FORUM

The Negro and the Dark Princess:

Two Legacies of the Universal
Races Congress

Robert Gregg and Madhavi Kale

As I sat in the great hall of the University of London, I wondered how many of
those audiences of five, six and seven hundred who daily braved the sweltering
heat of a midsummer meeting realized how epoch-making many of the words
quietly spoken there were, and how far they went toward undermining long and
comfortably cherished beliefs.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “The First Universal Races Congress”

In a recent article in the New York Times Book Review celebrating the centenary
of the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Henry Louis Gates
Jr. conformed to the practice of most authors writing about this work, focusing on
the idea of double consciousness, the two-ness that Du Bois felt formed part of the
psychological and cultural makeup of African Americans at the beginning of the
twentieth century. This consciousness was very much a modern sensibility, Gates
noted, and it is something that seems very easy to understand in this age of multi-
culturalism. Gates ended his article, however, taking on a critical tone, something
less common, noting the inadequacy of this idea of double consciousness. “[Du Bois
had] conjured ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings,’ ” Gates wrote.
“Just two, Dr. Du Bois? Keep counting.”1

Radical History Review

Issue 92 (Spring 2005): 133–52
Copyright 2005 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

133

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Gates’s criticism seems misplaced, however, as so much of Du Bois’s later

work stands in stark contrast to these early essays published when he was a mere
thirty-five years old. Within only a few years, the inadequacies of many of the ideas
advanced in the work seemed readily apparent to him. He would have been quite
able to count beyond two, without any prompting from an intellectual a century on.
Our essay, then, highlights the way in which Du Bois came to his own understand-
ing of the limitations of the polarized and colonial view of race and racism in the
United States, and how he, through his own brand of black Marxism, was able to
understand what we consider the imperial and interconnected dimensions of the
class and race systems of exploitation. Crucial to this trajectory from the Hegelian
Souls of Black Folk to Black Reconstruction in America, we argue, was Du Bois’s
engagement with the Universal Races Congress (URC), both in his initial participa-
tion in the conference and then in the manner that he returned to it in texts that
were in some respects by-products of that conference, namely, The Negro of 1915
and Dark Princess of 1927. In both works, Du Bois turned to an understanding of
world historical developments, derived in part from or in response to the URC, to
interpret issues of race and class in the United States.
Linking Du Bois with the Universal Races Congress is important, we feel,
because it helps explain a shift in his work not easily understood either without it
or within an American context alone. Du Bois’s early work fits neatly within the
kind of radicalism that Ian Christopher Fletcher has attributed to the Edwardians,
extending the boundaries of empire to fit nationalist needs.2 As the limits of this
radicalism became clearer in the conflicts arising out of the failure of Home Rule
in Ireland, World War I, and the postwar colonial settlements, the possibilities for
a double consciousness, as proposed by a Roger Casement, a Gandhi, or a Du Bois,
became tenuous indeed. Increasingly, the Edwardian would have to become either
an apologist for empire or its antagonist. Along with these other men, Du Bois took
the latter course.

The Universal Races Congress

Du Bois’s participation in the URC was not especially surprising. He was certainly
the leading African American intellectual of his time and had garnered a very
impressive reputation and résumé. Part of his reputation as an intellectual of some
renown obviously came from the success of Souls, but it was also a product of his
presence at the Paris Exposition of 1900, representing and presenting the so-called
progress of the race in the United States to visitors from around the world.3 In addi-
tion, his famous essay in Souls, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” had
catapulted Du Bois into a prominent political position as head of the opposition
to the Tuskegee Wizard and his machine. A founder of the Niagara Movement, a
cofounder of the NAACP, and the first editor of its journal, the Crisis, Du Bois had

