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The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michelle H. Phillips
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Abstract

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 590 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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