Tales from Du Bois

<p><b>Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics including the concept of double consciousness by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.</b></p><p><i>Tales from Du Bois</i> brings together critical race theory queer studies philosophy and genre theory to offer an illuminating new comprehensive study of W. E. B. Du Bois's fiction from 1903-1928. Erika Renée Williams begins by revisiting Du Bois's tale of being rebuffed by a white female classmate in <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i> identifying it as a failure of what she calls cross-caste romance-a sentimental conjugal or erotic relation projected across lines of cultural difference. In Du Bois's text this failure figures as the cause of double consciousness the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. Far from being unique to <i>Souls</i> the trope of cross-caste romance Williams argues structures much of Du Bois's literary oeuvre. With it Du Bois queries romance's capacity to ground nationalism on the one hand and to foment queer forms of Afro-Diasporic reclamation and kinship on the other. Beautifully written and deftly argued Tales from Du Bois analyzes familiar works like <i>Souls</i> and <i>Dark Princess</i> alongside neglected short fiction to make a case for the value of Du Bois's literary writing and its centrality to his thought more broadly.</p>