Une romance à message : Dark Princess de W.E.B. Du Bois et l’enjeu de la « ligne de couleur »

Résumé 0

Almost three decades after Du Bois first introduced well-known formulation, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line,” he published his fantastical novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), in which he imagines the possibility of an end to white imperialism. Describing the novel to his publishers as a “romance with a message,” Du Bois envisions an allegoric resolution to the problem of the color line that is configured through an interracial and international romance. Set in the early 1920s, Dark Princess fantasizes about the fall of European empires in Asia and Africa and the overthrow of systems of racial subordination in the United States against the backdrop of a love story between a South Asian woman and an African American man. This essay considers the political prophesy Du Bois first published in Souls of Black Folk (1903) alongside the fictive prophesy he sets forth in Dark Princess, of the end of Western imperialism. Through a close reading of the novel, the essay traces Du Bois’ simultaneous turn towards internationalism as well as his continued enchantment with democracy – an as of yet unrealized democracy that we might understand as, to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, a “democracy to come.” Why does Du Bois choose the genre of romance to tell a story of anti-imperial internationalism and radical democracy? What are the limits and the possibilities of Du Bois’ deployment of this particular racialized sexualized romance? Moreover, what exactly is the message of Du Bois’ “romance with a message?