Du Bois's Hybrid Progressivism

In a famous discussion of Du Bois, Paul Gilroy celebrates the “hybridity and intermixture” of the Black Atlantic, which enables an “intercultural, transnational anti-imperialist alliance” (144). Highlighting the importance of Du Bois's travel—especially his student days in Germany—to the development of his thought, Gilroy objects to “the fixity of the modern nation-state as a receptacle for black cultures” (127). Yet there is a tension in Gilroy's discussion of Du Bois's time in Germany, since in 1893 Du Bois claimed that its state was omnipresent, “work[ing] about and around the new-comer, with a military precision and careful attention to trifles” (“Present Condition” 171). Although this militaristic aspect of the state evokes violence and domination, Du Bois also noted aspects that were salutary, arguing that Germany has “outstripped the world with her . . . waterworks, gas works, . . . theatres and universities, with her old age, accident, sickness, and death insurance, and her almost limitless regulation of private industry and competition”; in Germany, he concluded, the “State [is] the guardian and leader of the social and industrial interests of the people” (173). Here, Du Bois enumerates major goals of the American progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including public education, modern and efficient infrastructure, and comprehensive social insurance. Most of all, Du Bois emphasizes that the state can be a counterforce to laissez-faire, or classical economic liberalism, which held that a nation's well-being depended primarily on private, self-interested exchanges in the market (Rodgers 77).

In short, Du Bois provided a firsthand observation of the emergence, at least in the West, of the modern welfare state. As the historian Daniel Rodgers shows in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Reference Rodgers1998), Du Bois was one of many American progressives whose travels to Europe exploded the intellectual confines of laissez-faire ideology. While they did not venerate the German state, noting its militarism and undemocratic tendencies, these progressives found its innovations useful for the United States. In effect, Rodgers argues that the opposition between the national and global is a false one, that modern welfare states are fed by crisscrossing intellectual currents that ignore national borders. The New Deal, for instance, often seen as idiosyncratic and uniquely American, was “deeply stocked with imported policy ideas” (479).

The question is whether Du Bois was marginal to this transatlantic exchange of progressive ideas or, as this essay argues, its central figure. But viewing him as an American progressive requires a discussion of his New England character, an aspect of his cultural hybridity that is often overlooked. As Arnold Rampersad emphasizes, Du Bois's “model of the civic polity” was the “ordered life and simple beauty” of Great Barrington, the Massachusetts town in which he grew up (Art 7). His moral intensity was fostered by a Calvinist upbringing, which stressed that liberty was only the freedom to create a better world (23). Another secularized Calvinist, Thomas Carlyle, inspired Du Bois not only through his prophetic zeal but also through his writing style, which helped Du Bois find his own prose voice while he was a graduate student at Harvard University (Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography 116): “Du Bois's early insistence that the ‘Talented Tenth’ must be the vanguard of black progress and the distinct strain of anti-egalitarianism in his thought reflect Carlyle's expressed faith in the power of the few over the many” (Rampersad, Art 67). In Wilson J. Moses's account, this model of Carlylean charismatic leadership links Du Bois to the long-standing tradition of the Black messiah, who embodies history's providence in bringing about an earthly kingdom of God. Du Bois's New England character reflects a bourgeois variant of Black messianism, which preaches the uplift of the masses while instilling Protestant morality in its adherents (Moses 12).

Du Bois's secularized Puritanism forms the basis for a potentially undemocratic belief in charismatic leadership (E. Edwards), as well as a tendency to foreground the heroic race man in a way that marginalizes women.Footnote ¹ In the view of Adolph Reed, Jr., trying to identify precisely when Du Bois became a Marxist or any sort of socialist is a scholastic exercise. Reed argues that Du Bois's long career involved various articulations of “the hegemony of the ‘new class’ elite,” in keeping with the goals of other progressive-era intellectuals (450).

While I agree with these critiques, my essay is not an exposé or demystification. Instead, I argue that we need to shift the focus of our readings of Dark Princess: when the novel departs the national for the global, it indulges in the fantasy of the charismatic leader, but when the novel brings global thinking about social policy to bear on the national, it gives a remarkable agency to people of color, and to Black women in particular. Du Bois's hybrid progressivism incorporates thinking from diverse global sources, contesting the notion that insurance or infrastructure can be merely a technocratic affair. To borrow Gilroy's “central organizing symbol . . . of ships” (4), Du Bois's great accomplishment is to take seafarers who might seem to be on merely parallel or even opposite courses—the explorers of a Black Atlantic counterculture and the mostly white progressives on Rodgers's Atlantic crossings—and stick them in the same boat. What results is the vision of a shared institution, an equitable welfare state with comprehensive social programs, and the centrality of Black American intellectuals and professionals to movements that marginalized them.

