Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-01-15 21:11Z by Steven

Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

The Journal of Modern African Studies
Volume 30, Number 4 (December, 1992)
pages 669-684
DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00011101

Michael J. C. Echeruo, William Safire Professor in Modern Letters
English Department
Syracuse University

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

Blyden was an outspoken interpreter of colour and race as they related to the identity and meaning of his Africanness. For him, the so-called ‘mulatto question’ (tragic, comic, queer) had been imported into Africanist discourse from the politics and power of European racism. For Blyden, blackness was never a metaphorical construct; it was an essential condition for his Africanness. So outspoken was he in this regard that not only was his political career in Liberia actually destroyed in consequence, but many of his biographers (Hollis R. Lynch remains an exception) have become apologetic on his behalf, as if he was, in some major sense, a rather misguided race jingoist. Indeed, Thomas Livingston has gone so far as to make Blyden a failed ethnocentrist, ‘a professional representative of a stigmatized group, and (quoting another writer) likens him to those leaders who ‘instead of leaning on their crutch… get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent’. His Blyden is, he says, a poor man’s Heinrich Heine: weak in arms…

Purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,