Abstract
… And Bid Him Sing is a novel by David Graham Du Bois, published in 1975, through
which the author reflects on his experience as an African-American intellectual in self-imposed
exile in 1960s Cairo, Egypt. …And Bid Him Sing presents a confluence of harmonious and
dissonant modalities of Blackness articulated and (re)defined by shifting political currents
beyond the Atlantic. While Egypt, post-Nasser, was undergoing a shift in its political and
economic identity, the Black Power movement was also negotiating and rearticulating its
political identity, as in the case of the Black Panther Party. From Oakland, California, David Du
Bois chronicled different modalities of Blackness through a triadic literary expression using
fiction, history, and autobiography to represent and dramatize the Black American lived
experience within the confines of imperialism in both the center and the periphery.
In this article, I show how David Du Bois sets up the novel as a Black diasporic
internationalist discursive formation through which he draws the contours of Egyptian and
African-American “diasporan consciousness” using different modes of (discursive)
representation (Butler, 2001). The novel is a field where space and memory intersect through
different modes of representation. While different modes of translation seem to dominate the
novel’s literary discourse (Feldman, 2011), I argue that the novel primarily grapples with issues
of representation, including questions of displacement, authenticity, roots and routes, language,
class, and race. In this novel the Black lived experience and its future are defined through the
memory of African-American story of transnational belonging, centering Cairo––a city aptly
known as Al-Qahira or “The Conqueror.”
David was the stepson of pioneer Black pan-African intellectual and activist-scholar,
W.E.B. Du Bois. His sojourn in Cairo marks a metaphoric return to Africa, a place that
“functions as the constituting basis of collective [Black] diasporan identity,” (Butler, 2001).
Enabled by Nasser’s commitment to a “revolutionary” decolonial Egypt, David Du Bois came to
Cairo in 1961, as an imagined diasporic homeland, followed by his mother Shirley Graham Du
Bois in 1967. David Du Bois’s approach brings Nasser’s three circles in close proximity to the
Black American gaze and dialectics of Blackness in the diaspora. Whether the motivation for
David Du Bois’s love for Egypt was real, desired, or imagined, it centered 1964 Egypt in a way
that made Cairo become a “metropole for Black internationalism.” (Alhassen, 2015).
Discipline
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
None