It has been a long time coming, but political theorists (at least a few) are finally paying attention to The Souls of Black Folk, described by Eugene Victor Wolfenstein as “one of the masterworks in the African-American/American literary canon” (p. 1). Published in 1903, Souls includes nine previously published articles among its 14 chapters. This accounts for the prevailing tendency to view the text as a compilation or collection of discrete pieces, and the related inclination to focus on specific parts and themes rather than the whole. Hence, W. E. B. Du Bois is widely credited (rightly) for the concept of double-consciousness, but such appropriation tends to pluck the singular treasure from its setting. And this constitutive setting, the text conceived as “an intricate and coherent narrative, indeed as an organic whole and even at times as a living presence” (p. 2), is what Wolfenstein proposes to reconstruct.

According to the author, “Souls grows out of an aesthetic-affective configuration consisting of a situation of insult and injury both personal and racial; anger as the native and direct response to the humiliating wound; and, when the anger is suppressed, a melancholy retreat from the site of the injury” (pp. 2–3, italics in the original). This originating situation of insult and injury is, for readers of Souls, readily discernible in its first chapter, where Du Bois relates his account of the “Visiting Card Incident,” a loss of innocence experienced as a racialized refusal of recognition that would inaugurate the topographical structure, as well as animating thematic preoccupations, of the text. In this incident, Du Bois the schoolboy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, offered a visiting card to one of his white classmates during a group activity in which students were exchanging such cards. She refused his gift, and the young Du Bois knew immediately why. (That he knew immediately why tells us something important about the already-existing racist atmosphere of Great Barrington, of which he must have been aware.) His response to what he termed the lowering of “the Veil,” the great divider between white and black, was to rise above it. His retreat from the scene of humiliation was simultaneously an upward ascent into the ether of academic accomplishment and camaraderie with great minds.

This retreat by no means signals Du Bois's refusal to engage with the problematics of racism, however. In short, it is no manifestation of a denial that represses the memory-scene of trauma and injury. Rather, Souls is a revisiting and reworking of this painful material, the refusal of recognition, in an effort to set it right, to lift the Veil. And this sets the stage for Wolfenstein's phenomenologically inspired account of a topographical structure in the text, composed of vertical (spiritual), as well as horizontal (mundane) dimensions, along with his measured deployment of psychoanalytic insights. Connecting each of these is his claim that “something akin to a palindromic relationship is established between” narrator and narrative: “The topography of Souls is Du Bois's personality writ large while, conversely, he appears within the text as an exemplification of the souls of black folk” (p. 3). Wolfenstein's reconstruction of Souls thus brings the personal and autobiographical chapters into sympathetic and productive concordance with the sociological chapters.

Several “optics” utilized by the author merit brief mention: a “platonic topography,” “Hegelian problematics,” and psychoanalysis utilized “primarily as a technique of textual interpretation and secondarily as a psychological theory” (p. 13). Du Bois's affinities with Plato may be discerned in his valuation of mind (spirit) over body, in his concept of “The Talented Tenth,” and in his ambiguous/ambivalent valuation of high culture over low. In contrast to interpretaters of Du Bois who read him as an Hegelian acolyte, Wolfenstein is not persuaded that Hegel served as inspiration for such concepts as “double-consciousness.” Nevertheless, he argues that “it does not distort the text to make interpretive use of the problematics of recognition and a stripped-down version of dialectical development in interpreting it” (p. 78). As for the role of psychoanalysis in this endeavor, Wolfenstein argues that “it provides a sounding board, an (optimally open) set of meanings that remain in the background until they are called forth by the interpretive transaction” (p. 15). Scenes of insult, anger, and melancholy serve as the occasion for psychoanalytic reflection in the service of the elucidation of textual meaning.

But Wolfenstein also takes overt and nonapologetic exception to this parsimonious utilization of psychoanalytic theory when it comes to the consideration of racialized oedipal and pre-oedipal relations. He argues that this is warranted for two reasons: First, “a perverse familial paradigm has been built into the everyday practices of white supremacy. White men are positioned as fathers, black men as sons, and women (black and white) as objects of masculine desire and prizes in the contestation of men” (p. 15). Within this masculinist paradigm, women are rarely granted agency. When they are, “it is in the performance of maternal functions” (p. 15). Hence, the stereotype of the black mammy as a figure in the white imaginary. And second, “the paradigm is of a piece with the underlying psychology of Souls” (p. 15). That underlying psychology has everything to do with “the fundamental problematic of recognition and renunciation, which touches more nearly on the painful issues of identity and selfhood with which Du Bois frames his exploration of the souls of black folk” (p. 15). In this respect, Wolfenstein's brash invocation of psychoanalytic theory helps us to discern thematics of feminization in Du Bois's characterization of the disempowered black masses, black spirituality, and death as release from the trials of life, even as it urges us to remember the women, whose voices and experiences are largely absent from this work, except as tragic victims and sympathetic helpmates. In a related vein, we are better poised to appreciate the heroic dimensions of Du Bois's narrative quest for recognition and affirmation on behalf of himself and his people.

For social scientists, one of the most interesting aspects of this reconstruction should be Wolfenstein's discussion of Du Bois's turn away from purely objective inquiry in the Enlightenment model of rational persuasion, prompted by the brutal lynching of Sam Hose, not far from Atlanta (where Du Bois lived and worked at the time), and the all-too-premature death of his young son Burghardt. Profound pain forms the dialectical kernel of Souls, as Du Bois endeavors to communicate with the tools of dispassionate inquiry, on the one hand, and searing critique, on the other. His collection of essays in Souls, taken as an organic whole, manifests an integrated response to this pain, a working through of its elements in a variety of narrative forms, including autobiography, sociological investigation, eulogy, and short story fiction. But it does not dwell in this pain as the final remainder. In the end, Souls is “a book of and for the living,” (p. 135), who do not seek death as recompense for the demands of living under excruciating conditions of oppressions. Although this vision of death exists at the level of temptation in Souls, it is not finally embraced by Du Bois.

Wolfenstein's A Gift of the Spirit is a gift to those whose intimations have told them that Souls comprises the kind of narrative integrity and imaginative genius reserved for great texts. While some may quarrel with specific aspects of the analysis, we should be cognizant of the new ground of argumentation that now exists. Thanks to Wolfenstein, we have a text, not merely a collection of articles, that can serve as the object of study, debate, and reconstruction.