With her characteristic understatement, George Eliot exposes the English bourgeoisie's use of picturesque art to affirm its self-identification and selectively to ignore aspects of reality. However, where Eliot questions the bourgeoisie's assertion of its own interests at the expense of the laboring classes, W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk,¹ questions the racial self-identification and interests of white America—which he takes on as social and metatheoretical problems. Thus, rather than dismissing the picturesque as Eliot does, Du Bois finds that it can be recoded so that it functions instead to promote social critique, foster sociability across racial lines, and transform self-interest into an interest in others. All of this might explain why, in several key moments of Souls, Du Bois appropriates language associated with the picturesque aesthetic and produces what I am referring to as a "racial picturesque," in which a language of social analysis and critique is supplemented by romantic vocabulary and imagery. By aestheticizing the social and political landscape of early-twentieth-century America, Du Bois takes the risky step of creating a textual environment that, while not directly reflecting a real social environment, invites a coming to terms with the notion that the racial picturesque can reveal important aspects of the Negro problem and of our ways of approaching it.

The racial picturesque engenders a mobile subject who is sensitive to racial and other social inequalities. Facilitating the process of transforming a presumed knowledge into interests, Du Bois constructs a textual environment from the diverse tropes of the picturesque, specifically those remarking vistas, vantages, prospects, and other objects comprehended in spatial terms. By means of the picturesque, Du Bois's narrator shows a different face of the land and challenges the reader (about whom more will be said) to see and to respond differently to the signifiers representing the Negro problem. As writer rather than as narrator, Du Bois has two tasks: to motivate the reader to comprehend the color line and its effects on whites as well as blacks and to supplement conventional formulations from sociology and political economy with aesthetics, their seemingly polar opposite.²

Like Du Bois's fictive reader, readers today are asked to engage the metatheoretical questions upon which he works. Such questions appear in Du Bois's early writings, and there is continuity in the line of thought that produced "The Study of the Negro Problem," delivered in 1897 before the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and his proposal six years later in Souls that the "Negro problem," the problem of the color line, will become the "problem of problems" for the twentieth century. In his earlier address, Du Bois clearly states the methodological difficulties of extant investigations of the Negro problem, and he is acutely aware that scholarly concerns are not irrelevant when compared to the bare facts of oppression. He also indicates that what might be deemed the merely cultural or rhetorical are significant ways by which we begin to understand, take a position on, and attempt to resolve social problems. As he puts it, "However difficult it may be to know all about the Negro, it is certain that we can know vastly more than we do."³ The racial picturesque is one of the ways in which we can know, and perhaps do, more.