Double Consciousness: African American Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This chapter explores constructions of double consciousness circulating at the turn into the twentieth century, explicating and situating W.E.B. Du Bois's articulation of the concept, not only in relation to the discourses of double consciousness emerging out of late nineteenth-century “new psychology,” but also in relation to a range of postbellum black writers, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. Such writers variously employed the concept of double consciousness to challenge existing representational protocols, while also asserting alternative ways of knowing and complex black subjectivities, as most centrally located in black vernacular traditions.