The Soul-less Souls of Black Folk : A Sociological Reconsideration of Black Consciousness as Du Boisian Double Consciousness

Paul Mocombe takes on a giant of black sociology, Dr. William Du Bois, challenging his famous thesis in the Souls of Black Folk. Proposing an original socio-historic interpretation of black consciousness, Mocombe offers an engaging, combative and insightful theory vital for considering the state of black America today.

Since the 1960s, there have been two schools of thought on the origins and nature of black consciousness: the adaptive-vitality school and the pathological-pathogenic school. The latter argues that in its divergences from white American norms and values, black American consciousness is nothing more than a pathological form of and reaction to American consciousness, rather than a dual (both African and American) counter hegemonic opposing "identity-in-differential" (the term is Gayatri Spivak''s) to the American one. Proponents of the adaptive-vitality school argue that the divergences are not pathologies but African "institutional transformations" preserved on the American landscape. The purpose of this work is to understand black consciousness by working out the theoretical and methodological problems from which these two divergent schools are constructed, in order to arrive at a more sociohistorical, rather than racial, understanding of black consciousness. Using a variant of structuration theory to account for the sociohistorical development of black consciousness formation within the American social structure, author Paul Mocombe concludes that black American life is dual and pathological only in relation to a particular interpretive community, the black bourgeoisie or liberal middle class.