LISTENING TO DU BOIS'S BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: After James

In a sense, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction effectively performs and even aestheticizes what Fred Moten describes as the "asymptotic" relation between Afro-pessimism and black optimism, and it is precisely this pessimistic/optimistic relation emergent in the work of Du Bois that James himself seems also to be interested in theorizing.1 At the end of his second lecture, James pursues his "Comparative Analysis" in more specifically methodological directions and acknowledges, once again, his indebtedness to Du Bois, this time for the latter's novel historical, even anthropological treatment of Negroes as historical actors-"ordinar y human beings" (Black Reconstruction xix), as Du Bois puts it, capable themselves of thinking and feeling-whose self-conscious acts were culturally meaningful and historically revolutionary: If Black Reconstruction laments the failure for America to realize a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (345)-of the "five million non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers" (29) together with the "four million black folk emancipated by civil war" (124)-then Color and Democracy is a different affair altogether, if only in degree: "Thus we see," writes Du Bois in 1945, "that there live in colonies today more than one-third of the world's inhabitants, occupying more than one-third of the land space of the globe" (258-261).