and Liebig, Michael. “The Intelligence Dimension of Kautilyan Statecraft and Its Implications for the Present.” Journal of Intelligence History, vol. 15, no. 2, 2016, pp. 119–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundquist, Eric. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Autobiography of Race.Introduction. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Sundquist, , Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 336.Google Scholar
Van Wienen, Mark W. American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois. U of Michigan P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Kenneth W. “An Inevitable Drift? Oligarchy, Du Bois, and the Politics of Race between the Wars.” Boundary 2, vol. 27, no. 3, 2000, pp. 153–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasik, John F. The Merchant of Power: Samuel Insull, Thomas Edison, and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C., Oxford UP, 1958, pp. 77128.Google Scholar