Double Consciousness: It’s More Than What You Think

Abstract

Emerson’s “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” and Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” amplify and limn the emotional discourse and affective-cognitive narratives of experience that are such crucial yet under-valued dimensions of their authors’ writings on reform and race, and reading them together sets up a uniquely revealing context against which to gauge the potency and limits of the most widely known idea they have in common: double consciousness.