Introduction: On W. E. B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking

Abstract

The idea for this special issue of boundary 2 has a complicated genealogy. Its beginnings go back to the summer of 1985, when I had been asked by Harold Bloom to contribute an original essay for the Ralph Ellison volume of his Modern Critical Views series. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota at the time and had just met Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the Cultural Critique conference in Berkeley, California, on minority discourse. It was Skip to whom I was indebted for the opportunity extended by Bloom, which I botched. That failure, however, was the occasion for the beginning of the idea for this issue of boundary 2. I had begun to write a piece on the theory of language entailed in Ellison’s understanding of the blues as an ironic practice of signification in which experience has no categorical foundation. In particular, I was trying to think about how the Negro, ever lurking in Invisible Man, and boldly delineated in Ellison’s Shadow and Act essays, figured in his theory of the blues. Did it figure in as the agency of signifying practice, or as a function of the practice, the origin of whose agency was indeterminate? Pursuing the his-