Il Tolomeo Vol. 18 – Dicembre | December | Décembre 2016 [online] ISSN 2499-5975 [print] ISSN 1594-1930 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» Adriano Elia (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia) Abstract This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story «The Comet» in the light of the Afrofuturist movement, a transnational and interdisciplinary, theoretical and literary-cultural enterprise that has endeavoured to rethink the history of Black civilisation in order to imagine a diferent, better, future. A remarkable example of post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist short fiction, «The Comet» functions as a fictional counterpart of the influential key concepts – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – previously introduced by Du Bois and it also foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later, namely Fanon’s psychology of racism and Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by people of African descent. Keywords W.E.B. Du Bois. «The Comet». Afrofuturism. Double Consciousness. The Color Line. The Veil. This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s short fiction in the light of the Afrofuturist movement, a transnational and interdisciplinary, theoretical and literary-cultural enterprise that has endeavoured to rethink the history of Black civilization in order to imagine a different, better, future. Afrofuturism is based upon the unusual connection between the marginality of allegedly ‘primitive’ people of the African diaspora and modern technology and speculative science fiction. Using a wide range of different genres and media, the creative contribution of Afrofuturist writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers and critics challenges the stereotypical view routinely applied to the Black Atlantic experience and proposes counter-histories that reconsider the role of black people in Western society in the past and imagine alternative roles in the future.1 As is known, Du Bois’s groundbreaking contribution, spanning from the 1890s to 1963, the year of his death, includes countless volumes, essays and articles, mainly about the sociology of interracial relations in America. In his Autobiography, Du Bois ([1968] 1991, 148) pointed out that he was striving to carry out a systematic investigation of the history of race rela- 1 See Elia (2014) for an analysis of the development of Afrofuturism as a cultural phenomenon. DOI 10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-18-16-12 Submission 2016-09-22 | Acceptance 2016-10-22 | © 2016 173 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 ISSN 2499-5975 tions in order to analyse scientifically the so-called ‘Negro problem’. At the same time, he was aware that it was not possible to be a detached scientist while blacks were still being lynched, hence his own enduring involvement in militant associations such as the Niagara Movement and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). An elitist advocate for the so-called ‘Talented Tenth’ and one of the leading harbingers of the African-American Civil Rights movement, Du Bois widened his vision to an ever-increasingly international perspective, foreseeing well in advance the importance of the critical issue of transnationalism that would become central in postcolonial criticism thanks to the contribution of scholars such as, to name just two, Julia Kristeva and Paul Gilroy.2 An exemplary figure for the African-American community, historian, sociologist, intellectual and political activist, Du Bois used fiction as a further instrument of social analysis. There is still a significant critical gap to be bridged as regards Du Bois’s output as a man of letters – five novels and a few poems and short stories – that so far has received relatively limited attention from the critics as well as from the public.3 As Herbert Aptheker (1985, ix) has noted, Du Bois, in a letter of March 1938 addressed to the editor Frank E. Taylor, about the possible publication of a book of poems, declared that those poems were amongst the best things ever written by himself also because – in Du Bois’s words – “this volume […] touches the race problem in unusual ways” (Aptheker 1973-1978, 2, 361-362). In fact, Du Bois was a supporter of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, whose intense cultural activity fostered the rediscovery and the promotion of African-American art and literature. He opposed the idea of an apolitical ‘art for art’s sake’ and highlighted instead the importance of ethical and political responsibility of art and literature that should trigger a social change via political propaganda. As he stated in the essay «Criteria of Negro Art» (1926), “all Art is propaganda and ever must be. […] I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (Sundquist 1996, 304, 328).4 By ‘Talented Tenth’ Du Bois referred to an élite of African Americans (about one out of ten) who, thanks to their education and culture, could have led the African-American community towards the recognition of their rights. See Posnock (1997, 323-324); Kristeva (1993); Gilroy (1993). See also Elia (2015), whose main points are developed and expanded in this article. 2 The only exception is Du Bois’s second novel Dark Princess (1928), on which many critics have focused throughout the years. For an overview of the criticism on Du Bois’s works of fiction see Rampersad ([1979] 2001, 72-73). 