Dark Princess: the Official RPG Setting (REAL [in progress])

inclusion in a wojackpost might be the worst thing to happen to Du Bois since the feds stole his passport. i will do it four more times.

"Matthew, Day has dawned. Of course a little Virginia farm cannot bound your world. Our feet are set in the path of moving millions...The Great Central Committee of Yellow, Brown, and Black is finally to meet. You are a member. The High Command is to be chosen. Ten years of preparation are set. Ten more years of final planning, and then five years of intensive struggle. In 1952, the Dark World goes free - whether in Peace and fostering Friendship with all men, or in Blood and Storm - it is for Them - the Pale Masters of today - to say...Our chart is laid. Our teeth are set, our star is risen in the East. The 'one far-off divine event' has come to pass, and now, oh, Matthew, Matthew, as soon as both in soul and body you stand free, hurry to us and take counsel with us and see Salvation...The Day has dawned, Matthew - the Great Plan is on its way." — the Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur to Matthew the Exile, Dark Princess

a new blog project???

THAT'S RIGHT DORKS...while you were jerking your steamboat willies and yapping about some triplecoin opera bullshit, I (a genius) recognized the TRVE DIAMOND hidden within this year's slate of new works entering the public domain: the 1928 Afroindofantastic romance-revolutionary political fable Dark Princess by philosopher/sociologist/historian/editor and SUPERNATURAL ROMANCE NOVELIST William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. It's so over for y'all.

Wouldn't be fair to blame this post's existence on marsworms, some version of it was coming one way or another, but it's totally on her that it turned out like this. After our conversation about Black Reconstruction - possibly the most significant work of American history ever written and certainly among the most moving / beautifully written - dedicating the next post here to spotlighting the least appreciated part of his oeuvre was only natural.

Fig. 1(a)-(b): Goodreads idiots getting filtered by the towering intellect of W.E.Bster's Du-ctionary Bois

Real talk, I spent a lot of my time last year reading books by / about "the early Du Bois" and I think it sucks that Dark Princess is pretty much relegated to analysis fodder for academics; it's a deeply weird and super challenging and counterintuitively brilliant book when you give it time, just like the young Du Bois himself. Tbh, it's fair to call this the transition point between the two Du Boises, inasmuch as one actually exists. My goal is just to have some fun talking about this period in W.E.Bby's thought and doing a bit of gonzo worldbuilding w/friends, but I'd be psyched if any of y'all changed your minds about his fiction along the way. 

what actually happens

What doesn't happen? I'd tell you to read the Wiki summary but it sucks, so here's Eric Strand's super shortened summary from his paper Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and the Welfare State:

"Dark Princess combines anticolonial political intrigue with a nuanced analysis of Chicago politics. The protagonist, Matthew "the Exile" Towns, is a medical student who is unable to complete his training because of racial discrimination. Shattered, he sails for Berlin, where he meets Princess Kautilya, the monarch of the Indian kingdom of Bwodpur. Princess Kautilya leads 'a great committee of the darker peoples' that is organizing against white supremacy, and she sends Matthew on an information-gathering mission among Blacks in the United States. Becoming enmeshed in a terrorist plot, Matthew winds up in a Chicago jail. He is freed by Sara Andrews, the secretary to a local Black politician, Sammy Scott. Sara develops an elaborate plan to make Matthew the first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction, and Matthew imagines reforming corrupt utilities companies and exposing financial schemes. Although Matthew becomes distressed by the dealmaking involved in political campaigns, he is reinvigorated by the sudden reappearance in Chicago of Princess Kautilya. Eventually they marry, and during an elaborate ceremony, the Princess reveals that she has had a son by Matthew who will inherit her throne."

A small addition, Madhu's birth in his grandma's Virginia sharecroppers' house is like, explicitly divine - angels and jinn and other spiritual beings announce his titles and his coming liberation of the World Oppressed. There's a lot of the Nativity and the birth of the Buddha in it. Anyways, this is barely scratching the surface.

THE MASTER PLAN

There are four major thematic elements of the novel that I think any worthwhile Dark Princess Experience would have to preserve or at least engage with:

• Romantic internationalist orientalism 
• Spiritual-historical theories of race
• Postpuritan agnostic mysticism
• Utopian aristosocialism

I'm gonna do a post for each one, just kinda going through what I mean and how the book approaches the topic in question. Maybe look at some of the secondary literature for context about where our boy's head was at? That sort of thing. Once we run through the four, then we can do some worldbuilding for Dark Princess 1947: a more gameable extended timeline version of the Dark Princess universe set after the miracle-working liberator prince Madhu Chandragupta Singh (King of the Snows of Gaurisankar! Son of the Great Mother Africa! Protector of Ganga the Holy! Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!) comes of age and the anticolonial secret society first organized by his mother is ready to launch its GLOBAL SHADOW WAR. 

The reason why I'd like us to work out what exactly Dark Princess is trying to do first is that it'd be cool to see what y'all think about the worldbuilding side of things! I haven't really done anything very collaborative or interactive on the blog yet and it's in the spirit of public domain shenanigans to make Dark Princess the first. A disclaimer: I don't have a timetable for this series, I am bad with schedules and there's a lot I'd like to get around to, but I'll def update as the year goes along. It might actually be better to space things out a bit, give it time to marinate. You also don't have to wait for all of them to finish to start tossing out ideas, hopefully there's going to be a lot to work with right off the bat in some of the critical readings of Duboisian romantic orientalism. Everyone can pick up their official CentCom of Yellow, Brown, and Black sleeper agent badges on the way out.