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The Lesson Which India Is Today Teaching the World: Nationalism and Internationalism in The Crisis, 1910–1934

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

RACHEL FAREBROTHER
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Abstract

This article aims to test the limits of current assessments of the New Negro renaissance, which tend to emphasize either its investment in cultural nationalism or its Pan-African focus, by exploring the international contours of The Crisis under Du Bois’s editorship. Recent analysis of The Crisis has paid considerable attention to the productive juxtaposition of what Anne Carroll has termed “protest and affirmation,” whereby Du Bois positioned reports on racial violence next to accounts of African American achievements in order to prompt acknowledgement of the realities of racism. But such criticism has focussed almost exclusively upon Du Bois’s treatment of American issues, overlooking his sustained interest in international cultural and political concerns. Focussing on the editorial framing of Indian nationalism, this article contends that the common distinctions drawn between internationalism and nationalism are too simplistic to accommodate The Crisis's formulation of cultural nationalism by way of internationalism. Indeed, scrutiny of the magazine's formal texture, which stages dynamic interplay between poetry, short fiction, investigative journalism, photography, readers' letters and political cartoons, reveals tensions that animate Du Bois's project, not least his dependence upon colonialist ways of seeing and a narrative of racial unity across the African diaspora that serves to elide cultural and historical specificity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 603 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Du Bois, W. E. B., “The New Crisis,” The Crisis, May 1925, 7–9, 8Google Scholar.

2 Such emphasis upon “Peace and International Understanding” became official editorial policy with the launch of “The New Crisis” in May 1925, but interest in “the darker races of the world” characterized the magazine from the outset. Du Bois, W. E. B., “The New Crisis”, The Crisis, May 1925, 7–9, 8Google Scholar.

3 Valentine Nieting, “Black and White,” The Crisis, May 1924, 16–19.

4 Ibid., 18–19.

5 See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: Egypt and India,” The Crisis, June 1919, 62; “The Looking Glass: India's Saint,” The Crisis, July 1921, 124; “The Looking Glass: An Open Letter from Gandhi,” The Crisis, Aug. 1921, 170; “The Looking Glass: The Boycott of India,” The Crisis, Oct. 1921, 270, 272; “Editorial: Ireland and India,” The Crisis, Jan. 1922, 104; “Gandhi and India,” The Crisis, March 1922, 203–07; “The Looking Glass: The Affairs of India,” The Crisis, June 1922, 82–83; “The Looking Glass: A Word from India,” The Crisis, Sept. 1925, 229–30; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: Peace,” The Crisis, Dec. 1926, 59; “To the American Negro: A Message from Mahatma Gandhi,” The Crisis, July 1929, 225; “A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore,” The Crisis, Oct. 1929, 333–34; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois: Russia and India,” The Crisis, Oct. 1929, 350; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois: India,” The Crisis, July 1930, 246; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois: Magnificent India,” The Crisis, Jan. 1931, 29.

6 See, for example, Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993)Google Scholar; Foley, Barbara, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Dawahare, Anthony, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 There are some notable exceptions to this trend, such as Baldwin, Kate A., Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–63 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goyal, Yogita, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Boehmer, Elleke, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8Google Scholar, original emphasis.

9 Gillman, Susan and Weinbaum, Alys Eve, Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3Google Scholar, original emphasis.

10 See Carroll, Anne Elizabeth, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Kirschke, Amy Helene, Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Goeser, Caroline, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 Carroll, 43, 45.

12 Ibid., 47.

13 From May 1911 the “Men of the Month” column documented the lives of exceptional individuals, pairing descriptions of their accomplishments with photographic portraits. The gender politics that underpinned this regular column introduce further tensions into Du Bois's project. Notwithstanding the emphasis upon manhood in the column's title, it did feature accounts of black women's achievements.

14 Carroll, 45.

15 See, for example, “Echoes from around the World,” The Crisis, Oct. 1929, n.p; “The Battle Front of the Darker Races,” The Crisis, Sept. 1929, n.p.; “Round Table Talks – Twentieth Year Program,” The Crisis, Dec. 1929, n.p.

