ABSTRACT
In W.E.B.DuBoisy’s Dark Princess: A Romance ([1928] 1995), the radical AfricanAmerican protagonist Matthew Townes successfully proves himself and the panAfrican peoples qualified to join an international movement of the “darker” peoples planning to overthrow white imperialism. Though Orientalist, especially in its gendering of discourses, the novel professes DuBois’s complex internationalist, antiimperialist, antiracist, Marxist politics through the romance between the protagonist and an Indian princess. Only the leader and global voice of this anti-imperialist movement, the princess Kautilya, recognizes the centrality of the African diaspora to the anti-imperial struggle for liberation as she falls in love with Townes. In contrast, the princess’ pan-Asian entourage, spouting an antiblack racist rhetoric, promotes an Asian exceptionalism and a wholesale dismissal of blacks. The text focuses not only on the infamous color line between “darker peoples” and whites in the United States and transnationally but also on the racial hierarchies among people of color that impede political anti-imperialist solidarity. Through the romance in the novel, DuBois launches a critique of the “shadow of a color line within a color line” maintained by Indians and other Asians who dismiss the possibility of African and African diasporic contribution and participation in the formation of an internationalist solidarity movement. Townes proves himself capable and resourceful not only as a political comrade but also as a worthy spouse for the princess. His unique contributions are based on his racialized double consciousness and, more important, on his location in the African diaspora as a black proletariat.1
