Introduction: Determinism, Double Consciousness, and the Construction of Subjectivity in American Protest Novels

Abstract

The historic and cultural “inheritance” of African Americans has customarily excluded them from their “birthright,” an American identity that in the minds of the earliest settlers was intimately connected to the vast spaces of “unpeopled” land they claimed as their own. Social power has everything to do with the control of space, as Houston Baker notes, describing dominant society as “those who maintain place” and tradition, and the socially powerless as “placeless,” “nomadic, transitional” (Baker 202). James Baldwin recognizes implicitly that the American birthright has been claimed for the exclusive use of “people,” meaning whites, while those in the category of “ranging” non-people are denied membership in the transcendent human community constituted through and symbolized by free space, defined instead by their compulsory racialness. Recognizing that their culture and history are vital, neither Du Bois nor Baldwin demands to be “raceless”¹ or “melted” in the American “pot,” but both lay claim to that American space (Du Bois’ “world” and “house”) and human community (Baldwin’s “all that lives, and everyone”). Ultimately, though, neither can clearly articulate how one might move freely between inheritance and birthright. The opposition is constructed between a supposedly limiting racial identity and an unlimited “human” identity,² so that to be “raced” in the United States is in practice to be viewed categorically, through the lens of stereotype, which dehumanizes the individual being viewed.

The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast. and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than wild beasts of the same.

(Bradford 168, my emphasis)

I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast. veil … Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all.

(Du Bois Souls. 44, 45, my emphasis)

My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting: my birthright was vast. connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.

(Baldwin xii, my emphasis)

I relished the thought that the steady stream of white customers who went in and out of our drugstore did not know what our dining room was like, did not even know if we had one. It was like having a concealed weapon to use against your enemy.

(Petry “New Mirror” 62)