The essays collected in this issue celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903 by A. C. McClurg, Souls is Du Bois's biting dissent from the racist and nationalist ideologies animating the public, political culture of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow America. Announcing that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," it is Du Bois's best-known attempt to explore the "strange meaning of being black" in a society that was structured by racial apartheid and that consistently treated blacks with contempt.¹ To this end, Souls details a sweeping tableau of African American social and political life, highlighting the economic and social legacies of slavery, the fight for political and civil rights, and the contributions of African Americans to the spiritual and material formation of the American nation. The advent of Souls was an incisive event—an original, philosophically daring, and artfully wrought initiative that gave new life to the black resistance to white supremacy. In the words of David Levering Lewis, it "was like a fireworks going off in a cemetery…sound and light enlivening the inert and the despairing…an electrifying manifesto mobilizing people for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history."²

Lewis's remarks could be taken as an epigraph for the volume as a whole, because they suggest that Souls is both a call to arms and an aesthetic event, at once a manifesto and electrifying sound and light—thus, a book that demands to be read equally as political argument and literary art. His remarks also resonate with the now commonplace claim that Du Bois's book invites appraisal from many disciplinary perspectives—including politics and literary criticism—because its impact and significance cannot be reduced to the terms available to just one such point of view. The essays collected here support this claim, for they demonstrate the possibility of combining literary critical analysis with detailed reflections on Souls's larger political themes (e.g., white supremacy, homosocial patriarchy, and the relation between race and nation) to produce bifocal readings of Souls. Incorporating the sensibilities of the literary critic and the political theorist alike, they rely on the former to explore aspects of Du Bois's political agenda and on the latter to make sense of his aesthetic choices.

But these essays also support a stronger claim, namely, that the terms of literary criticism have a crucial role to play in exploring the efficacy with which texts establish their literary and political authority. More than any other instance of twentieth-century African American writing, Souls has emerged as an authoritative text: specifically, as a text that African Americans have regarded as establishing an appropriate discursive and normative framework for African American political and cultural practices. Few scholars would deny that Du Bois's critique of Booker T. Washington addresses a constellation of political theoretical issues that have decisively (if not exclusively) shaped twentieth-century African American political debates—an eventuality that William Ferris seems to have anticipated when, just ten years after Souls first appeared, he dubbed it "the political Bible of the negro race."³ And most would agree that Souls has played a decisive role in the formation of African American literature. Indeed, Arnold Rampersad has suggested that "all of African American literature of a creative nature" stems from Souls, while Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written that "no other text, save possibly the King James Bible, has had such a fundamental impact on the shaping of the African American literary tradition."⁴ Souls has demonstrated an enduring efficacy as a source of both political and literary authority. As I argue below, it also conceptualizes these modes of authority as convergent, which is one reason why appreciating Du Bois's text as literary art is essential to appreciating its political influence. While Souls is historically rooted in the segregationist era of Jim Crow, it still demands our attention: the book's literary and political grip extends well beyond its origins, so much so that its compelling ideas and memorable themes continue to shape valuable discussions of black literature and racial politics in postsegregation America.⁵

Let me clarify the issues at stake here by distinguishing between Souls as a political theoretical defense of a politics and Souls as a performance of the politics it defends. As political theory, the book answers the question, "What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?" Thus it argues that a politics fit to respond to American racial apartheid must satisfy two conditions. The first relates to Du Bois's depiction of African Americans as "masses": to wit, to his characterization of African Americans as an aggregate of uncultured, premodern slaves, or former slaves. The second relates to his representation of black Americans as a "folk": that is, to his description of them as the bearers of a historically formed and collectively shared ethos, or spirit. For Du Bois, a politics suitable to counter Jim Crow had both to uplift the black masses—that is, assimilate them to the norms of modernity by battling prejudice and backwardness—and to articulate the ethos of the black folk. In short, it had to be a politics of modernizing "self-realization" (Du Bois's term) that expressed the spiritual identity of the folk: what I have called a "politics of expressive self- realization."⁶ Souls enacts this politics—most explicitly, I think, in its concluding chapters—by presenting and distinguishing itself as an act of expressive and modernizing political leadership. Performing the politics it defends, the book is meant to satisfy the conditions it identifies as essential to a black American politics that would successfully respond to white supremacy.

As both theory and performance, Souls is a densely figurative and carefully plotted composition that invites literary criticism. In the essays belonging to the present issue, careful exegesis and nuanced interpretation underline Souls's literary allusions, its iterated suturing of music and poetry, and its reliance on allegory and the aesthetics of the picturesque. Through readings that concentrate on what the epigraph to this introduction calls "formal principles," these essays engage Du Bois's book as political thought or political action while also offering insight into its success in establishing its authority. To be sure, not all the contributions echo, or obviously converge with, the reading of Souls I have sketched here (see, e.g., the essays by Alexander G. Weheliye and Vilashini Cooppan). Yet all of them raise questions bearing on Souls's significance as political theory and political performance, and they do so by attending to its specificity as a text—to its use of allegory to understand the political significance of race, to its figurings of homosociality to conceptualize political leadership, and so forth. In a related vein, they also prompt the thought that the politics performed by a text, due to the literary complexity of that text, may quite unwittingly diverge from and put into question the theory the politics is intended to embody.⁷ For most of the contributors to this issue, literary reading and political reading are inseparable.

Not all Du Bois scholars appreciate a critical consciousness that concentrates formal and other considerations. It is significant, for example, that the currently most influential study of Du Bois's political thought dismisses the idea that literary analysis can lend itself to political interpretation. Surveying the history of the critical reception of Souls, Adolph Reed has reproached petit bourgeois, postsegregation-era black intellectuals for giving short shrift to Du Bois's attack on Booker T. Washington and for preferring literary (or, more generally, "text-based") to political readings of the book. But Reed's polemic depends on two false premises: first, that Du Bois's response to Washington exhausts Souls's worth as political thought; and second, that literary and political readings of Souls simply cannot coincide. As the essays here collected demonstrate, Souls's importance as political thought far and away exceeds its treatment of Washington. As they also attest, the view that literary and political readings necessarily exclude each other, so that interpretation is always a matter of opting for one rather than the other, is not sustained by careful, attentive, and subtle readings of Souls's political and literary strategies.⁸