16 Du Bois, W. E. B., “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: England,” The Crisis, Jan. 1920, 107–8, 108Google Scholar.

17 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: England, Again,” The Crisis, March 1920, 237–38, 238.

18 “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: The World and Us,” The Crisis, June 1922, 55–56, 55. Juxtaposition of international and national stories was a common feature of Du Bois's editorials and the news column “The Looking Glass.”

19 Du Bois, “The World and Us,” 55.

20 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, “Reproducing Racial Globality: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism,” Social Text, 67, 19, 2 (Summer 2001), 15–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 31. It is interesting to note that Weinbaum's formulation elides Du Bois's (occasional) interest in an anticolonial alliance that includes Ireland.

21 Du Bois, “The World and Us,” 55.

22 Luis-Brown, David, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America” (1916), in Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 93–108, 106.

26 W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the World: The Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress,” The Crisis, Nov. 1921, 5–10, 5.

27 Luis-Brown, 7.

28 A tendency to position colonized peoples outside modernity is a familiar feature of Du Bois's internationalism. In “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” (1925), Du Bois draws a distinction between “the educated black” and “the primitive black,” calling for a Pan-African movement “[l]ed by American Negroes [that will] end color slavery and give black folk a knowledge of modern culture.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 385–414, 399, 412–13.

29 Edwards, Brent Hayes, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5Google Scholar.

30 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Ireland and India,” The Crisis, Jan. 1922, 104.

31 William S. Nelson, “The American Negro and Foreign Opinion,” The Crisis, Aug. 1923, 160–61, 160.

32 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois: India,” The Crisis, Aug. 1930, 281.

33 Du Bois, “Magnificent India,” 29.

34 Du Bois was not alone in using Indian nationalism as a model and a foil. In January 1922, A. Philip Randolph's “Economics and Politics: Black Zionism” drew parallels between Irish nationalism, Zionism and Indian nationalism: “the objective … is essentially the same, the achievement of independent nationalism,” he claims, “but they differ in method.” A. Philip Randolph, “Economics and Politics: Black Zionism,” The Messenger, Jan. 1922, 330–31, 334–35, 330. See also George Schuyler, “Gandhi and Non-violent Resistance,” The Messenger, Sept. 1925, 330–33, 333: “[i]nstead of repudiating the machine for the spinning wheel, they should use the machine as a means toward their emancipation, both from the capitalists and from deadening labor.”

35 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editorial: Bleeding Ireland,” The Crisis, March 1921, 200.

36 Du Bois, “The World and Us,” 55.

37 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editorial: Ireland,” The Crisis, Aug. 1916, 166–67, 167.

38 See, for example, Du Bois, “Editorial: Ireland,” 166–67 and “Editorial: Bleeding Ireland,” 200.

39 Du Bois, “Editorial: Ireland,” 167.

40 Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 8.

41 In his emphasis upon the need to reconstruct dominant European perceptions of America, Nelson calls for an expansion of the Pan-African movement and an increase in the number of African Americans studying in Europe. Such students would act as ambassadors at a time when few racial or national groups could “afford indifference to others’ opinions of his cause.” Nelson, “The American Negro and Foreign Opinion,” 160.

42 “The Outer Pocket,” The Crisis, Jan. 1921, 126.

43 “The Looking Glass: As Europe Sees Us,” The Crisis, Jan. 1921, 125.

44 “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: Visitors,” The Crisis, Jan. 1922, 104.

45 “The Looking Glass: America's Lynching Fame Spreads over the World,” The Crisis, June 1923, 84.

46 “The Outer Pocket,” 126.

47 Ibid.

48 For other examples of Du Bois's formulation of an ideal international audience, see the letters page in the magazine's second issue, which features correspondence from a Russian Revolutionist and a Dutch Working Men's club. “Letters,” The Crisis, Dec. 1910, 28–29. See also “Echoes from around the World,” The Crisis, Oct. 1929, n.p.; “The Battle Front of the Darker Races,” The Crisis, Sept. 1929, n.p.; “Round Table Talks – Twentieth Year Program,” n.p.