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become the main spokesperson of more liberal and radical African Americans. He
was certainly not the most radical black leader—Henry McNeil Turner, William
Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were more so.4
While these things accounted for his reputation, his résumé was filled with
other achievements in the fields of history and sociology: author of the first work in
the Harvard Historical Series; author of the first major sociological study under-
taken in the United States—The Philadelphia Negro (1899); and founding director
of the first center for the study of African Americans at Atlanta University. This
latter achievement had seen the publication throughout the first decade of the twen-
tieth century of numerous studies (too many to list here) covering all aspects of
African Americans’ social, economic, and religious lives.5 In short, the organizers of
the URC would not have needed to consider for more than an instant whom it was
that they should invite; it had to be W. E. B. Du Bois.
Du Bois’s contribution itself is very much what the organizers would have
anticipated. The paper that he submitted was measured in tone and sociological in
nature—rarely if ever resorting to polemic—and summarizing in great detail (his
essay had to be published in a much smaller font than all the other contributions)
all aspects of his rather blandly titled topic: “The Negro Race in the United States.”
Indeed, were this piece the whole story of his presence at the congress, it would not
have been especially noteworthy.6
But it is clear from Du Bois’s writings about the congress that it had a pro-
found effect on his intellectual development. This at first may seem surprising, as
many of the other papers published under the auspices of the congress were equally
moderate. They all tended to echo Du Bois’s progressive sensibility, intimating that
there was much that needed altering in the world, of course, but that enlightened
intellectuals were leading everyone in the right direction. Empire itself could be a
vehicle for bringing progress to the “less fortunate” and “less advanced” civilizations
of the world.
In the immediate aftermath of the URC, however, Du Bois argued that its
significance lay in the definition of race elaborated there. Whereas most racial theo-
rists, particularly those in the United States, had been arguing for clearly defined
races with “unbridgeable differences” among them, the contributors to the congress,
making clear “the present state of scientific knowledge concerning the meaning of
the term ‘race’,” rejected this altogether.7 Du Bois noted that this was the “most
important work” of the congress: “There were practically no reports of new anthro-
pological knowledge. There were, however, several reviews and restatements in pop-
ular terms of the present dicta of the science in the matter of human races, exprest
[sic] with a clearness, force and authority that deserve especial mention.”8 Du Bois
then proceeded to list the luminaries present or influencing the proceedings at the
University College meetings: Felix von Luschen and Julius Ranke of Germany; 9

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 136 Radical History Review

Giuseppe Sergi of Italy; Charles S. Myers, Lionel W. Lyde, and Alfred C. Haddon of
England; and Franz Boas of the United States. Alongside these were lesser-known
scholars: the Hegelian Brajendranath Seal from India, Joao Baptiste de Lacerda
from Brazil, Jean Finot from France, and Paul S. Reinsch from the United States.
Among these men only Boas was unable to attend.10 The significance of these con-
tributions to scholarship and the politics of race, Du Bois felt, could not be underes-
timated. As he noted later in Dusk of Dawn, “It would have marked an epoch in the
racial history of the world if it had not been for the World War.”11
Thus while the URC appeared not to be momentous in either its conception
or its impact, especially when compared to some other internationalist moments,
the many world’s fairs, or the Socialist and Communist Internationals, at least in Du
Bois’s mind it had had a profound effect on his own intellectual development. Not
surprisingly, it would have a significant impact on his later works, The Negro and
Dark Princess in particular.

The Negro
We can see the immediate impact of the congress on Du Bois’s thinking in The
Negro, his first effort to expand his study of Negroes to encompass their African
origins and history since the completion of his dissertation. Published in 1915, this
work drew on the lectures and writings of many of the attendees at the URC.12 The
optimism of the URC influenced Du Bois’s analysis, and many of the ideas that
would shape his early Pan-Africanism originated in its proceedings.
While a certain political conservatism adheres to The Negro, there is much
that is radical in terms of its ideas about race, thus showing a distinct movement
away from Du Bois’s earlier work. One of the work’s most radical aspects derived
from Du Bois’s attempt to shift the focus of African history away from empires and
geographical landmarks to (as the work’s title suggests) those who peopled the con-
tinent. Earlier accounts of Africa had tended to be static, converting places of strug-
gle and sites of contestation into exotic wonders and cultural artifacts. Du Bois’s
work was a social history of sorts, perhaps an early ethnohistory. He cast his gaze
firmly on people in Africa and the diaspora. He certainly noted all the empires that
waxed and waned, but he was most interested in the people as they moved around
the continent, migrants all.13
Indeed, though commentators have generally overlooked this, migration is of
prime importance to this volume, defining the different peoples in all the various
sections of Africa. We learn of the wandering herders on the Senegal River in early
times, who then “changed to a Negro or dark mulatto people and lived scattered
in small communities between the Atlantic and Darfur” (60). We find out that in
coastal West Africa, “movement and migration is evident along this coast in ancient
and modern times” (63). Meanwhile, around the Great Lakes, there was “endless

