Darkwater’s New York City
TODAY’S GUEST POSTER IS MARC FARRIOR. (SEE BIO BELOW.)
One hundred years ago today… W.E.B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, one of the lesser known works among his large body of publications.
First printing of Darkwater by W.E.B. Du Bois., Harcourt Brace 1920. Journal of Race Development.
Darkwater is a curious text in Du Bois’s corpus, a hybrid mix of prose, poetry, essay, mythology, and gospel that marks it as perhaps a quintessential text of Black Modernism. With a renewed spike in the interest of Du Bois’s work as a result of the sesquicentennial anniversary of his birth along with heightened global conversations on the intersections of social justice, Blackness, and socialism, Darkwater is well-positioned as a reference text for exploring a lineage of divisive sociological debates. The included works, referred to here as chapters, seemingly alternate in terms of their genre, particularly between fiction and non-fiction. These chapters are therefore often discussed as self-contained works, a quality also partially derived from the fact that several of them were previously published prior to their inclusion in Darkwater. When read as a more unified text, where chapters serve as the progression of a narrative arc rather than parts of an anthology, the entire work then lends itself to more complex and nuanced readings.
W. E. B. Du Bois in the office of The Crisis. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Note: other sources, such as the Wisconsin Historical Society, claim that this photo was taken in Du Bois’s offices in Atlanta University, sometime in 1916-17.
A central theme that rises out of such an inclusive reading is Du Bois’s preoccupation with the collisions of time and space that shape and tear apart Blackness. What helps to anchor this unstable spatio-temporality throughout the text are the many renderings of New York City and how it serves as one of the cradles of Blackness for Du Bois. New York makes its first appearance as a gateway to the Americas for two Huguenots, Jacques and Louis DuBois who flee oppression in France, settling in seventeenth century New York. From here Du Bois traces ancestry to a grandfather in the nascent port city and who serves as a chief steward on a passenger boat between New York and New Haven. Flight and persecution are key themes that Du Bois ties to New York City along with echoes of the Middle Passage. It is a vexed city in Darkwater, containing at once the “white world’s vermin and filth…All the scum of New York” and is where children “scream and run and frolic, and all is good and human and beautiful and ugly and evil, even as Life is elsewhere.”
Harcourt, Brace and Howe advertisement. The Crisis Vol 20, No. 5 (March 1920). The Modernist Journals Project.
“The Comet” is Darkwater’s most well-known chapter and the final prose piece in the work that is often read as a short story. The setting is a post-apocalyptic New York City, both an ode to a nostalgic charm and a dire warning of an impending crisis where Du Bois questions not just the city’s ability to host civility but also civilization’s capacity to break free of its own dark and veiled inhumanity. At its core Darkwater is a fountain of philosophical and propositional musings on questions of identity that preoccupy intellectual and artistic movements of New York City in 1920, the year of Darkwater’s publication. The city itself serves less as a central character in the work and more of a standard-bearer, leading a movement urging social change in the text at the same moment the city itself begins to find a stride and voice in a turbulent time at the site of an always precarious space.
WRITTEN BY MARC FARRIOR. FEBRUARY 28, 2020.
MARC FARRIOR IS A MILITARY VETERAN AND PHD CANDIDATE IN LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA. BORN IN GERMANY, HE RECEIVED HIS MA AND MFA FROM QUEENS COLLEGE IN NEW YORK CITY. HIS RESEARCH IS FOCUSED ON CONCEPTS OF RACE, CONFLICT, HOME, TEMPORALITY, AND MYTHOLOGY AS FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIO-CULTURAL IDENTITY THAT SHAPE COUNTER-NARRATIVES IN AMERICAN LITERARY MOVEMENTS. HIS DISSERTATION PROJECT IS A NARRATOLOGICAL STUDY THEORIZING THE DEVELOPMENT OF A ‘ROGUE EPIC’ BY MARGINALIZED WRITERS IN THE PERIOD LEADING UP TO AND BEYOND THE FIRST WORLD WAR. HE CURRENTLY TEACHES WRITING AND LITERATURE AT SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY AND PIMA COMMUNITY COLLEGE. TWITTER: @MARCFARRIOR