Theos-Talk Archives (January 2005 Message tt00063)

Hey,

The header is the subtitle of the book Blood Talk by Susan Gillman, 
published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press. As I mentioned 
before, Amazon.com has a new index feature which enables authors to 
identify works in which their works are cited. This is the first 
one I found that will be useful in my current project, which could 
be called an American race melodrama of the nonfiction variety.

The author traces this genre in "historical romances, sentimental 
novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain, the regional fiction of 
Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, and the multiple genres of 
W.E.B. Du Bois." Gillman reveals "how raceial discourses in the 
United States have been entagled with occultist phenomena" according 
to the back cover description.

Theos-talkers will find it noteworthy that the author mentions 
Theosophy a dozen times and Blavatsky half that often, tying them in 
to themes of American race melodramas of the late 19th/early 20th 
centuries. I was especially intrigued by this passage from the last 
chapter, which discusses the writings of W.E.B. Dubois:

...occultism represented for Du Bois less a singular, mystical 
belief system than a set of knowledge fields, institutions and 
social movements that could posit hidden-- occulted-- 
correspondences uniting, or dividing, the peoples on the global 
color line. What specific kinds of occultism provide the cultural 
context for Du Bois? Rather than the syncretic Africanist or Afro-
Caribbean blend that some might expect, it is the protean Western 
occult tradition, traveling (as we saw in chapter 1) the 
international circuits of pseudosecret brotherhoods and 
revolutionary societies that are based on a variety of suppose 
ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Eastern wisdoms...(p. 153)

I'm looking forward to finishing this chapter and learning about 
occultism in the writings of Du Bois.

Paul