Du Bois at his angriest and most lyrical — essays, litanies, and a story that invented Afrofuturism, all in one book.

Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

W. E. B. Du Bois · 1920

Published in 1920, Darkwater catches Du Bois at the furthest reach of both his rage and his lyricism, pairing each polemical essay with a litany, prose-poem, or short story that carries the same argument in a different register. "The Souls of White Folk" names whiteness itself as a modern invention and reads the First World War as that invention's logic turned inward. "The Damnation of Women" is Du Bois's own feminist essay — a direct reckoning with slavery's assault on Black motherhood and a demand for women's full economic and sexual freedom, the natural bridge from this collection to the platform's Women's Liberation shelf. And "The Comet," closing the book, imagines a Black bank messenger surviving an extinction event as the last man in New York — speculative fiction that anticipates Afrofuturism by decades. Read the essays against the poems and the case builds twice, once as argument and once as song.

12 chapters · 67,171 words · ~5.1 hr read