Take your geography and trace it: The cosmopolitan aesthetics of W. E. B. DuBois and Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Abstract

© 2014 Taylor & Francis. The twentieth century's long list of connections underneath the colour line, dubbed provocatively (if sometimes ahistorically) 'cosmopolitanism', reveals a network of international interlocutors spanning India and the United States during the interwar period. This essay reads Dhan Gopal Mukerji's semi-autobiographical Caste and Outcast (1923) alongside W. E. B. DuBois's fictional Dark Princess (1928), in relation to Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997). DuBois and Mukerji, throughout their career, were centrally concerned with developing aesthetic protocols to correspond to a more cosmopolitan, globally just politics: a project that they share at the intersections of anti-racist and anticolonial struggles during the interwar period. I suggest here that specific attention to errantry of transnational movement, which structures both books across their respective genres, undergirds a shared aesthetic project. Such transnational circuits are the basis, for Glissant, of a poetics of relation; an errant way of being in the world. Reading Caste and Outcast and Dark Princess together (and in the context of the global history of anti-racist and anticolonial solidarities) offers us an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism available in the interwar period. By reading these writers together, this essay illuminates the aesthetic lineaments of this cosmopolitanism, fundamentally organized around errancy, historical injustice and relations with Others.