3 It is odd to note the overdue Italian reception of Du Bois’s œuvre. To our knowledge, only in 1975 the volume Du Bois e la Black Reconstruction by Lauso Zagato was published, followed by an essential collection of essays by Alessandro Portelli significantly entitled La linea del colore (1994) and by a notable essay by Anna Scacchi (2002) on Dark Princess. Over a century since the publication of the original version, the long awaited first Italian 4 174 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» ISSN 2499-5975 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 However, Du Bois also acknowledged the importance of the artistic value of literature and took his activity as a writer of fiction very seriously. Anthony Appiah (2014, 19-20) has aptly argued that Du Bois was a man of contradictions, a complex figure characterised by a number of paradoxes: a left-wing man, but at the same time an elitist and a dandy; an anticlerical who often resorted to using Christian metaphors of suffering and redemption; a supporter of an art exclusively aimed at political propaganda who was concurrently committed to the aesthetic value of literature, poetry, art and music. Moreover, although Du Bois supported Pan-Africanism, pointing out that the African-American population should partake in a wider entity transcending nationalities, on many occasions he affirmed his community’s sense of belonging to America, not only by birth and nationality, but also by political ideals, language and religion. Du Bois’s is not a static ideology of race, but instead a corpus of problematic speculations, enriched through repeated adjustments and revisions, in a long and tortuous process that now and then has led to contradictory conclusions. Nevertheless, these somewhat conflicting ideas do not undermine the enormous pioneering value of his works that inspired a series of political and cultural phenomena that would modify interracial relations not only in the United States, but also all over the world. What is particularly interesting is Du Bois’s influence on Afrofuturism. In various guises and more or less explicitly, Afrofuturism has always been present in literary and artistic expressions of the African diaspora, but has found its own definition only since the early 1990s, thanks to the critical contribution of authors such as Sinker (1992), Dery (1993), Eshun (1998, 2003), Nelson (2000, 2001, 2002, 2010), Rockeymoore (2000), Yaszek (2005, 2006), among others. Its political agenda – Nelson (2010) has observed – is intended as an epistemology rewriting the history of the past and imagining a positive future for people of African descent and, with a transnational stance, for the whole African diaspora, through an accurate speculation about the condition of subalternity and the alienation of the past as opposed to aspirations for modernity. More recent contributions (Fawaz 2012, Womack 2013, Anderson and Jones 2015) have updated and broadened the discussion around the essence of Afrofuturism and its current implications. As Fanon ([1952] 2008, 176) put it in the often quoted conclusion to translation of The Souls of Black Folk was published in an important volume edited by Paola Boi in 2007, and afterwards more essays appeared, such as the remarkable contributions by Raffaele Rauty (2008a, 2008b, 2012), Scacchi (2008) and Annalisa Oboe (2008), the volume with an excellent introduction by Sandro Mezzadra Sulla linea del colore. Razza e democrazia negli Stati Uniti e nel mondo (2010) and the following article «Questione di sguardi: Du Bois e Fanon» (2013), and finally La Cometa di W.E.B. Du Bois (2015), my Italian parallel-text translation of the short story «The Comet», completed by an introductory essay. Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» 175 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 ISSN 2499-5975 Black Skin, White Masks, the black man no longer wants to be a slave of the past: “in no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future”. And it is right there, hidden in between the vehemence of the Fanonian discourse, that the first signs of Afrofuturism emerge. Paraphrasing Marx, Fanon nullified a past-bent perception of the history of black people. No longer slaves of the past, blacks should look to the future. He called for a new vision of what could happen rather than for a redemption of the history it had been. But what means could possibly be used to pursue this objective? First of all education and culture, accomplished through hard work, with momentous evidence of this being shown in those learned and documented dialectical argumentations put forward by Du Bois in his pioneering collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Secondly, irony and satire, the most remarkable features of George S. Schuyler’s vitriolic novel, Black No More (1931). Finally, and this is what concerns us above all, the pursuit of experimentalism, the crucial element Afrofuturist practitioners have insisted upon. It could be argued, then, that the diffusion of Afrofuturism activated a double process: on the one hand, it has encouraged the development of avant-garde literary and artistic forms; on the other, it has triggered research on Afrofuturist elements in works of art and fiction that were actually created at a time when nobody would have thought about the question in these terms, thus also attributing credibility and substance to the phenomenon. And here one may be surprised by the fact that as early as 1859 Martin Delany published the novel Blake, or the Huts of America, which already presented elements that prefigured this movement. The story of the heroic black revolutionary Henry Blake is a groundbreaking example of radical speculative fiction with a message. Following the path traced by Delany there is Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), the first piece of African-American utopian fiction; Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), another utopian novel envisioning a separate African-American state within the United States; Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), the first known collection of speculative short stories written by a person of color; Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902), the first ‘Lost Race’ novel by an AfricanAmerican author describing the discovery