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movement and migration both in ancient and modern days,” which makes the region
“very difficult to understand” (80). Also we learn that “the first clearly defined move-
ment of modern times,” the migration of the Bantu from central to southern Africa,
began “at least a thousand years before Christ” (80). And it is not just people who
move. Trade routes circulate ideas, customs, and commodities around the continent
and beyond its boundaries.14
This migration perspective has important implications. First, it helps to
explain Du Bois’s stated belief that “the character of the Negro race is the best and
greatest hope” and his sense that the race had an important role to play in the emer-
gence of a world order that would be based on humanitarian principles. Africa had
been connected to such transformations in the past, in the shaping of Egyptian and
Greek civilizations, as a font of world religions and providing the labor that would
make possible the emergence of industrial capitalism. Its people had spread across
the globe and in all sections of it still felt the sting arising from racial prejudice,
the kind of alienation that Marx had seen as the basis of a revolutionary conscious-
ness.15
Second, notions of race to which Du Bois had subscribed earlier in his career
were clearly brought into question by his discussion of migration. If people migrate
they also become “amalgamated,” and we have to question a classificatory system
that defines them as if they were immobile. In his earlier writings on race, like “The
Conservation of Races,” Du Bois had tended to romanticize the category of race.16
According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, Du Bois attempted to assail racism by devel-
oping an alternative category of race in which racial characteristics were not seen
as related to biological or intrinsic moral differences, but were sociohistorical in
nature—in other words, he described them as socially constructed. Yet having taken
form, they developed histories and cultures, and these gave races meaning. Thus Du
Bois had written in a Hegelian vein, “The history of the world is the history, not of
individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races.”17 In this history, according to
Appiah, “races have a ‘message’ for humanity,” and each message was unique. One
was not better than another; it was merely different. In short, Du Bois had wanted
to take a concept of race constructed along a vertical, hierarchical axis (one race is
better than another) and give it a horizontal reading.18
In The Negro, however, Du Bois seemed to rely more heavily on the idea
of race as a social construction, and, through his attention to migration, he came
pretty close to throwing out a racial classification system altogether. For example,
he quotes Friedrich Ratzel, whose work had inspired many of those present at the
URC: “There is only one species of man. The variations are numerous, but do not
go deep.” Du Bois continued: “To this we may add the word of the Secretary of
the First Races Congress [Gustav Spiller]: ‘We are, then, under the necessity of
concluding that an impartial investigator would be inclined to look upon the vari-

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 138 Radical History Review

ous important peoples of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially equal
in intellect, enterprise, morality and physique.’ ”19 Then, after passages extolling the
virtues of African culture, Du Bois informed his readers: “All this does not mean
that the African Negro is not human with the all-too-well-known foibles of human-
ity. Primitive life among them is, after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Ger-
mans or Chinese, but it is not more so, and the more we study the Negro the more
we realize that we are dealing with a normal human stock which under reasonable
conditions has developed and will develop in the same lines as other men” (138).
Such cultural relativism obviously reflects the views then gaining currency in the
work of Spiller and Boas, among others. But it also is not far removed from Appiah’s
own view that race cannot stand up to philosophical scrutiny, and that of a scholar
like Paul Gilroy, who founds hopes for a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan,
on the renunciation of race.20
But Du Bois’s analysis took a different turn in the ensuing passages. He
asked why it was, if the African Negro shared this common humanity with others,
that “misinformation and contempt is widespread concerning Africa and its people”
(138). One reason for this, he argued, lay in the connotation of the term Negro and
its changing definition in different contexts. There is the North American defini-
tion, with which Du Bois was all too familiar, that “a Negro may be seven-eighths
white, since the term refers to any person of Negro descent.” While this had led to
widespread discrimination, it had, according to Du Bois, at least allowed for “the
Negroes” to be recognized for being “among the leaders of civilization in every age
of the world’s history.” “In sharp contrast to this usage,” Du Bois continued “the
term ‘Negro’ in Africa has been more and more restricted until some scientists,
late in the last century, declared that the great mass of the black and brown people
of Africa were not Negroes at all, and that the ‘real’ Negro dwells in a small space
between the Niger and Senegal” (138–39). In this way, the achievements of people
who in America would be classified “Negro” had been attributed to other people.
Then Du Bois commented wryly, in a fashion that might bring a gleam into the eye
of the contemporary postcolonial critic: “In this restricted sense the Negro has no
history, culture or ability, for the simple fact that such human beings as have history
and evidence culture and ability are not Negroes!” (139).
Many things can be said about this comment, beyond the simplistic and erro-
neous reading that frequently accompanies it—that Du Bois here conformed to a
belief that Africans contributed nothing unless they had received some infusion
from without. Bearing in mind all the migration that Du Bois described in this vol-
ume, we can assume he believed that the American definition is the one that ought
to be used for Africa. In the process, African Americans were to be tied more closely
to their African heritage, not because they could be traced through direct lineage
to a particular people or area in Africa, but because they, like Africans, were prod-

