"The Great Near." Mondi possibili in The Princess Steel di W.E.B. DuBois

Authors

  • Adriano Elia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2016.i8.378

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story The Princess Steel (c. 1908) is a significant example of proto-Afrofuturist speculative fiction functioning as a powerful allegory on the origins of modern capitalistic industry. An original hybrid narrative form, The Princess Steel combines to great effect disparate genres such as literary realism, romance and science fiction. Using a series of intertwining plots, Du Bois developed a clear-cut political statement that on the one hand, through irony, denounces the stigmatization of black people, and on the other, through the parable of the Princess Steel, prophetically directs acute criticism towards the degeneration of colonial exploitation and industrial capitalism.

Downloads

Published

2016-12-01

Issue

No. 8 (2016): Around Selma – Selma e dintorni: La questione African American nella lingua, letteratura, e cultura degli Stati Uniti

Section

Articles (general section) - American language, literature, and culture

License

Copyright (c) 2016 Adriano Elia

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

 Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.
  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.