The main outcome of Du Bois's sojourn in Germany from 1892 to 1894 was his reimagination of the United States as an antiracist welfare state. Du Bois studied political economy at the University of Berlin, where Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller attacked laissez-faire economics (Rodgers 76–111). Schmoller, in particular, enjoyed a role as a politically influential academic whose detailed studies of economic history informed progressive labor legislation. Du Bois wrote a research paper on agriculture in the southern United States for Schmoller, which suggests that the depiction of the rural Black Belt in The Souls of Black Folk was influenced by postgraduate study in Berlin, confirming Gilroy's emphasis on the importance of routes as well as roots. Yet Du Bois's route through Germany also highlighted the importance of a strong state to ensuring social justice. He was captivated by the lectures of Heinrich von Treitschke, who argued that lynchings of Black people “could happen only in a nation with a weak government” (Barkin 86). To be sure, not all this German influence was salutary; the ambition that Du Bois expressed on his twenty-fifth birthday—when, heeding “the silent call of the world spirit,” he imagined “rais[ing] a visible empire in Africa thro’ England, France, or Germany”—was entirely in keeping with the proimperialist attitude of these professors (“[Celebrating]” 193, 195). Yet when Du Bois brought his intellectual baggage home, he was inspired to envision American government as a center of antiracist legislation. As Kenneth Barkin notes, Du Bois's Atlanta University Research Series, which organized academics to study Black life in the South, was modeled on the German professors’ Verein für Sozialpolitik (“Association for Social Policy” [98]).

The tragic erosion of Du Bois's belief in the efficacy of social science is well known: events like the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose and the 1906 Atlanta race riot made him embark on a career of activism and propaganda. Yet if we take a more comprehensive view of Du Bois as a progressive nationalist, we can see that his entire oeuvre contains state-affirming visions. In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” the chapter in The Souls of Black Folk on Reconstruction, Du Bois endorses the concept of a “permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social settlements.” “All this vast expenditure of money and brains,” he argues, “might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship” (Souls 32). The passage employs the German critique of laissez-faire and the ideal of the state as a social guardian in an American context, where Du Bois fully realized the value of a “vast expenditure of money and brains” long before his white progressive contemporaries did. His follow-up article, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits” (Reference Du Bois1910), is a striking reorientation of American history. Although the federal government remains important, Du Bois emphasizes Black political agency, hailing the unsung heroes of Reconstruction who combated white supremacy and, in the process, ushered in welfare states that paralleled those of Europe. “There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency,” Du Bois writes. In his historical revaluation, “negro rule” gave the South democratic government, free schools, and important social legislation (795). Later, Du Bois's magisterial Black Reconstruction in America (1935) would maintain that these welfare states would have prevented New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa; in 1910, he argues compellingly that African American activists were the nation's first and best progressives.

Even more adventurous than Du Bois's German travels, Dark Princess extends his search for models of Black statecraft across the Indian Ocean. The canonization of Du Bois as “the premier theorist of modern transnationalism” has led critics to construct romances of Afro-Asian solidarity too quickly, while flattening the state into a Western project to be rejected (Goyal, “Transnational Turn” 56). In fact, in the early twentieth century, anticolonial Indian intellectuals argued that Asia had invented the concept of a modern and rational state long before Europe had (Misra 320). This claim led to Du Bois's creative engagement with one of the oldest works of political thought in the East or West, Kautilya's Arthashastra.

Kautilya's Arthashastra and Du Bois's Anticolonial Orientalism

Dark Princess combines anticolonial political intrigue with a nuanced analysis of Chicago politics. The protagonist, Matthew Towns, is a medical student who is unable to complete his training because of racial discrimination. Shattered, he sails for Berlin, where he meets Princess Kautilya, the monarch of the Indian kingdom of Bwodpur. Princess Kautilya leads “a great committee of the darker peoples” that is organizing against white supremacy, and she sends Matthew on an information-gathering mission among Blacks in the United States (DP 16). Becoming enmeshed in a terrorist plot, Matthew winds up in a Chicago jail. He is freed by Sara Andrews, the secretary to a local Black politician, Sammy Scott. Sara develops an elaborate plan to make Matthew the first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction, and Matthew imagines reforming corrupt utilities companies and exposing financial schemes. Although Matthew becomes distressed by the dealmaking involved in political campaigns, he is reinvigorated by the sudden reappearance in Chicago of Princess Kautilya. Eventually they marry, and during an elaborate ceremony, the Princess reveals that she has had a son by Matthew who will inherit her throne.

Rampersad's influential essay “Du Bois's Passage to India” gives a thorough account of Dark Princess's Indian themes and connections, relating the novel to Henry David Thoreau's and Walt Whitman's interest in India, Du Bois's friendship with the Indian independence activist Lajpat Rai, figures from Hindu mythology such as Kali and Siva, and Mahatma Gandhi's use of satyagraha (nonviolent resistance, or “soul-force”) in the cause of anticolonialism. For Rampersad, Dark Princess is ultimately Gandhian in sentiment even if Gandhi is marginal to the narrative. However, in stating that Princess Kautilya is merely “perhaps” named after “the male author of the Artha-sastra, a treatise on politics and diplomacy” (166–67), Rampersad, like other critics, downplays an extremely significant influence on the novel's themes, characters, and plot. The parallel between the works is in fact explicit; Princess Kautilya and Matthew, for instance, name their infant son “Madhu Chandragupta Singh” (DP 311).

