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""Photography on the Color Line" should be widely read and widely taught. In this outstanding book, Shawn Michelle Smith has offered not only a spirited reading of a historically important group of photographs but also a methodology and theoretical grounding that are widely applicable even beyond the specific archive of the Du Bois photographs."--Laura Wexler, author of "Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism"

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Photography on the Color Line

Duke University Press

Chapter One

In what has become one of his most widely quoted propositions, W. E. B. Du Bois describes "double-consciousness" as "the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," thereby drawing on a visual paradigm to articulate African American identity in the Jim Crow United States. It is the negotiation of disparate gazes and competing visions that imposes the "two-ness" of double consciousness. The recognition of violently distorted images of blackness-those projected "through the eyes of [white] others"-produces the psychological and social burden of attempting to assuage "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals."

Many of Du Bois's most influential concepts from the turn of the century are focused through visual imagery, including, in addition to double consciousness, what he calls "the Veil" and "second-sight," and this chapter argues for Du Bois as an early visual theorist of race and racism. Du Bois not only utilized visual images to describe racial constructs but also conceptualized the racial dynamics of the Jim Crow color line as visual culture. In Du Bois's early writings, the color line represents not only the systemic inequity of racialized labor but also a visual field in which racial identities are inscribed and experienced through the lens of a "white supremacist gaze." While race may be structurally codified and entrenched according to the movement of global capital via colonialism, imperialism, and the slave trade, in Du Bois's understanding, the experiences of racialization and racial identification are focused through a gaze and founded in visual misrecognition. Attending to the visual in Du Bois's early written works enables one to see identity and race as both effects and cornerstones of visual processes, as both products and producers of visual culture.

Double Consciousness as Visual Culture

Over the course of the century following his initial proclamations, double consciousness has proven to be one of Du Bois's most evocative conceptions, framing and shaping much creative and scholarly work on the cultures of the African diaspora. Despite its influence, however, double consciousness remains a subtle and complicated insight, and recently scholars have begun to historicize Du Bois's use of the term by tracing its genealogy. In my own assessment here, I aim to draw out the relatively unexplored legacy of visual psychological ideas that Du Bois draws on and fundamentally reconfigures to theorize double consciousness. Once again, it is the image of himself that Du Bois sees through the eyes of white others that makes him feel his "two-ness"; it is the image of self as other that Du Bois cannot fully assimilate.

By focusing on the visual terms through which Du Bois conceives double consciousness, one finds that the connections between his theory and William James's early work in psychology are both less direct and more fundamental than others have posited. Indeed, the most important conceptual links shared by Du Bois and James, which clarify Du Bois's unique use of double consciousness, become fully apparent only when considered through a visual lens. My argument necessarily takes issue with part of Shamoon Zamir's recent and important study, Dark Voices, in which he spends considerable energy distancing Du Bois's thought from that of James. Zamir has argued that during Du Bois's years at Harvard, it was not his studies with James, but his studies with George Santayana, of Hegel and German philosophy, that most influenced Du Bois's understanding of double consciousness. In a detailed comparison of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Zamir suggests that Hegel provided a means by which Du Bois could theorize "the relationship of consciousness to history." But while Zamir argues carefully and convincingly for the Hegelian thematics in The Souls of Black Folk, his analysis fails to account for the visual dynamics central to Du Bois's conception of double consciousness. Indeed, the one aspect of Du Boisian double consciousness Zamir cannot reconcile with Hegelian philosophy-"the linking of self-consciousness to seeing and being seen"-can be illuminated by a closer analysis of James's Principles of Psychology. And as Zamir notes, James was teaching portions of Principles in 1889, the year Du Bois studied with him at Harvard.

While I will persist in drawing connections between the early work of Du Bois and the contemporary work of James, I do not aim to make a case for scholarly influence by tracing a genealogy of great ideas through great men. For certainly, as David Levering Lewis suggests, "the irreducible fact that Du Bois's existence, like that of other men and women of African descent in America, amounted to a lifetime of being 'an outcast and a stranger in mine own house,' as hewould write, was a psychic purgatory fully capable by itself of nurturing a concept of divided consciousness, whatever the Jamesian influences." And yet, the particular manner in which Du Bois articulated double consciousness does run parallel to James's thought in important ways. Ultimately, however, I am interested, as is Zamir, in demonstrating how Du Bois adapted, rather than adopted, the critical thinking of his day, and further, like Priscilla Wald, in how Du Bois's adaptations commented on the limitations of the thought he worked with and transformed. Du Bois's thinking was clearly in flux at the turn of the century. He was struggling to refashion received models of inquiry, attempting to develop new languages and methods for assessing and articulating African American life in all its geographic, economic, and gendered variety. He sought fervently to develop an anti-essentialist methodology that could challenge the legacy of biological racialism and the emergence of eugenics, both of which claimed to delineate a hierarchy of innate, inherent, biological racial differences. Following an elite education and training in the United States and Germany, Du Bois modified and reformulated the purportedly "universal" theories that he inherited-theories outwardly unmarked but clearly Eurocentric, white supremacist, and masculinist-to make them adequate to his own experience and race-conscious social, economic, cultural, and psychological analysis. Thus, while the particular psychological conversations he entered into shaped his own thinking at the turn of the century, Du Bois also pushed the limits and challenged the foundations of those conversations by attending to the question of race.

Several scholars have noted James's use of double consciousness to discuss personality disorders and pathologies. And while interesting overlaps exist between James's clinical psychological use of the concept and Du Bois's adaptation, Du Bois's specific articulation of double consciousness in visual terms resonates most powerfully with the more general processes of identity formation and self-recognition that James describes as fundamental to the development of "normal" consciousness. In other words, Du Bois does not adopt the category of an anomalous pathology to articulate African American distinctiveness; instead, he racializes the very process of identity...