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SHAMOON ZAMIR
A "Prosody of Those Dark Voices": The Transformation of Consciousness
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nan address titled "The Need for New Ideas and New Aims," Alexander I Crummell, founder of the American Negro Academy, urged African- Americans to forget the past in order to successfully enter modernity. According to Crummell, "memory. is a passive act of mind... the Accessary and unavoidable entrance, storage and recurrence of facts and ideas to consciousness. Recollection... is the actual seeking of the facts, the endeavor of the mind to bring them back to consciousness. The natural recurrence of the idea or the fact of slavery is that which cannot be faulted. What I object to is the unnecessary recollection of it." Crummell's influence on the early thought of Du Bois has been well documented. The American Negro Academy's program to promote an interest in literature, science, and art among African-Americans as a way of developing a scholarly and refined elite was adopted with little modification by Du Bois in "The Talented Tenth." But Frank Kirkland, in a discussion of the problem of modernity and the past in the thought of African-American intellectuals, demonstrates that if Crummell's refusal of history and of active recollection leads anywhere, it leads to Booker T. Washington, not to Du Bois. Focusing his discussion of Du Bois on "Of the Sorrow Songs," the final chapter of Souls, Kirkland argues that Du Bois firmly ties the present and the future to the past and accepts the creative and critical function of recollection.
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res: WEB. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903. © 1995 by The University
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SHAMOON ZAMIR
For Du Bois, recollection pries loose from the e horrors fleeting revelations with forms of expression continuano of enslaved Africans punctuating that rendered their hopes good and just reflectio expectations of what counted as good transparent albeit constantly unfulfilled. It enables fra them as motives for rending "the Veil"; it enables them and de conceive themselves as breaking the repetition of unfulfilled expectations regarding what counts as good and just in thein future-oriented present. Without it, they fall victim to the "irreverence toward Time" and to the "ignorance of the deeds of men," succumbing to a complacency of mind regarding a par that goes unredeemed and a future-oriented present that lends itself to being forgotten.
Crummell's refusal of recollection ties his programmatics to American exceptionalism, a problematic alignment that persists, so the this study argues, in contemporary African-American critical thought Several forms of this exceptionalism have already been encountered, from the social sciences to the work of Emerson and James, Max Horkheime critique of Pragmatism's refusal of the past is pertinent here because it of a reminder that the failure of active remembering leads to the sacrifice creative contemplation and truth: conclusion
Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and mediate. Like science, philosophy itself "becomes not a contemplative survey of existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook upon future possibilities with a reference to attaining the better and averting the worst." Probability or, better, calculability replaces truth, and the historical process that in society tends to make of truth an empty phrase receives its blessing, as it were, from pragmatism, which makes an empty phrase of it in philosophy.
This chapter examines not so much the way in which Du Bois recove the facts of the past in his encounters with the acts of recollection alrea embodied in the great African-American spirituals as how these encount lead Du Bois toward a transformation of consciousness. This transformati is described in part through a shifting ratio of the senses. Between the and last chapters of Souls Du Bois moves from being seen by the " newcomer" to hearing the voices of the "black folk" as they sing the "sorr144
SHAMOON ZAMIR
Soulr's final chapter can be read as an attempt featu "contradiction of double aims" that traps the "black dark alike. In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" the black educator double awareness that the knowledge needed to educate the black mass a "twice-told tale" to most whites, and the knowledge needed world where the whites despise the "sool-beauty" of black cofture, bo world thing himself to abandon the culture in order to cite cansage of another people. These dichonomies are dissolved into gree complexity in "Of the Sorrow Songs." Grught in dhe
ploi Bois's commentary on the spirituals focuses on the political an commentary sociological meaning of the lyrics, not on the romantic and primitivist ei of some innate "soul-beauty." By adopting Herderian organic history, makes folk culture central to national identity, as a frame for his Du Bois suggests that the spirituals and their political content mint be mine central to any national self-definition in America. The destabilionion de white self-confidence also troubles the confidence of the black bourgeoise because the insistence on the spirituals as an embodiment of historical knowledge also reverses the flere of knowledge and power herween the Talented Tenth and the black masses. As in the first chapter of Souls, the crisis of the leadership elite is dramatized through the cave from Plato's Republic The allegorical reworking is the culmination of a series of dramatizations of the crisis of leadership, dramatizations that dominate the last five chapters of Souls, and it is a reworking to which Du Bois returns years later in Drek of Dawn
This chapter examines Du Bois's treatment of this crisis, the ways in which he anchors his descriptions within a dramatization of his own relationship to the spirituals and the revisions of the Platonic allegory, and how the account of consciousness suggested above arises out of these materials. In the final section the account of consciousness and of the relationship of self and the African-American masses in Souls is compared to Du Bois's later autobiographical writings. The chapter begins with a brief look at Du Bois's commentary on the political content of the sorrow songs in the context of other nineteenth-century American accounts of folk caltare and the spirituals.
The Sorrow Songs: Using an Unusable Past
In his essay "Negro Spirituals" (1867), Thornas Wentworth Higginson,
the white commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the fir
- Shamoon Zamir discusses the transformation of consciousness in African-American thought
- Du Bois's emphasis on recollection and the importance of remembering the past
- Crummell's influence on Du Bois and the rejection of history in favor of modernity
- Comparison of Du Bois's approach to the past with Booker T. Washington's
- Examination of the political and sociological meanings of African-American spirituals
- Du Bois's exploration of the crisis of leadership and the role of the spirituals in national identity
- Comparison of Du Bois's treatment of consciousness in "The Souls of Black Folk" and his later autobiographical writings
- The importance of recollection in preserving historical knowledge and challenging power dynamics in society.
Why would someone disagree with Alexander
- Some may argue that forgetting the past, as suggested by Alexander Crummell, leads to a lack of understanding of historical injustices and the impact they continue to have on society
- Others may believe that remembering the past is essential for creating a more inclusive and just future, as it allows for lessons to be learned and mistakes to be corrected
- Some may see Crummell's approach as a way of ignoring important cultural heritage and experiences that shape one's identity and sense of self
- Critics may argue that dismissing the past erases the struggles and achievements of marginalized communities and perpetuates systems of oppression and inequality.