In 1905, the Sanskrit scholar R. Shamasastry was sorting through palm-leaf manuscripts at Mysore's Oriental Research Institute when he came across the Arthashastra, a two-millennium-old political, economic, and military treatise that had disappeared from history in the twelfth century. Shamasastry published the Sanskrit document in 1909 and an English translation of it in 1915. As the most recent English-language translator, Patrick Olivelle, puts it, “The story of the discovery of Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra reads like a thriller, one of the few exciting, Indiana Jones-like moments in the rather drab history of ancient Indian scholarship” (1). Although the attribution of the Arthashastra to Kautilya is most likely erroneous, he has been identified as a real historical figure—Chanakya, the chief adviser to the great Indian ruler Chandragupta. Together, Chanakya and Chandragupta founded the Maurya Empire, the first time that Indian subcontinent was united politically.Footnote ² According to the political philosopher Roger Boesche, “It is probably most accurate to describe Kautilya [i.e. Chanakya] as an early Bismarck, a chancellor who helped Chandragupta unify India into an empire” (11).

Du Bois seems to have incorporated details from accounts of Chandragupta's life into his novel. According to legend, after a heated disagreement with a ruler of the Nanda dynasty in northern India, the court adviser Chanakya escaped into a forest, where he discovered the laborer Chandragupta. Inspired by Chandragupta's magical powers, Chanakya groomed him to overthrow the Nandas. This story parallels Princess Kautilya's spiriting away of Matthew from urban politics, and their seeking refuge in Jackson Park by Lake Michigan. The Chandragupta connection also sheds light on the geographic location of the Princess's kingdom in Du Bois's novel. Pataliputra (now Patna), the city at the center of Chandragupta's empire, was located in northeast India, in what is now the state of Bihar. Du Bois's Princess Kautilya thus describes the location with rough accuracy: “Before my face rose every morning the white glory of the high Himalayas. . . . Behind me lay the great and golden flood of Holy Ganga. On my left hand stood the Bo of Buddha” (228). One cannot actually see the Himalayas from Patna, but they would indeed be to the north, and the “Bo,” or Bodhi tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, is in Bodh Gaya, also in present-day Bihar. Just as Chandragupta conquered the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire, the Princess resists British imperialism; the Arthashastra thus provides the novel with an anticolonial heritage that is countervalent to Olivelle's perhaps unfortunate reference to Indiana Jones. Finally, Princess Kautilya evokes Chandragupta and Chanakya's mastery of warfare when she warns that when, in 1952, “the Great Central Committee of Yellow, Brown, and Black is finally to meet” (296), it will be up to “the Pale Masters of today” to decide whether “the Dark World goes free … in Peace and fostering friendship with all men, or in Blood and Storm” (297). While the plan and sentiments are not very Gandhian, they are Chandraguptan and Kautilyan, with a more global scope.

Yet where the globalism of “Yellow, Brown, and Black” is concerned, there is an ideological tension involved in Du Bois's appropriation of Kautilya. Dark Princess has been valorized for endorsing “new and affiliative forms of minoritarian agents and institutions that do not necessarily choose to signify their lifeworlds in the political forms of nation-ness and nationalisms” (Bhabha 57), yet Kautilya's Arthashastra is resolutely focused on the nation. The work galvanized Indian nationalists, since the idea that Kautilya's ancient state had been more advanced than those of its Western competitors could be used to undercut Britain's claim to supremacy in the colonial present (Mishra). Kautilya was also recruited for a kind of Hindu supremacy: the social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar called him “the Bismarck of the first Hindu empire” (151), who revealed “the genius of the Hindus for martial exploits, naval organization, and colonizing adventure” as well as “their capacity for capturing the markets of the world” (282). Western and Eastern thinkers alike labeled Kautilya the founder of realpolitik; for example, Du Bois's fellow sociologist Max Weber remarked in his essay “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), “A really radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of this word, is classically represented in Indian literature, in the Kautaliya Arthasastra (long before Christ, allegedly dating from Chandragupta's time). In contrast with this document Machiavelli's Principe is harmless” (123–24). In the 1920s, Du Bois's name for his anticolonial Princess would have been immediately recognized by intellectuals across continents. However, while the text did not literally disappear this time, the Arthashastra became culturally invisible during India's midcentury struggle for independence, since it was generally perceived as an amoral and warlike text that undercut the ideals of decolonization and nation-building (Misra).

The emergence of India as a world power in recent decades has revived interest in Kautilya/Chanakya, generating what amounts to a scholarly and popular industry. As Maria Misra observes, the author of the Arthashastra “has become one of India's most invoked Indian statesmen, increasingly displacing Nehru [and] Gandhi” (311). In a potential embarrassment for critics of Dark Princess, Kautilya is today seen as an exemplary proponent of uninhibited economic growth and aggressive military strategy. In keeping with the book's title, which translates as “the science of wealth,” the Arthashastra has been taken as a guide to market-friendly neoliberal policies, making Kautilya “India's answer to China's Sun Tzu in the popular ‘ancient-sage-as-business-guru’ market” (Misra 340). Insofar as Kautilya is associated with the regime of Chandragupta, contemporary Indian nationalists view the Arthashastra as the foundational document underlying current views about the need for a powerful military in India (Kanwal). In a 2013 academic seminar, India's national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon, claimed that “Kautilyan ideas . . . of the basic functions of the state, of the necessity and justification for the use of force, and of raisons d'etat, are part of the popular vocabulary and thinking on politics and international relations in India” (qtd. in “Chanakya's Arthashastra,” par. 8). For Western scholars as well as political leaders, it has become conventional to quote Weber's famous comment, while crediting Kautilya with initiating various traditions of political thought. According to Boesche, Kautilya was the world's first great political realist, assuming that nation-states came into conflict as they pursued their own political, military, and economic interests (3). Henry Kissinger concurs in World Order (Reference Kissinger2015), discussing Kautilya's “vision of how to establish and guard a state” in a world in which “power is the dominant reality” and expanding Weber's time-honored comparison of Kautilya with Machiavelli to include Carl von Clausewitz, Richelieu, and Frederick the Great (195). The lauding of Kautilya by both Indian and United States national security advisers indicates how much global power structures have changed not only since the publication of Dark Princess but also since the international event the novel is said to have foretold, the 1955 Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations.

