Prometheus as Racial Allegory: The Sociological Poetics of W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois often appropriated and deployed the metaphor of “Prometheus,” drawing from Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Goethe’s poem “Prometheus,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Throughout Du Bois’s career, he employed this figure in order for the reader to better understand the racialized social order in general and White supremacy in specific. In what follows, I cover the eighteenth and nineteenth century use of the Prometheus metaphor in regard to critiques of racism and slavery. I then establish how Du Bois stepped into this tradition to advance a multifaceted critique of global White supremacy that continues to resonate today. Precisely, Du Bois rendered this character in six patterned forms: (1) as an embodiment of de jure and de facto segregation; (2) as newly conscious Black people that would soon revolt against White supremacy; (3) as the paradoxical capture and harm of White people by their own design; (4) as the prejudice, discrimination, and racism born of White supremacist politics; (5) as the struggle of Black folks against White supremacy; and (6) a Black-centered spiritual worldview of eventual liberation. Together, these six deployments signal the early manifestations of both critical race theory and Afrofuturism—two modes of inquiry that help us to reconsider not only the material repercussions of racial inequality but the pathways and roadblocks toward racial utopia.