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“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century. This meaning
is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”(Du Bois, p. 5). So begins W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. To many, The Souls of Black Folk appears to be a series of only quasi-related articles, many of which were previously published and written at different times, some sociological, some clearly autobiographical. But it is Victor Wolfenstein's project to demonstrate that the book is an aesthetic, political, and affective whole — a dual unity of psychic and social complexity, to be sure, but a unity nonetheless. Du Bois himself said that what unifies Souls is his own subjective experience and a “personal and intimate tone of self revelation”(Du Bois, cited on p. 6), but Wolfenstein's book is a sustained meditation on the ways that Du Bois's subjectivity is formed not only from his own individual history, but from the crucible of ‘double consciousness’ and a life marked by the Veil.
Many scholars have drawn on the concepts of ‘the Veil’ and ‘double-consciousness’ to describe and understand psychoanalytically the split experience of African-Americans in a world of white supremacy. But Wolfenstein's reflection on the whole text unearths the multiple meanings of the Veil and the multiple dualities that fill out the concept of double-consciousness. Through a close reading of each of Du Bois's chapters, supplemented by introductory material that shows the way that Du Bois's personal history and intellectual influences contribute to the unity of the text, Wolfenstein succeeds admirably in enriching our appreciation of both the book and its author.
Both Du Bois and Wolfenstein begin with a particular incident in Du Bois's life, the moment when the Veil came down and made him aware of the double-consciousness that marks the life of A