ABSTRACT
A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa (1798) by Venture Smith and the essay “Stranger in the Village,” included in Notes of A Native Son (1955), by James Baldwin are two examples of that double consciousness Du Bois defi nes as the warring presence of the two intimate souls of black folk. Although two centuries stand between Smith and Baldwin, their texts can be jointly read as representative examples of a transatlantic displacement-one from Africa to America and the other from America to Europe-showing how the concept of doubleness, and consequently of black diasporic identity, works in two different yet closely related spheres: economy and culture.
