Musical/Textual Double Consciousness in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of…

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_9740
dc.title	Musical/Textual Double Consciousness in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
dc.contributor.author	Elia Adriano
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Venice University Press, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/2022/1/musicaltextual-double-consciousness-in-web-du-bois/
dc.description.abstract	Besides introducing groundbreaking critical concepts such as double consciousness, colour line and the veil, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was among the first books to attribute universal dignity to black music. It did so by devoting a whole chapter to the ‘sorrow songs’, seen as “the articulate message of the slave to the world”, as well as by opening each chapter with epigraphs composed of bars of ‘black’ spirituals juxtaposed with lines of poetry by notable ‘white’ authors – Symons, Lowell, Byron, among others – in a musical/textual version of double consciousness. Reconsidering the composite formal structure of The Souls of Black Folk and the role of the spirituals as ceaseless reminders of freedom, the paper explores the ways in which Du Bois’s speculations on black music foreshadow contemporary sonic/textual strategies.
dc.relation.ispartof	Il Tolomeo
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 24 \| December 2022
dc.issued	2022-12-19
dc.dateAccepted	2022-10-06
dc.dateSubmitted	2022-07-01
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2499-5975
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2022/01/019
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Double consciousness
dc.subject	Du Bois
dc.subject	Sound studies
dc.subject	Spirituals
dc.subject	The Souls of Black Folk

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Musical/Textual Double Consciousness in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

Adriano Elia Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia

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abstract

Besides introducing groundbreaking critical concepts such as double consciousness, colour line and the veil, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was among the first books to attribute universal dignity to black music. It did so by devoting a whole chapter to the ‘sorrow songs’, seen as “the articulate message of the slave to the world”, as well as by opening each chapter with epigraphs composed of bars of ‘black’ spirituals juxtaposed with lines of poetry by notable ‘white’ authors – Symons, Lowell, Byron, among others – in a musical/textual version of double consciousness. Reconsidering the composite formal structure of The Souls of Black Folk and the role of the spirituals as ceaseless reminders of freedom, the paper explores the ways in which Du Bois’s speculations on black music foreshadow contemporary sonic/textual strategies.

Published

Dec. 19, 2022

Accepted

Oct. 6, 2022

Submitted

July 1, 2022

Language

Keywords: Du Bois • Sound studies • The Souls of Black Folk • Double consciousness • Spirituals

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2022/01/019

Copyright: © 2022 Adriano Elia. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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