A review by ralowe
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

5.0

so we started a fanon reading group. actually it was supposed to be an afropessimist reading group. i kind of don't really want it to be that. saidiya hartman apparently disagrees with frank wilderson's classification as an afropessimist. i don't need afropessimism to tell me not to vote but if that does it for you then whoopty-woo. it's a fun way to read film. i suggested adding *souls* to our reading list because during the q&a of a recent talk on poetry and blackness in berkeley fred moten shared nahum chandler's duboisian forumulation of a para-ontological distinction between blackness and black people. i'm still re-reading *of exorbitance* but the only thing i've been able to uncover was a heideggerian term "ontico-ontological" which he cited in the first translation of *of grammatalogy* which i just so happen to have on my shelf. i haven't actually gotten around to reading heidegger but re-reading the derrida passage chandler cites offers the idea of the arche-trace as the plentitude prior to the sign. should we then imagine black people prior to blackness, and then blackness prior to black people, over and over, in a kind of cyclical causation? i'm still extremely shaky on what moten intends with chandler's unorthodox reading of dubois and i was even more confused after actually reading dubois. am i supposed to be noticing dubois describing facts of blackness? because just as often he seems to be describing it as a lived experience, sometimes characteristics or a feeling. or maybe i have it backwards, farrington's mistranslation of fanon is actually closer to what he intended, even if he was homies with sartre. was i prepared for the melancholy that hung over this book? the horrible infant mortality story about his first born? our reading group will each report back on three chapters and i get to do that one, the religious fatalism one and the exceptionalism fable of alexander crumwell. i didn't expect that dubois would be so perfect for an afropessimism reading group, dubois optimism notwithstanding. the parable of the coming of john is particularly affecting. made me wonder about its influence on *if he hollers let him go* as it generated similar feelings of hopelessness and rage. the designation of the reading group oscillates between fanon and afropessimism, so i'm starting to wonder whether we should add chester himes to the syllabus.