Racing the Archive: Will the Real William Dubois Please Stand Up?

The 1938 Federal Theatre Project play Haiti has been repeatedly misattributed to the famous black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, however, white New York Times journalist William DuBois is the author of the work. The play’s contemporaries were aware that the white DuBois authored the work, however, at several points in the last few decades the mis-take has been made—and it appears to occur predominantly at the level of the archive. The Library of Congress, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, other prominent archives including The British Library, and several individual scholars have made the misattribution. To be sure, many of the scholars who study the play attribute the work correctly to the white DuBois, but none seem to be aware of the misattribution. If they are, they have not documented it or theorized its implications. In this essay, I prove my claim, and in so doing call attention to the way the misattributed play performs “blackness” in the national archive and mediates the production of a phantom body of knowledge that integrates the play into W.E.B. Du Bois’s theories of theatre and of race. I argue that this remarkable misattribution reveals a racialized logic at work in the national archive and demonstrates that the archive organizes knowledge according to the logic of the national imaginary—even as it constitutes part of what is said or imagined about the nation. In this sense, the national archive is a collection of the commonly known, already said, and rehearsed; it offers a kind of restored or surrogate knowledge. Looking at the Du Bois misattribution in this way facilitates an understanding of the ways in which archives are sites for the mediation of race and nation.

Based in part on research that appears in the author’s PhD dissertation:

Riley, Shannon Rose. Imagi-Nations in Black and White: Cuba, Haiti, and the Performance of Difference in Us National Projects, 1898-1940. University of California, Davis. Ann Arbor: UMI/Proquest, 2006.