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Chapter 2 - “The Noblest Blood God Ever Made”

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Medievalism in the Contexts of the World Wars

from Part I - Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2022

By
Cord J. Whitaker
Edited by
Benjamin A. Saltzman  and
R. D. Perry
Benjamin A. Saltzman
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
R. D. Perry
Affiliation:
University of Denver
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Summary

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.

Keywords

medievalismliteratureromancesociologypoliticsrace, BlackAfrican AmericanW. E. B. Du BoisG. W. F. HegelPrincess SteelDark Princess“Color and Democracy”
Type
Chapter
Information
Thinking of the Medieval
Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages
 , pp. 68 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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