of a hidden civilisation with advanced technology in Ethiopia; Edward Austin Johnson’s Light Ahead for The Negro (1904), whose protagonist awakens in 2006 to discover that America has become an egalitarian and post-racist nation; and George S. Schuyler’s novels, Black No More and Black Empire (1936-1938), the former a satire about an African-American scientist who invented a process that could transform blacks into whites, the latter describing the attempts of a radical African-American group equipped with superscience 176 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» ISSN 2499-5975 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 to create their own independent nation on the African continent. All of the above are works of fiction that, in one way or another, transcend a mere realistic description of the narrated events and present proto-Afrofuturist elements (Webb 2014). Perhaps the most important forerunner of the politics of Afrofuturism was indeed W.E.B. Du Bois. As he wrote in 1924 in defense of Eugene O’Neill, any mention of Black life in America had always caused “an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast” (Rampersad [1979] 2001, 75). In Du Bois’s enormous output, among his works of fiction there are five novels: The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Dark Princess (1928) and the trilogy The Black Flame, consisting of The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959) and Worlds of Color (1961). For Du Bois speculative fiction represented a further instrument of interpretation and social analysis: “I have used fiction to interpret those historical facts which otherwise would be not clear”, Du Bois wrote in the «Postscript» to The Ordeal of Mansart (Terry in Zamir 2008, 54).Therefore, in order to attain a realistic representation of African-American life, paradoxically Du Bois used imagination to reinterpret more correctly historical situations that had either been distorted or had not been adequately considered by traditional narrations. In particular, the trilogy is emblematic of Du Bois’s literary production exactly for the crucial overlapping of fiction and real life. Written when Du Bois was ninety, The Black Flame follows the life of the protagonist Manuel Mansart between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and describes in fiction the trajectory of Du Bois’s life and career, introducing several characters who convey particular aspects of his own personality, such as, for example, Sebastian Doyle, who “not only studied the Negro problem, he embodied the Negro problem. It was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It made his world and filled his thought” and professor James Burghardt, who, like Du Bois, used to teach at Atlanta University and claimed that “the Negro problem must no longer be regarded emotionally. It must be faced scientifically and solved by long, accurate and intense investigation”, words that seem to have been uttered by Du Bois himself.5 Moreover, Du Bois wrote several poems, like the famous «A Litany at Atlanta» (1907), and some short stories, in particular «Of the Coming of John», collected in The Souls of Black Folk, and «The Comet» (1920). Published in the collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, characterised by a skillful balance of political militancy, art and literature, «The Comet» represents a remarkable and innovative example of fiction that, as we shall see, is simultaneously post-apocalyptic, speculative and This character shared Du Bois’s mother surname (Burghardt). See Gates Jr. in Du Bois ([1920] 2007, xviii) and Edwards in Du Bois ([1957, 1959, 1961] 2007). 5 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» 177 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 ISSN 2499-5975 proto-Afrofuturist.6 In this story, only Jim, a young black man, and Julia, a rich young white woman, survive the deadly gases of a comet in an early twentieth century New York. Du Bois employed this narrative device to speculate on whether racial prejudices could be erased in a world with only two survivors. Unlike the friendly comet described by H.G. Wells in his novel In the Days of the Comet (1906), Du Bois’s comet brings about a post-apocalyptic world used for speculation on racial discrimination. There are some passages in the story playing as a fictional counterpart of the critical issues Du Bois had developed in The Souls of Black Folk, namely the concepts of double consciousness, the color line and the veil. Let us see how these issues are experienced by the protagonists.7 At the beginning of the story, Jim is quite aware of his marginal role in the white society of that time. While sitting on the steps of the bank where he works, no one notices him, and he is – as Ralph Ellison would famously express it in 1952 – ‘invisible’. This is obviously because he is black, and also because, as Du Bois ([1903] 1994, 1) had famously put it, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. “How does it feel to be a problem?”, Jim seems to be asking himself. Jim is sent by the president of the bank down into the lower vaults to retrieve some old documents. While he is down there, there is a huge explosion. When Jim reappears on the surface, he discovers that everybody is dead. Strangely enough under these circumstances, he decides to go to a trendy restaurant he would never have been allowed to enter before the catastrophe: “‘Yesterday, they would not have served me’, he whispered, as he forced the food down. Then he started up the street, – looking, peering, telephoning, ringing alarms; silent, silent all”.8 Suddenly Jim hears a cry. It is Julia. Here Du Bois significantly describes the glamorous woman’s reaction when she realises that Jim is black: Rabaka (2007, 64-66) has also highlighted the ways in which «The Comet» foreshadows several themes of Critical Race Theory, namely the interlocking of racism with sexism and classism and the critique of modernity. 