Instead of regarding the contemporary articulation of Kautilya as a betrayal of Du Boisian ideals, I would argue that it highlights a tension within Du Bois's own thought, since Dark Princess itself can be read as a romance of power. We might argue that what Du Bois ultimately seeks in the East is a reflection and, indeed, magnification of his own self. Flying from Chicago to Richmond, Virginia, to meet Princess Kautilya and his newborn son, Matthew experiences a moment of world-shaping transcendence: “He rode triumphant over the universe. He was the God-man, the Everlasting Power, the eternal and undying Soul” (305). This passage refers to the Hindu concept of moksha, or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, but it also reveals Du Bois's long-standing conception of his own messianic role. “As the epitome of his race,” Eric Sundquist observes, “Du Bois set himself the formidable task of representing not just Africans in America but, by implication, the whole ‘vast family’ of Africa . . . as though it were an integral part of his own self” (20); by the 1920s, Du Bois's “vast family” comprised not only Africans but also “the ‘colored’ or oppressed races of the world [taken] as a single racial collective” (25). We might note, too, that Dark Princess does not have an African character; at a dinner held by Princess Kautilya, Matthew is taken by the attendees to represent “the ability, qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere” (DP 21). I would argue that the problem here is not representation as such but the explicit claim that Matthew can represent a “world of Black Folk” across nations and continents (19). This claim arguably constitutes African American exceptionalism, or what we might simply designate African American Africanism: that is, the desire of Black Americans to speak for the African continent.Footnote ³

Kwame Anthony Appiah has famously critiqued Du Bois's desire to express “the message of his . . . race” (29), while emphasizing that “American culture . . . undoubtedly is his” (41).Footnote ⁴ What is “American culture”? A great many things, but as I have emphasized above, Du Bois's sense of leadership was formed in the crucible of New England Protestantism. Bill Mullen and Mark Van Wienen link Dark Princess's utopian politics to the ideals of the Communist International (Comintern [Mullen 70; Van Wienen 242]). However, the mild argument that Matthew and Kautilya have over the world's decolonized future—spurred by Matthew's assertion, “Work is God” (DP 272)—can be set within a long-term Du Boisian investment in bourgeois Protestant morality. Kautilya's rejoinder to Matthew—“‘Love is God, Love is God and Work is His Prophet’; thus the Lord Buddha spoke” (DP 295)—is taken almost verbatim from a sermon that Du Bois gave at Atlanta University in 1905: “There is no God but Love and Work is his prophet” (qtd. in Rampersad, Art 121). The more transnational Du Bois's vision becomes, the more he seems to view global racial liberation through a lens derived from his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth”; as Princess Kautilya explains, “We looked frankly forward to raising not all the dead, sluggish, brutalized masses of men, but to discovering among them genius, gift, and ability. . . . Democracy is not an end; it is a method of aristocracy” (DP 225). Since Dark Princess deals with many global cultures that are rather thinly treated, the Puritan discipline that underlies Du Bois's thought becomes his ideological common denominator, untempered by the profound respect for the rural African American South that had characterized his turn-of-the-century work, or the affection, however qualified, that he shows for Chicago's African American South Side. The Calvinist-Carlylean basis of Du Bois's global vision is what gives Dark Princess its odd quality of often extolling what it criticizes: as Matthew says, “[W]e must . . . literally beat the world into submission and a real civilization. The center of this fight must be America, because in America is the center of the world's sin. There must be developed here that world-tyranny which will impose by brute force a new heaven on this old and rotten earth” (285). I thus agree with Kenneth Warren that Dark Princess has an elitist vision of global leadership, although in my view, the problem is not elitism in itself, because there never was a radical leftist, anti-hierarchical Du Bois. Du Bois was elitist in 1903 and in 1928, but in Dark Princess, the apotheosis of a global Talented Tenth of color stands in for the democratic institutions and specific cultural appeals that make the concept of a Talented Tenth meaningful.

However, while Du Bois's anticolonial Orientalism ultimately has a depoliticizing thrust where Afro-Asia is concerned, the book's use of Indian political philosophy is highly relevant for progressive change in the United States. As Lajpat Rai wrote in The Problem of National Education in India (Reference Rai1920), “Our Arthashastra may have been excellent in the good old times, . . . but we will be cutting our nose to spite our faces if we fail to insist on the teaching of the modern and the up-to-date Arthashastra, which controls and orders the economic life of the world” (77). In an American context, Du Bois was able to creatively update the Arthashastra, which enabled the imagination of something counterfactual yet compelling—a progressive movement that encompasses whites and is guided by people of color.

