"Second Sight": Double Consciousness in American Literature and Popular Culture

THE INVISIBILITY OF "SECOND SIGHT": DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE ASHLIE DABBS A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS December 2011 Committee: JOLIE SHEFFER, Advisor KIMBERLY COATES ii ABSTRACT Jolie Sheffer, Advisor In The Invisibility of “Second Sight”: Double Consciousness in American Literature and Popular Culture I examine the metaphor, “second sight,” as a signifier of the concept of double consciousness, described in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I observe how the metaphor operates to express various perceptions of double consciousness as intrinsic to the African-American. As such, I provide a close reading of second sight in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-3), noting the ways in which her portrayal of second sight as a biological inheritance transforms the metaphor from a signifier of double- consciousness to a signifier of blackness. I subsequently move eighty years beyond Du Bois and Hopkins to scrutinize the depiction of second sight in Gene Rodenberry’s popular television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). In doing so I illuminate the ways in which Du Bois’s metaphor continued to be relevant in popular culture at the end of the twentieth century. I argue that the three texts depict second sight as a racialized knowledge and reveal a concurrence that race is corporeal and fixed. However, while Hopkins’s text asserts that the African-American will, by way of race, inevitably develop “second sight,” Du Bois and Rodenberry articulate that it is not race, but culture that leads to the successful development of such skills. In examining second sight as a racialized and coded signifier relevant beyond its inception, I open doors for the continued exploration of the signifier in the American literature and popular culture of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. iii To my husband, Anthony Weygandt, whose unwavering confidence in my abilities never fails to astonish. I thank you for your support. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To the uninitiated, writing a thesis may appear to be a solitary undertaking. However, a thesis represents the culmination of years of study, and as such, requires a supporting team. Consequently, I am indebted to many people. I am most especially grateful to my advisors, Dr. Jolie Sheffer and Dr. Kimberly Coates, whose guidance spurred my beleaguered brain onward when I thought it could chug no more. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION...... ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Defining Second Sight ......................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER I. SECOND SIGHT IN PAULINE HOPKINS’S OF ONE BLOOD ................. 23 CHAPTER II. SECOND SIGHT IN STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ................... 38 CHAPTER III. CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................... 52 WORKS CITED......... ........................................................................................................... 55 Dabbs 1 INTRODUCTION “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself in the revelation of the other world.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (2-3) It is by correlating blackness to a “problem” that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, writer, editor, and political activist, begins his highly influential text, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Following a quote from the song “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” Du Bois asks “How does it feel to be a problem?” (1), a question he attempts to answer throughout the duration of his text as he promotes a new understanding of race that sees blackness as being an advantage, rather than a hindrance. His main concern, shared by his contemporary, Pauline Hopkins, writer of Of One Blood, published serially in 1902 to 1903 in The Colored American Magazine, was to problematize the seemingly “naturalized” concept of race, i.e., that being raced, or non-white, was indeed a problem. However, while the “Negro Problem” was the motivating factor behind Du Bois’ attempts to establish a new understanding of race as a concept, today’s cultural critics seek to examine the ways in which race influences our social, historical, and political discourses. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain, “our central work is to focus attention on the continuing significance and changing meaning of race” (200 original italics), as opposed to challenging a normative concept of race. It is my intention to examine a specific concept first introduced by Du Bois in his groundbreaking work The Souls of Black Folk, which asserts that African-Americans are privy to Dabbs 2 a mode of seeing, known as “second sight” (3). I concern myself with this particular notion because it has remained a common thread between the racial discourse of the early and late twentieth century, from Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903), to the popular television show, Star Trek; the Next Generation (1986-1994). In examining “second sight,” I hope to illuminate the ways in which it has been adapted and re-adapted to reflect and inform the perception of blackness in the U.S. cultural imaginary. For instance, Du Bois’s usage of the metaphor asserts that only blacks have the ability of second sight, and Hopkins uses second sight to promote the idea that blacks are biologically inclined towards the ability. Additionally, Star Trek; The Next Generation (STNG) also depicts second sight as a black privilege, however, the show articulates that while second sight is a benefit, it is gained through the negative circumstance of being black—that something desirable manages to come from something undesirable. Both Du Bois’s and Hopkins’s articulation of second sight demonstrate a belief that blacks are somehow fundamentally different from whites and other races—that race is tangible, concrete, and physical This is a drastic difference from more modern ideas of the late twentieth century that insist upon the notion that race is a social construction. The concept of second sight laid the groundwork for more contemporary arguments that being different strengthens marginal people because they have had to struggle constantly. For instance, according to Du Bois, the African-American is strong because they are constantly “striving” and working hard to merge their two identities (Du Bois 3). As Du Bois notes, “The black man’s turning hither and thither in . doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like . weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims” (3). Rather than becoming weak, the African-American becomes strong, and that Dabbs 3 strength alone is what keeps the African-American from being “torn asunder” (3). This argument implies that being positioned in the margins makes one tough and it appears time and again in contemporary critical works such as bell hooks’s “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” and provides a basis for many works that argue in favor of celebrating racial, sexual, and cultural difference. In fact, bell hooks’s essay, published in 1989, is by and large a discourse promoting Du Bois’s concept of second sight. The essay exudes Du Boisian concepts of privileged marginality. Not only does hooks remark that she chooses a space of marginality, she notes that this space in the margins is a place from where she “see[s] things differently” (158), explaining that her notion of marginality “comes from lived experience” (157), that it is gained through “struggle” (159), and she racializes her message by claiming a collective “We” in her implied audience of “Black Folks” (155). Much of the essay is thus an explanation of how her location in the margins and her choosing to re-appropriate the margin as a positive, rather than negative space, allows her a different way of seeing and articulating the world, a message sharing many similarities with Du Bois’s original conceptions of the benefit(s) of being black, thus demonstrating the extent to which the positive aspects of his ideology have been appropriated. However, as Uma Narayan warns, “the thesis that oppression may bestow an epistemic advantage should not tempt us in the directions of idealizing or romanticizing oppression and blind us to its real material and psychic deprivations” (340), meaning that contemporary reconstructions of Du Bois’s ideas should not forget that second sight, though beneficial, comes from the very unromantic circumstances of struggle and oppression. And indeed, Du Bois’s does acknowledge that second sight can also be a painful burden in addition to an advantage. As Du Bois notes: Dabbs 4 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 warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (3) According to this passage, the African-American, who possess double-consciousness, and thus has second sight, has to have the ability to look “at one’s self” through the eyes of a (white) society that “looks on in amused contempt and pity” (3). To be able to see one’s self through a vision that holds contempt and pity and to always feel a “warring” bifurcation is painful, as Du Bois indicates with the comment that the African-American might be “torn asunder” by the constant clashing of the two identities (3). Hence this sight can be a gift, but also quite painful because it can never be turned off—“one ever feels his twoness” (3).

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