This essay introduces the medievalism of African American sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s medievalism, a device to promote the ends of racial justices, also becomes a critical and epistemic tool, a lens through which to view and analyze the present by using the European Middle Ages for comparison and as a metaphor. Examining fictional, sociological, and historical writings, the essay traces Du Bois’s deployments of the Middle Ages from the first decade of the twentieth century to just after the second World War. It considers Du Bois’s early short story “The Princess Steel”; Du Bois’s interwar medievalism through his 1928 novel Dark Princess; and finally his 1947 speech “Color and Democracy” after his book of the same name. The essay establishes that Du Bois employed a sophisticated medievalism strategically in order to assert African Americans’ equal access to and ownership of US and European history and culture.

This chapter argues that in the 1920s, Du Bois’s conception of racial solidarity transitions from being focused upon the US toward the cosmopolitan, transnational, and diasporic. The chapter studies transformations and shifts in Du Bois’s racial theories during this decade. Valdez draws upon John Bryant’s notion of the “fluid text” to interpret Du Bois’s essays as forms of drafting and revising core ideals. Reading the essays published in Du Bois’s collection Darkwater (1920), the essay “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” (1925), and the novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), Valdez develops the idea of the “splendid transnational,” a future-oriented program of combating racism and oppression throughout the black diaspora.

This chapter considers how literary representations of interracial relationships between Asians and other US racial groups underwent a major transition in the 1920s, in response to shifting geopolitics in Asia. In Mae Munro Watkins Franking’s My Chinese Marriage (1921) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928), miscegenation plots serve to expand the possibilities for transnational alliances and to register American anxieties about social upheaval in Asia. Franking’s memoir provides an intimate look at the romance between a white American woman and a Chinese man in the USA and in China. Du Bois’s Dark Princess highlights the international revolutionary potential represented by the union of an African American man and an Asian Indian woman. These plots reject a binary choice between American or Asian identities. And yet, despite their progressive or revisionist energies, these works reveal a reliance on patriarchal, reproductive models of gender and sexuality and an erotic excess that serves both as justification for miscegenation and as fodder for critics. This chapter argues that these early twentieth-century discourses of reproductive heterosexuality and transnational, coalitional politics should be understood as an example of what Colleen Lye refers to as a distinctive Asian American “racial form.”