Abstract
This final reading traces how W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) suggests to remove the ‘roots’ of slavery and exploitation and thus to change the United States. For this purpose, the novel refashions literary conventions from the nineteenth century, rewriting Greek mythology, Victorian Romances, and Hawthorne’s Puritans, to construct a story that cumulates in a utopian socialist community, led by an African American woman from the Deep South. In the novel, the European American bias of US American utopianism is consciously highlighted, to then argue that, not only should African Americans be included in this tradition, but that they are the ones who will bring about the utopian United States. This chapter then draws attention to Du Bois’s novelistic engagement with utopian practice by which he proposes a new order of production as well as a resolution of the internal conflict that African Americans struggle against, famously dubbed ‘double consciousness’ by Du Bois himself. The novel also allows to view the national-utopian discourse as more productive than the previous chapters and the fate of many utopian communities suggest.
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Notes
- 1.
In these cases, the intentional communities were a means to an end other than communalism (see Pitzer 2013, 35; Sargent 2013, 59). However, historical sources on African American utopian communities are scarce, and academic research on the topic is patchy; it is possible that a community that resembles Zora’s project more closely has existed but that I have not learned of it yet. See Chap. 2, footnote 11, for further reading suggestions on African American utopian practice.
- 2.
See Chap. 6 footnote 6.
- 3.
Du Bois had already drawn this analogy between cotton and the Golden Fleece in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The chapter that offers a sociological study of the situation of Black rural workers in the South is entitled “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece.”
- 4.
- 5.
As introductions to the topic of Afrofuturisms, I am suggesting Kalí Tal, “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction” (2002), Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Lisa Yaszek “Afrofuturism in American Science Fiction” (2015), and Alex Zamalin Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019).
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Adamik, V. (2020). ‘A Bold Regeneration’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). In: In Search of the Utopian States of America. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_7
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