Ancient Indian Political Philosophy in Bronzeville

Although the historical Kautilya figures in most accounts as a hardheaded political realist, he has also been called the originator of the concept of the welfare state. In volume 1 of Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity (Reference Lahiri1914), Narendra Nath Law asserts that “the department of public works in the government of Chandra Gupta was fairly well organized,” enumerating the “prominent works and institutions of public utility” that appear in Kautilya's manuscript (2), including “the maintenance of . . . highways of commerce, waterways, land-routes, and other facilities for communication . . . [and] the State protection of the disabled, the helpless and the infirm, and also of the lower animals, thus anticipating some of the tendencies of modern legislation” (3). It is no accident that Law's account syncs with contemporaneous European progressivism, since Indian intellectuals made trips to Germany that paralleled Du Bois's a generation earlier. As Kris Manjapra has shown, despite the power imbalance between Europe and Asia, Indian and German activists and scholars perceived a common cause in the contestation of British dominance, which led to a cross-pollination of thinking about the state. In the 1922 essay “Was State-Socialism Known in Ancient India?,” Hemchandra Ray argues that Kautilya was the intellectual ancestor of Schmoller and Wagner, since Kautilya advocated unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and a nationalization of key industries that reflected “even more advanced views than Wagner” (446).

The ultimate question is not so much whether an antecedent of the welfare state emerged first in Europe or India; indeed, Indian analysts of the Arthashastra were themselves conscious of the charge of presentism, often mocking the idea that “some of the greatest triumphs of modern science such as the Railways and the Aeroplanes [were] anticipated by our Vedic forefathers” (Ray, “Economic Policy” 1). The point is rather that progressive thinkers of various colors made physical and mental journeys across oceans, giving the modern welfare state an Eastern as well as Western foundation. In the year before Dark Princess's publication, Narayan Chandra Bandyopadhyaya's study Kautilya (Reference Bandyopadhyaya1927) claims that “the crafty Brahmin anticipates the problems of modern states” (51n), which involve “social redress and re-adjustment” (52). According to Bandyopadhyaya, in ancient India

We thus see a tradition of reading the Arthashastra that emphasizes its progressive elements, as opposed to mere wealth accumulation or realpolitik.

This tradition has become ever more important in the wake of recent neoliberal and militarist appropriations, which have been countered by scholarship like the essays in the edited collection Kautilya's Arthaśāstra and Social Welfare (Reference Jha1999 [Jha]). In this left-liberal vein of scholarship, Ritu Kohli has argued against parallels with Machiavelli or views that Kautilya was a “cruel, manipulative tyrant and a believer of police-expediency” (19). Contesting the neoliberal policies of her own nation, India, as well as the global expansion of free-market economics directed from Washington, DC, Kohli argues that the “main features of Kautilyan philosophy” are “the intervention of the state to achieve the objective of development, justice to all, upliftment of the poor, [and] providing social security” (19). Explaining the advent of the welfare state, Kohli sometimes sounds like Du Bois's Princess Kautilya, who states, “All that the world has done, India did, and that more marvelously, more magnificently. . . . [T]he shame of it, that men may today be counted learned and yet be ignorant, carelessly ignorant, of India” (DP 227–28). Kohli strikes a Dark Princess–like note: “western thinkers and ideologists believe that the very concept of welfare state originated in the west. . . . Indian texts are so comprehensive in devising such a view of welfare state that it is amazing to note that although we try to find the roots of such an ideology in the West yet its roots always lay in India” (9). Kohli's approach is a counterpoint to that of analysts like Kissinger, productively reading the Arthashastra in relation to progressive reform, the growth of the modern welfare state, and the defense of this welfare state against neoliberal depredation.

Dark Princess is relevant today not because it liberates us from white-supremacist global capitalism but rather because it makes the concept of the welfare state less Eurocentric. Although Matthew's son is hailed as “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!” (DP 311), we might well ask what he will actually do when he becomes old enough to rule Bwodpur. But Princess Kautilya has already put a great deal of thought and work into this question; telling her life story to Matthew, she remarks, “[W]ith a growing council of young, enthusiastic followers I began to transform my kingdom. We mitigated the power of the castes. . . . We contrived to spend the major part of the income of the state for the public welfare instead of on ourselves, as was our ancient usage. We began to establish public schools and to send scholars to foreign lands” (245). The reference to scholars in foreign lands brings to mind Du Bois's student days in Berlin and indicates the richness of his intellectual experiment, which makes the notion of “Atlantic crossings” multiracial and transoceanic. Princess Kautilya's plans for Bwodpur reveal Du Bois's continuing adherence to the spirit of progressivism, since the emphasis on public welfare and public schools takes us straight back to Du Bois's account of Reconstruction in “Of the Dawn of Freedom” (Du Bois, Souls 17–33) and “Reconstruction and Its Benefits.” However, in this progressive vision, Bwodpur sounds more like an elite-guided welfare state than a communist utopia. Even Princess Kautilya's much-cited line about “working thinkers” and “thinking workers” suggests as much: “Workers unite, men cry, while in truth always thinkers who do not work have tried to unite workers who do not think. Only working thinkers can unite thinking workers” (DP 286). If the infant Chandragupta indeed inherits royal power from Princess Kautilya, the international vision that informs his birth will give way to the necessity of state management. The ruler of Bwodpur must handle internal cultural divisions as well as external economic pressures, as the Princess complains: “We had Hindus and Mohammedans, Buddhists of every shade, and a few more or less sincere Christians. I wanted to clean the slate and go back to the ancient simplicity of Brahma. But, ah! Who can attack the strongholds of superstition and faith!” (245). Du Bois's novel is again congruent with the Arthashastra here, since it is generally agreed that Kautilya wanted the state to have an autonomous power above tradition and religion.

