Prophecy and the Veil

Abstract This chapter compares the African American and Asian American modernisms of W. E. B. Du Bois and Sui Sin Far, respectively. They were contemporaries and I argue that their work influenced each other as they both wrote for the political magazine, The Independent. In this chapter, I characterize their Jim Crow modernisms as “not-yet modernism.” This chapter argues this claim through demonstrating the ways in which Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness and the veil in The Souls of Black Folk impacted the racial formation of Sui Sin Far’s short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance. It further demonstrates such reciprocity in influence in Du Bois’s Afro-Orientalism in his later novel Dark Princess.