49 The Crisis kept readers updated on Tagore's activities, drawing attention to his achievements as a representative of “the colored races.” See, for instance, a report on Tagore's international lecture tours, published in December 1916: “[t]he world in these days is beginning to listen to a great, new voice representing the colored races and speaking with the peculiar authority of a Nobel Prize man.” “Editorial: Tagore,” The Crisis, Dec. 1916, 60–61, 60.

50 Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1918), 5Google Scholar, 79.

51 Elleke Boehmer, “‘Immeasurable strangeness’ in imperial times: Leonard Woolf and W. B. Yeats,” in Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds., Modernism and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 93–111, 103.

52 “A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore.”

53 Ibid., 333.

54 Ibid.

55 Gidley, Mick, “E. O. Hoppé Photographs the Recognized Face of Rabindranath Tagore,” Moving Worlds, 4, 1 (2004), 47–59Google Scholar, 51.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 58.

58 “A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore,” 334.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editorial: N.A.A.C. P.,” The Crisis, Dec. 1910, 16.

64 Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1913/tagore-article.html, accessed 28 Aug. 2010.

65 Monroe, Harriet, “The Motive of the Magazine,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1, 1 (Oct. 1912), 26–28Google Scholar, 27.

66 Wyatt, Edith, “On the Reading of Poetry,” Poetry, 1, 1 (Oct. 1912), 22–25Google Scholar, 23.

67 Monroe, Harriet, “Notes and Announcements,” Poetry, 1, 3 (Dec. 1912), 99–100Google Scholar, 99.

68 In this context, it is significant that the first appearance of Tagore's poems in the magazine featured alongside a lengthy editorial lamenting the obtuseness of American audiences who only seemed to appreciate “American genius” once it had been granted European endorsement: “Must we always accept American genius in this round-about fashion? Have we no true perspective that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look abroad for genius, only to find that it is of American origin?” Henderson, Alice Corbin, “Editorial Comment: A Perfect Return,” Poetry, 1, 3 (Dec. 1912), 87–91, 87Google Scholar.

69 Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 197, original emphasisCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Monroe, Harriet, “Editorial Comment: The New Beauty”, Poetry, 2, 1 (April 1913), 22–25Google Scholar, 25.

71 Hegeman, Susan, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4Google Scholar.

72 Max Eastman, “West to East,” The Masses, Oct. 1914, 6.

73 Hammill, Faye, Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 11Google Scholar.

74 “The New Order of Critical Values in Which Ten of the Modern Critics of America Are Allowed to Substitute New Laurels for Old,” Vanity Fair, April 1922, 40–41, 40.

75 In an article on German expressionism, Tristan Tzara contends that “Germany is charmed by the sweet harmonies of the exotic” and the “German forgets his race with Tagore or with beer.” Tristan Tzara, “Germany – A Serial Film – Some Considerations, without Notice or Enthusiasm, upon What Is Going on in Germany between the Acts,” Vanity Fair, April 1923, 59.

76 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 1–2.

77 Ibid., 22.

78 Du Bois, “Egypt and India,” 62.

79 Jessie Fauset, “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress,” The Crisis, Nov. 1921, 12–18, 14.

80 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois: Peace,” The Crisis, Dec. 1926, 59.

81 Du Bois, “Bleeding Ireland,” 200.

82 Peiss, Kathy, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 220Google Scholar.

83 With this move, the artist alludes to visual codes that were used to celebrate the achievements of exceptional individuals in The Crisis. The placement of a portrait in the centre of the page recalls images featured in the “Men of the Month” column.

84 Goeser, Picturing the New Negro, xi.

85 Advertisement for Madam C. J. Walker, The Crisis, Nov. 1919, 359.

86 David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization, 7.