Princess Kautilya's sigh of frustration indicates that Du Bois was most skilled at imagining such a balance of competing interests, and empathy for different cultures, in an American context. Instead of letting us see Princess Kautilya as a figure for “anti-racist left internationalism” (Lahiri 548), her lengthy stay in the United States, which involves extensive work as well as travel, allows us to read her as an Asian immigrant—again, an element of Du Boisian fantasy, given the racially exclusionary Immigrant Act of 1924. In today's terms, Princess Kautilya resists the model-minority stereotype—she does not merely reproduce her economic and cultural capital, she also aids the exploited by heading the New York–based Box-Makers’ Union. Yet Princess Kautilya's activism also involves her namesake's ancient philosophy—specifically, the technique of surveillance, an aspect of the Arthashastra that fascinates contemporary critics (Davies; Shoham and Liebig). As Olivelle notes, “There are four kinds of mobile agents . . . who spread incognito throughout the kingdom: secret agents, assassins, poisoners, and female wandering ascetics” (43). In the Arthashastra, spies are used not only for quelling internal subversion but also for fomenting instability in neighboring states, as well as for gauging popular attitudes toward kings. Princess Kautilya herself uses Matthew to gauge popular attitudes, sending him on an intelligence-gathering mission among American Blacks after meeting him in Germany. Canvassing people of color in the United States to discover their aspirations, he conducts a kind of antiracist social survey and public-opinion poll.

We might question the efficacy of this United States–centered updating of Kautilyan thought. The novel's effort to rewrite Arthashastra-style espionage degenerates into “cloak-and-dagger melodrama” when an emissary from Bwodpur spies on Sammy in order to recover Princess Kautilya's jewels (Rampersad, Art 216). But that leads us to Sara Andrews, who, however counterintuitively, can also be considered one of the book's central characters. Dohra Ahmad is right to see Sammy Scott as a machine politician who reproduces the segregated status quo, but Chicago is not merely a “barren landscape” of “dry, pessimistic white realism” that is forsaken for global solidarities (156). Sara “was intellectually a step higher” than Sammy. “Her letters and advice did tricks and brought a growing stream of gold of which Sammy had never before dreamed” (DP 132). The “stream of gold” makes Sara herself a magical creation. Indeed, she is as much a figure of desire as the Princess: her political agency and talent for forming coalitions—centered on nation-based alliances instead of international conferences—are powers that Du Bois desired for himself. The novel's send-off for Sara is laudatory, not condemning, and it even gives her the status of a certain kind of race woman: “She was very calm and sedate about it, but after all she knew that the Black Belt of Chicago, with its strife, intrigues, defeats, and triumphs was, for her, Life” (273). We might pay closer attention to her attempt to merge the defeats and triumphs of her community with the national life.

I think that we have overlooked Sara's complexity and her political potential because we tend to devalue the nation-state in the wake of the transnational turn. In her study of romance in Black Atlantic literature, Yogita Goyal argues that Dark Princess “uses a realist mode for national questions, and the mode of romance for transnational ones,” but the novel's depiction of the nation also has romantic elements (Romance 87). Throughout the 1920s Du Bois remained committed to nation-based progressive movements, such as the 1924 presidential run of Robert La Follette, whose platform featured causes that Du Bois had promoted for some three decades.Footnote ⁵ Part political-science treatise and part jeremiad, Du Bois's 1928 Crisis article “The Possibility of Democracy in America” obsessively analyzes voter data in a manner reminiscent of his earlier Atlanta University Research Series. Du Bois warns the public about the subversion of national elections by the southern racial oligarchy, even as he holds out hope that America's “great experiment in democracy” can continue at the state level (“Possibility” 27): “It is not too much to say that almost in exact proportion as fear of Negro participation has been eliminated in these states, there has been a new growth of democracy both among whites and Negroes and an effective interest in social reform” (22). Shortly after the publication of Dark Princess, Du Bois joined forces with activists and public intellectuals like John Dewey and Paul Douglas in the formation of the short-lived League for Independent Political Action. Here a contrast between Bwodpur and Chicago becomes especially salient. Ahmad notes that during the writing of his novel, Du Bois relied on Lajpat Rai for information about India. However, he gathered information about national issues through his correspondence with many American progressives, including Charles Merriam, a University of Chicago professor, and Robert Morss Lovett, the editor of The New Republic. If Sara is Du Bois's most compelling character, as several critics have argued, it is because she replicates his insistence on a prominent Black role in a white-dominated public sphere (Byerman 131; Rampersad, Art 211). Not merely an amanuensis, Sara tirelessly networks, “read[s] papers carefully,” and writes letters and speeches, pursing the same kind of research and communication that Du Bois engaged in when he wrote Dark Princess (DP 114).