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 Gregg and Kale | The Negro and the Dark Princess 139

ucts of different peoples coming together through historical processes. The narrow
definition was inappropriate, not just because scholars motivated by prejudice had
deployed it but also because it was simply ahistorical. As such, there is an air of the
subaltern to Du Bois’s Negro: the category of Negro becomes quite unstable (in
both positive and negative ways), taking on a dual function of representing both
the contributor to great civilizations and the one who has no history.21 Here Du
Bois realized once again the need for political activism to accompany his work as
scholar. For it was not enough to highlight the contributions that a people have made
to history when those can be denied, or silenced, merely by altering the system of
classification.22 Though, of course, as his efforts in Paris in 1919 would attest, this
activism had to go beyond the confines of the NAACP and the United States to a
new Pan-Africanism.
Even so, the URC legacy found in The Negro was a relatively conservative
one. The concepts of race and the discussion of the importance of migration pre-
sented at University College were important, and the implicit and explicit demand
of congress participants that universal races be considered together, rather than
as singular races, required Du Bois to begin to jettison ideas of double conscious-
ness that seemed to treat synchronic colonial relations of colonizer and colonized,
white and black, oppressor and oppressed, but not those relations when tied to other
colonial systems and when they became diachronic through migration. The seeds
planted during the URC reached fruition at the end of the 1920s in the publication
of Dark Princess.

Toward Reconstruction
In tandem with ideas about race and migration, Du Bois was confronted more per-
sonally by his interaction with individuals far beyond his previous experience. Mary
White Ovington, who knew Du Bois intimately at this time (being one of his key
collaborators in establishing the NAACP), maintained that Du Bois met a particu-
lar Indian woman at the congress who became the model for his “dark princess,”23
the implication being that he fell head over heels in love with this mystery woman.
Given the story of Dark Princess this does not seem hard to believe; but even if
infatuation had not pushed him in this direction, his interactions with the likes
of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Annie Besant, and Israel Zangwill, among other world
intellectuals, were bound to affect him as much as his earlier sojourns in Berlin and
Paris had. Indeed, Paul Gilroy suggests that the connections between the Indian
anticolonial movement and African American civil rights movements can be dated
back to this time.24
But where Gilroy sees an almost natural progression from the work of Souls
of Black Folk through to Dark Princess, an extension of the ideas of cultural plu-
ralism to the global stage, we would suggest that this development was marked by

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important ruptures in a dialectical process that led from the clear-cut idealism of
Souls, which Gates and Gilroy both characterize as very much Hegelian in nature,
to the historical materialism of Black Reconstruction in America. Indeed, by end-
ing his story too early, Gilroy is able to cut Marxism out of Du Bois’s intellectual
trajectory altogether. Marxism, he suggests, was the one thing that could not be
incorporated into Du Bois’s worldview.25 What Du Bois’s endorsement of Marx in
Black Reconstruction shows, however, is that Marxism may actually have been the
only thing that could hold his emerging worldview together in the breakup of prewar
imperialism. By confronting Du Bois with ideas relating to empire and migration,
the URC gave him new ways to question some of his interpretations of the African
American experience. When empire was unsettled in World War I and the Russian
revolution, more radical scholarship was almost inevitable.
Through the crucible of World War I, anticolonial Marxism, or “Black Marx-
ism,” as Cedric Robinson has described it, emerged.26 It was certainly not conceived
during the First World War, since anticolonialism of different forms had already
been witnessed in many parts of the world (Haiti, Virginia, and Demerara, and the
western and southern frontiers of the United States in the New World, along with
India, Nyasaland, and the Philippines elsewhere, to name but a few places).27 So,
too, Marxism was hardly new when the war began. What the war did, in essence,
was bring all opponents of imperial capitalism into dialogue. On the one hand, a
person like Du Bois could now look to the Russian revolution for an alternative to
that “cash nexus” that he had found so disquieting in “Of the Wings of Atalanta” and
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” On the other hand, in seeking their
internationalism, European Marxists now had to consider, though not necessarily
welcome, the anticolonial movements developing from India to Africa, Ireland, and
(with Garvey) the Americas. Radicals who spoke in terms of class confl ict would
need to address those who talked in terms of race—Lenin and Stalin would have
to speak to the descendants of Toussaint L’Ouverture and John Chilembwe—when
before there had seemed no need.28
Having earlier criticized Marxian socialists (like Eugene V. Debs) for their
failure to consider issues of race, Du Bois had, by the late 1920s, moved toward his
own brand of black Marxism. This represented a substantial shift in his writing,
brought on by a number of events that pushed him into conflict with his Progressive
colleagues at the NAACP. First, there was the campaign in 1916 against The Birth
of a Nation, the film so carefully crafted around the leading historical interpreta-
tions of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Then came the Easter Rising in Ireland,
about which Du Bois editorialized in support of the “martyrs,” and the execution of
Sir Roger Casement, deemed by Du Bois a “terrible mistake,” especially in light of
the victim’s contributions to exposing the cruel exploitation of regimes in the Congo
and Putumayo. This was followed by the American intervention in World War I,
which Du Bois had so clearly described as an imperial war, but which he supported

