“It’s People in the Swamp”: Du Bois against the Democracy of Things

AbstractW. E. B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), which has been called a “spiritual epic of cotton,” was inspired by Frank Norris’s “epic of wheat” The Octopus (1901), though the connection is rarely explored. This essay argues that Du Bois offers a crucial critique of Norris’s novel, specifically in contesting the ways Norris naturalizes capitalist exploitation by depicting the nonhuman power of the wheat and the railroad as the plot’s prime movers. Du Bois’s exposure of the forces allied against Black political power in the rural South and in the nation’s capital, and his utopian vision of collective world-building, offers an insistently human-centered rebuttal to Norris’s vitalist fantasy of salvific wheat. In so doing, Du Bois helps expose the limitations of, and model alternatives to recent calls by critics (aligned with New Materialism, Actor-Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology) for a “parliament of things” or a “democracy of objects”—related claims for the supposed political radicalism of according nonhuman and human agents equal weight.“For Du Bois, the nonhuman world . . . may well have a kind of animacy, but its power is too tightly entwined with racial capitalism for it to serve as a democratizing check on human power run amok.”