Description: Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.
Brief description: Erika Renée Williams is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Review Quotes:
"Well researched and clearly written, this volume provides a new perspective on Du Bois, calling attention to his less-known writing ... Williams carefully documents the contexts and sources of the critical discourse surrounding her approach, making this excellent book a reasonable introduction to Du Bois." - CHOICE
"The insights this book offers are sometimes startling but also so convincing that one wonders how earlier scholars had not seen them." - Koritha Mitchell, author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
"Williams's archive and interventions are wide-ranging and far-reaching as she nimbly carries us from queer of color critique to medieval and African folklore to affect theory to Enlightenment formulations that braid aesthetics, morality, and reason. Still, it is not enough to say that this study of double consciousness and its enframement in cross-caste romance will be important to ongoing conversations across multiple disciplines. Rather, Williams invites a re-thinking of the key concepts that moor Black Studies." - Nicole A. Waligora-Davis, author of Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire