Ahmad, Dohra. “‘More than Romance’: Genre and Geography in ‘Dark Princess.’” ELH, vol. 69, no. 3, 2002, pp. 775–803. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30032042.
In her 2002 article “‘More than Romance:’ Genre and Geography in Dark Princess,” Dr. Dohra Ahmad, Assistant Chair of the English Department at St. John’s University, investigates the deeper meanings of the geographies described in W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1928 novel Dark Princess. The realism of Du Bois’s description of Chicago and the fictional events that transpire in Chicago contrast with the poetic, less specific descriptions of the American South and India, which stand in for the oppressed Global South more broadly. Ahmad argues that Du Bois uses place and his descriptions of place to ultimately “[privilege] the liberatory possibility of the imagination against that constructed modern world” (799).
Ahmad explains that Du Bois’s descriptions of Chicago serve to construct a very well-defined world where possibilities and dreams are limited. Du Bois went to great lengths to conduct research on Chicago, from its political happenings to its buildings and neighborhoods to the department stores that were popular and accessible to Black residents at the time. This research helped him produce a very realistic section of Dark Princess, almost mundane in its amount of detail and specificity. Ahmad argues that this highly constructed world reflects Du Bois’s view of Chicago and the American North as being limited in possibility for liberation of African-American people and especially for collective liberation of all people of color. Working within this highly constrained system would not produce the larger-scale change which Du Bois hoped to achieve.
In contrast, Ahmad states that India and the American South are portrayed as “fantasy locales” (799). Du Bois uses flowing sentences filled with descriptions, often overly romanticized or playing into tropes of Orientalism. The place names are even fictional—St. James County, Virginia, and Bwodpur, India, do not exist. Ahmad argues that these descriptions “[unwrite] the very realism which he [Du Bois] himself worked so carefully to construct” (799). This almost dreamlike fiction allows Du Bois to imagine a different future, and it leaves room for the readers to dream outside the cold, harsh reality of the political system depicted in the “Chicago Politician” section of Dark Princess.
Ahmad also notes that the women of the novel seem to represent place: Sara for Chicago, Kautilya for India or the Global South more broadly, and Matthew’s mother and Jimmie’s wife for the American South or the Global South more broadly. The descriptions of Sara are terse and align with the style of writing used for Chicago, whereas Kautilya and Matthew’s mother elicit more loving and poetic descriptions. Ahmad argues that Kautilya and Matthew’s mother are intrinsically tied together, both through language that could refer to either of them and through descriptions of Matthew’s mother only “given life” through Kautilya (795). The connections between Kautilya and Matthew’s mother help weave the American South with India, creating a sense of solidarity among the Global South as a whole.
Du Bois conducted deep, detailed research on Chicago, but for India, he relied on one person’s review of his work. This contributes to the realism of the “Chicago Politician” section and the exocitism of Du Bois’s depictions of India and Kautilya. Based on Du Bois’s writing across his career, Du Bois maintained a fairly consistent view throughout his life of the India–Britain relationship being analogous to the African-American–U.S. relationship. Du Bois imagined that India could be a model for African-American liberation, and he also saw an opportunity for solidarity between the two nations/groups. Interestingly, the one Indian person with whom Du Bois consulted while writing Dark Princess did not seem to share Du Bois’s views. Du Bois’s New York-based friend Lala Lajpat Rai, head of the India Home Rule League of America, at one point expressed that African Americans “were comparable to those of the depressed classes or untouchables in India” (Naeem Gul Rathore in Ahmad, 790) and eventually acknowledged that racism towards Black people in the U.S. is an issue, but not a severely pressing one. Thus, it seems that Du Bois’s African-American–Indian solidarity was not based in his own personal reality, but he saw an opportunity to depict global solidarity via the similar struggles of the two groups and the imaginative possibilities opened up via poetic (though stereotypical) Orientalism.