6 Du Bois ([1903] 1994, 2): “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”. In fact, the metaphors of ‘double consciousness’ and ‘veil’ had already been presented by Du Bois in the 1897 essay «Strivings of the Negro People», published in the Atlantic Monthly and republished with slight amendments later in The Souls of Black Folk with the title «Of Our Spiritual Strivings»; moreover, as Mezzadra (2010, 30) reminds us, the dilemma of the ‘color-line’ had also emerged in 1897 in the conference The Conservation of Races and, three years later, at the first Pan-African Conference in July 1900, Du Bois for the first time uttered the famous sentence “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. It was Frederick Douglass, though, who first used this phrase in an 1881 article from The North American Review. 7 8 See Du Bois (1920) for this and the following quotations from «The Comet». 178 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» ISSN 2499-5975 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She was a woman of perhaps twenty-five – rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darklygolden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Julia’s and Jim’s worlds are far apart, separated as they are by both a vertical line (the color line) as well as by a horizontal line (the class line). Julia is the living embodiment of those higher-class women who were hardly aware of black people, because their social condition prevented them from meeting blacks. As Reiland Rabaka (2007, 70) has noted, this idea is reinforced by the recurring use of the verb ‘to stare’, which is a direct reference to the celebrated beginning of The Souls of Black Folk, which is worth mentioning again: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question. […] They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; […] Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. (Du Bois [1903] 1994, 1-2). This “vast veil” is exactly what divides Julia from Jim, who thus experiences that peculiar sensation defined by Du Bois as double consciousness, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.9 However, Jim and Julia start searching the city only to discover that they are the only survivors. It is worth mentioning Julia’s ambivalence towards Jim. At the beginning, she is impressed by Jim’s resolute behaviour, but soon after, as a result of her white supremacist upbringing, Julia ends up considering Jim as a dangerous alien rather than a potential saviour. She wants to run away from him, no matter where. The racist psyche persists even when races no longer exist: “for the first time she seemed to realise that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger, – with a man alien in blood and culture – unknown, perhaps See Bloom (2001, 1-3), regarding Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influence on Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ and Ralph Ellison’s subsequent variation, ‘double vision’. On the limits of double consciousness, see Gilroy (2010, 152-154). 9 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» 179 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 ISSN 2499-5975 unknowable. It was awful! She must escape – she must fly; he must not see her again. Who knew what awful thoughts –”. Here Du Bois seems to foreshadow Fanon’s ideas on the psychological aspects of racial discrimination. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! […] Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up”, Fanon wrote in “The Fact of Blackness”, the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 2008, 84, 86), in which he denounced the absurdity of inborn racism. Despite Julia’s prejudices, Jim forgives her and gradually she seems to understand that Jim is not so dangerous. Formerly discriminated against in a white-led society, now Jim has become a sort of Adam, the first of a new humanity where blacks and whites should have the same rights and dignity. Julia seems even to resent the foolishness of human distinctions, as the following dialogue shows: “Have you had to work hard?” she asked softly. “Always”, he said. “I have always been idle”, she said. “I was rich”. “I was poor”, he almost echoed. […] “Yes”, she said slowly; “and how foolish our human distinctions seem – now”, looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows. “Yes – I was not – human, yesterday”, he said. This last assertion exposes Jim’s inferiority complex, what Fanon ([1952] 2008, 4) would later describe as “epidermalization” of this inferiority. The dialogue seems even to develop into a sort of romance between the two – in the end they are the only ones who could possibly repopulate the earth. Julia is now gazing at him again not in a negative or discriminatory way, but quite the opposite: He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him. Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face – eye to eye. […] Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other – the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. The post-apocalyptic setting paradoxically stages a utopian vision of equality, wherein Julia’s attraction towards Jim is strategically used by Du Bois to address the fear of miscegenation that made interracial sex a taboo for the American society of that time.10 As Lisa Yaszek (2006) has pointed out, Miscegenetion was among the ‘don’ts’, i.e., things that were not to appear in motion pictures according to the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines applied to U.S. films adopted in 1930. The anti-miscegenation laws were held to be uncostitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States as late as 1967. 