Sara's political acumen not only recalls Kautilyan strategy, it also makes for Black feminist autonomy. Early in the novel she founds a new organization, the “Chicago Colored Women's Council, . . . a real political force independent of the men” (DP 134), which quickly becomes “the biggest single political force in [Chicago's] colored constituency” (160). Intimidated by this vision of empowered Black women activists, Sammy admonishes Sara, “I don't like it. It's dangerous. Once give 'em real power, and who can hold them? . . . [W]ho'll hold you?” (134). Sara challenges color lines as well as gender norms, since her council seeks an alliance with white women's clubs to effect progressive legislation that would fund public transportation and support working women. For his part, Matthew functions as a welfare state unto himself when he becomes the representative of a Chicago ward, providing its residents with the services that racism and the dominant laissez-faire economy have denied them. His various activities—“charity for the old women whose sons and daughters had wandered off; help and a physician for the sick and those who had fallen and broken hip or leg; . . . and always jobs, jobs, jobs for the workers” (127)—embody the goals of transatlantic reformers, as well as of revisionist critics of the Arthashastra like Bandyopadhyaya. Chicago itself, and Bronzeville in particular, takes on a kind of enchantment that results from the combination of Indian political philosophy with transoceanic progressive politics.

This hybrid progressivism was needed to defeat the scheme of “super-power,” a neglected subplot of Dark Princess that centers on the state's relation to public resources and infrastructure (DP 133). In an October 1927 letter to Lovett, Du Bois asks, “Where can I get the best literature on the politics surrounding traction and public service in Chicago, including information about Samuel Insull, super-power, etc.?” (Letter; see also Merriam). Largely forgotten today, Insull was “the Babe Ruth . . . of the business world” during the 1920s (McDonald 237), and parts of his life story were later incorporated into the classic film Citizen Kane (1940 [Wasik]). Although he might be likened to Gilded Age robber barons or present-day moguls of the Internet, Insull is perhaps most accurately described as an urban progressive gone bad: the creator of Chicago's modern electricity grid, he also created the holding company, which allowed one commercial entity to own a vast pyramid of companies through financial legerdemain (Platt). In Dark Princess as in real life, “super-power” involved the consolidation of urban rail transportation, electrical power, and water power in a scheme that would involve the public financing of private profit (DP 153). For Du Bois, this plot element was every bit as compelling as the theme of anticolonial resistance: midway through the book, the narrator intones, “There was war in Chicago,” which involves “monopolizing free water power to produce dear electricity! Quick! Quick! Act silently and swiftly before the public awakes and sees that it is selling something for nothing. Keep Doolittle [a white Republican from Illinois] in Congress. Keep all the Doolittles in Congress. Let the silent war against agitators, radicals, fools, keep up” (168). I think that we have overlooked this element of Dark Princess because we are not used to thinking of our water supply and electrical systems as sources of dramatic interest. As Bruce Robbins observes, public utilities seem to constitute a zone in which “politics can for once be ignored and decisions safely left to the technocrats.” “Yet,” he goes on, “there has never been a moment when everyone possessed such public goods as access to clean water and efficient sewers. They are . . . objects of political struggle” (31). In the 1920s, Chicago's Black residents were overcharged and underserved by the utility magnates; Dark Princess thus foregrounds a struggle over access to utilities that is absent from the work of white naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser.

Du Bois's use of the Arthashastra's surveillance motif extends to Chicago, since Sara also uses spies. In addition to placing a personal representative in the office of Chicago's most influential power brokers, Sara contacts a Black valet in Congressman Doolittle's home, paying him for information about Doolittle's ailing condition (180). When Doolittle dies, Sara is the first to know. She is then able to influence the white Chicago political boss, Mr. Graham, getting him to accept Matthew as the Republican Party's replacement candidate: “When, therefore, this self-possessed, gray-eyed little woman came in and announced Doolittle's death, Graham did not believe it. Five minutes later it was confirmed on the 'phone. But still the thing looked uncanny, because Sara had only been there five minutes and must have announced the death at exactly the minute it actually took place” (187). To the white political boss, Sara is not only knowledgeable, she also seems to have magical powers. As Brent Hayes Edwards remarks, Dark Princess “is not just a ‘utopian exercise’ . . . as some critics would have it. It is a structuring that strives to force the reader to consider the possibilities of fiction itself—as a means to line the ‘heavy flesh of fact’ with imagined correspondences and ‘dreamt’ connections. They may be potential links, usable strategies in the world, or they may not” (237). But I would center Edwards's astute observation on the politics of the United States instead of on those of diaspora. In Du Bois's fictional structuring, a Black female professional can challenge the white-centered status quo and improvise a cross-class alliance with a Black valet. Although Sara bribes the valet and deals with power brokers, it is hard to see her activities as sheer corruption, and they can be turned toward progressive ends.

