Citation (Chicago Manual Style):
Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Reproducing Racial Globality, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism.” Social Text 19, no. 2 (2001): 15–41.
Thesis:
- “In view of this situation, this essay reads Du Bois’s work as an evolving response to the ideology of racial nationalism and as the articulation of a genealogical counternarrative that argues in some instances for African American inclusion in the nation, and in other instances for black belonging in the world.” (Pp.15-16)
Analysis:
In this article, Weinbaum uses W.E.B. du Bois’s conceptualization of ‘black maternity’ to address ideologies of American nationalism and to create discourse on the evolving responses to the concept of Americanness along the binary racial divide. In this article, Weinbaum argues the explicit re-reading of Du Bois’s philosophies that were meant to mimic concepts of racial superiority and conservation perpetuated in white nationalist discourse. Weinbaum’s re-reading of the scholarship on du Bois argues that du Bois’s use of the metaphors of black maternal body and reproductive themes were pivotal to help reintroduce black Americans into a narrative of inclusion in the nation.
In Weinbaum’s text she begins by introducing the concept of ‘race suicide’ as a reproductive theme related to ideologies of racial nationalism. According to ‘pundits’ or authorities of statistical birthrates of Americans, the rates of Native Americans were on the decline which mean that unless white mothers could somehow “be recruited into the reproductive service of the nation” (Pp.16), the United States would eventually become a nation “comprised of the darker-hued progeny” of immigrants and African slaves. Weinbaum notes that contemporaneous sociologists such as E. A. Ross argued that racial superiority could “not be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.” White women were considered the solution to the problem, however there needed to be a conscious effort to continue to repopulate and take the role as “nation builders”.
Weinbaum notes that scholars of du Bois have not fully or sufficiently acknowledged how du Bois wrote about the concept of “reproductive racism” and the roles that African Americans could not ever be a part of American nationhood because of their lack of pure “genealogical inheritance” (Pp. 17, Plessy v. Ferguson). Essentially Weinbaum states that the notion of “a racially pure kinship group” creates the perception of minorities as “genealogical outcasts” and “highlights the reproduction of racial kinship as central to the self-conception of the national majority.” (Pp. 17) Bringing together du Bois’s scholarly involvement with the concept of racial genealogy, Weinbaum states that he produces “various literary figurations” of black reproduction and maternity to show how the black maternal body serves as a symbol of representation of the source of belonging for African Americans (Pp. 18). According to the author, du Bois “reinserts the black mother into a discourse on belonging, but this time appropriates this vexed figure in order to argue for black inclusion in the world” (Pp. 18).
Important Quotations:
“…the concept of Americanness has been regarded as coextensive with whiteness, the exclusion of blackness and the castigation from the nation of those women thought to reproduce it have been mainstays of U.S. culture.” Pp. 15
“For the most part Du Bois’s readers have been divided over how to assess his representation of black women, especially mothers. Several extol his portraits of womanhood, particularly those of the figure he repeatedly refers to as “the black All-Mother,” while others reserve praise, and are only willing to claim Du Bois as a “profeminist” voice.” (Pp.18)
“Rather than assessing whether Du Bois’s representations are realistic or romanticized, I examine them in relation to Du Bois’s political and rhetorical claims about racism and nationalism and the meaning of being black in the twentieth century.” (Pp.18)