10 180 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» ISSN 2499-5975 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 it will take a natural disaster to eradicate racism. However, the idyll is suddenly interrupted by a car horn revealing that there are actually other survivors, in particular Julia’s father and fiancé, who are quite concerned by the fact that she had to share this experience with someone whom they would call “a nigger”. What is even more noteworthy is that Julia herself, after reassuring her fiancé saying that Jim had actually rescued her, quite ungratefully keeps showing the same prejudices as before, by not looking at him again. In the end the status quo is restored, everything is just as it was. A notable example of post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist short fiction, «The Comet» thus functions as a fictional counterpart of the influential key concepts – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – previously introduced by Du Bois and it also foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later, namely Fanon’s psychology of racism and Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler (for example in the novel Dawn) and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by people of African descent. «The Princess Steel», an earlier unpublished short story recently uncovered in Du Bois’s papers by Britt Rusert and Adrienne Brown, is yet another example of speculative short fiction confirming Du Bois’s ability in dealing with racial discrimination using proto-Afrofuturist tactics.11 To conclude, «The Comet» may thus be seen as a significant work of proto-Afrofuturist fiction in which the conflation of past, present and future is designed to rediscover hints of the African avant-garde past, thus envisaging for Africa and the African diaspora a future unchained from the usual catastrophic predictions. The anthropologist Franz Boas was among the first to disrupt the up until then prevailing idea of the inferiority of the black race and to stress the need of a re-evaluation of the history of Africa. In 1915, Du Bois himself wrote The Negro, a pioneering book that claimed a place for Africa in world history and opened the field of black historiography.12 In The African Origin of Civilization, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop provided further historical evidence that the civilisation of ancient Egypt (the first recorded by history) was indeed a Negro civilisation. This historical reconstruction has called for a necessary reassessment of Negro history, far too often overlooked or underestimated by the ‘Western’ world – for example, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of According to Rusert and Brown, The Princess Steel was written between 1908 and 1910. See Du Bois (2015) and Elia (2016). 11 George Shepperson has noted that other blacks had given historical proof that Africa was not without a past, including R.B. Lewis ([1844] 2012), Alexander Crummell ([1862] 2012) and Edward W. Blyden ([1887] 1994). See Du Bois ([1915] 1970, xiii-xiv). 12 Elia. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet» 181 Il Tolomeo, 18, 2016, 173-186 ISSN 2499-5975 World History, posthumously published in 1840, Hegel dismissed African history in its entirety in only a few unflattering pages. Herodotus’s accounts reveal instead that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes and that Greece borrowed all the main elements of her civilisation from Egypt, including the cult of gods. Most modern Western civilisation is rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science and even several Biblical passages are heavily influenced by Egyptian moral texts – Osiris, the redeemer-god, like Christ, sacrificed himself and was resurrected to save mankind (Diop 1974, 4, xiv; Du Bois [1915] 1970, 17-18). Regardless of whether this historical revisionism is plausible, there is no doubt that black people themselves have sometimes ignored the importance of their own history, and this is mainly due to the fact that ever since the beginning of the slave trade, white masters have always performed a systematic erasure of the past and of the memories of blacks. It was much easier to control and subjugate those who no longer had a cultural heritage. Such erasure has often led to an inferiority complex, as Fanon has taught us. Negro authors and artists did not seem to be in a cultural position to question the problem of man’s fate, the major theme of human letters. There are exceptions, though, Du Bois being one of the forerunners in fostering education for blacks and redeeming the role of the black intellectual (up until then, the phrase “black intellectual” had been a sort of oxymoron involving two mutually exclusive terms).13 Nearly a century has passed since the publication of «The Comet», but we realise on a daily basis that racial discrimination is still a topical issue. No doubt many things have changed for the better, and this is mainly due to the pioneering work of many activists, notably Du Bois. With regard to the importance of a reconsideration of past history, Du Bois once wrote “the past is the present […] without what was, nothing is”,14 a simple statement, yet charged with deep connotations that can be visually rendered into the image of Sankofa, a word in the Akan language of Ghana referring to the African bird with its head turned backwards, an apt icon of Afrofuturism and a symbol of hope for a better future involving taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress. 13 Diop (1974, xvi). Famous is Du Bois’s attack against Booker T. Washington, at that time the most influential African-American leader, who supported an integrationist and appeasing politics between blacks and whites. As emerges from the third chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, «Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others», the object of the diatribe was education for black people. 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