In my view, Dark Princess's most compelling fantasy is a progressive vision for the future in which a Black elite rules a more equitable welfare state. Princess Kautilya's dinnertime assemblage of Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, and Arab leaders in Berlin involves high culture and glamor as well as political intrigue, but Sara's dinner in Bronzeville, later in the novel, at which fourteen of the twenty attendees are African American, is an equally important gathering of community leaders and politicians. Critics have not yet speculated on who the real-life analogues to the attendees of these fictional dinners might be, although one sentence—“in the case of the intelligent white settlement worker and the colored representatives of the Women's Clubs . . . a new, purely delightful field of common interest [was] discovered”—offers a rich set of associations that contain transoceanic political currents (202). The famous Black activist Ida B. Wells was a pioneer of the progressive women's club movement and continued to work in Chicago-based clubs during the 1920s. Like Du Bois, Wells was hardly nation-bound, since she described herself as “born again in a new condition” during a productive stay in England (qtd. in Gilroy 18). Meanwhile the “white settlement worker” brings to mind Jane Addams, whose Hull-House initially had a British inspiration.Footnote ⁶ Dark Princess reminds us of Wells and Addams's friendship and, in a fictional restructuring of progressivism, has them share in Sara's attempt to make Matthew the first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction. It is not surprising, then, that after an awkward beginning, “a feeling of good fellowship began to radiate” among the dinner guests, making for a “rainbow of skins” that two political leaders at the event find “positively exciting” (DP 206).

The novel's romantic vision of interracial progressivism is ambivalent instead of redemptive. Princess Kautilya crashes the dinner party to remind Matthew of the goals of the “Great Central Committee of Yellow, Brown, and Black” (296); humiliating Sara, Matthew and the Princess flee Chicago society to have a son, the young messiah Chandragupta (311). The key question, as Erica Edwards observes (1), is what we make of one Black attendee's lament after Sara's party: “Won't we ever amount to anything? Won't we ever get any leaders? . . . I'll never work for another Negro leader as long as I live” (DP 212). For Edwards, the problem is not political corruption but rather the charismatic-leader model itself, insofar as the novel's conclusion “too easily accomplishes world revolution through an eroticized messianic vision centering around a single male figure” (70). Yet this too-easy revolution highlights the importance of focusing on Sara and her “ordinary labor of making change” (188). To be sure, Sara's movement involves a normative democratic politics centered on a coalition of professionals and middle-class activists, as opposed to Edwards's more radical vision of “a raucous bunch of fugitives making their way toward an elsewhere yet to be determined” (186). Yet Sara and Matthew win important victories in the Illinois state legislature for working mothers and the eight-hour day, and Matthew's outrage over the “super-power” scheme suggests further agitation at the national level (DP 142). Just as he had earlier worried about the agency of Sara's Colored Women's Council, Sammy tells Sara that Matthew's United States congressional bid deserved to fail: “Matthew was no good. . . . He didn't know the game, and he had fool Reform deep in his system. He was just waking up, and he'd ’a’ raised Hell in Congress. We never could have controlled him” (275). The novel invites us to speculate about what an uncontrolled Sara-Matthew alliance could have achieved, especially given the leftward turn that national politics took not long after the book's publication.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, the events in Dark Princess prefigure the New Deal as well as the Bandung Conference. The collapse of Insull's financial empire in 1932 stimulated a broad range of reforms carried out by Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.

As a hybrid progressive, Du Bois imported German social thought into the African American South and viewed Chicago through the lens of Indian political philosophy. In Dark Princess, the potential advent of an American welfare state has elements of romance, and it was a vision to which Du Bois remained committed, even when he faced persecution from the United States government during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Recently, Vaughn Rasberry has analyzed Du Bois's brave resistance of the cold war's freedom-totalitarianism binary, which involved criticizing the West's history of racism and colonialism while defending emergent nations’ “right to experiment” with alternative state forms (23). However, it is also important to emphasize Du Bois's continuing adherence to the spirit of the New Deal, if not the Democratic Party per se; his final novel, Worlds of Color (Reference Du Bois1961), castigates “the great march from the Revolution of Roosevelt to the Counter-Revolution of Truman” (144). Du Bois felt strongly enough about this counterrevolution to run for the United States Senate in 1950 as the American Labor Party's candidate for New York.Footnote ⁸ We might view this as an embarrassing episode in an otherwise storied career, since, lacking the dealmaking savvy of Sara Andrews, he received only five percent of the vote (Grant). Yet a quotation from a campaign speech indicates how relevant a Du Boisian candidacy would be today:

Du Bois was our premier literary theorist of such an American welfare state, in part because of his turn to Asian as well as to European progressive thinkers. Today, in a reversal of the world-systemic perspective that emphasizes that welfare states are luxuries that only Western capitalist countries can afford, the West has a great deal to learn from the East, given the latter's investment in education, health, and infrastructure. Most of all, Dark Princess is valuable if we deemphasize Matthew Towns's globalized apotheosis and turn to the less spectacular, but more important, role that Princess Kautilya plays as an activist immigrant, and to the one that Sara Andrews plays as a reformer and coalition builder. As of this writing, there are more women of color in the United States Congress than ever before, and it is difficult to imagine universal health coverage or the Green New Deal without a multiracial vision of the welfare state. This reimagination of national politics is Du Bois's tribute to his American dark princess.