Losing Your Mother / Finding Your Roots: Or, Genres of a Black (Democratic) Future

Abstract: This essay explores the long history of the critical and artistic reception—and disavowal— of the nineteenth century concept of double consciousness, from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Saidiya Hartman to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s television show Finding Your Roots (2012-present) and the science fiction and horror films of Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele. On one hand, the concept of double consciousness has been viewed as conveying a commitment to the political ideal of reciprocal recognition that envisions a nation-state wherein White and Black Americans work together to bring about racial reconciliation. On the other hand, the democratic promise of double consciousness has been rejected in order to imagine instead a stateless future alternative to the histories of colonialism and slavery constitutive of the nation-state. In the final analysis, my point of contention is that the conflicting orientations to double consciousness within these wide-ranging generic mediums foreground the antinomies between the past of slavery and the future of democracy that continue to animate the critical and artistic task of envisioning a Black (democratic) future.