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in the hope that it would improve the position of dark peoples around the world.
Following the war, however, the ongoing race riots from East Saint Louis to Chi-
cago, and the manner in which world leaders refused to hear Pan-African demands
at the Paris Peace Conference and then reestablished colonialism, brought home
to Du Bois his mistake. Finally, his increasing consternation was accompanied by a
growing awareness (made possible through his Pan-African commitments and his
communication with opponents of British rule in India) that racism in the United
States was not exceptional and that colonialism in Africa was matched by colonial-
ism in China, India, and the Philippines.29 These multiple experiences of racism, he
now felt, could be observed collectively using class analysis.
The extent to which Dark Princess represented this new black Marxist per-
spective, and followed from M. N. Roy’s calling Lenin on the issue of race, has
been laid out in great detail by Bill Mullens in “Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the
Afro-Asian International.”30 Mullens lays stress on the influences that several South
Asians had on Du Bois’s thinking about race and class in the years leading up to the
writing of this novel in 1927. The influence of Lala Lajpat Rai appears particularly
important in this regard, as both Mullens and David Levering Lewis note that read-
ing Dark Princess and offering a critical response to the work was one of Rai’s last
acts before he died following a beating by British police in a labor demonstration
in 1928. 31 Mullens also clearly shows the way that Du Bois’s ideas responded to
the shifts in debates in the Communist International and the myriad connections
that existed between African American intellectuals and Moscow, particularly at
Roy’s institute there. An additional point can be added to the picture provided by
Mullens, as it is worth considering how it was that Rai ended up taking part in a
labor demonstration, which prior to the First World War would have been decidedly
uncharacteristic of him. In part, Roy’s presence in New York in the months leading
up to American involvement in the war may serve as an explanation.
Those familiar with Roy’s biography will know that he came to the West
Coast of the United States as part of a failed attempt to secure the weapons that the
German government had promised his Bengali liberation movement and that Sikh
radicals in California were helping to finance. After failing in this mission owing to
the cooperative efforts of the British Secret Service and American police forces, he
moved with the help of his strong Stanford connections to New York City, where the
Punjabi Rai was already ensconced. Both Rai and Roy were at this point anticolo-
nial nationalists largely unconcerned about issues of labor and capitalism, combat-
ing their own versions of double consciousness. But as V. B. Karnik has noted, a
transformation occurred in Roy’s thinking at one of Rai’s public presentations. Rai
was confronted by “hoboes” (by which he meant “extreme left wingers in the labor
movement,” perhaps someone like John Reed, who was then in New York), who
asked why it would be better to be exploited by Indian businessmen than foreign
ones. Rai responded that it did make a difference whether one was being “kicked by

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 142 Radical History Review

a brother or a foreign robber,” but for both Roy and Rai this answer was unsatisfy-
ing.32 Once Roy fled New York for Mexico to escape indictment, he very quickly,
under the tutelage of Michael Borodin, moved into the communist movement. Rai
remained more moderate, but on his return to India, he continually endeavored to
push Gandhi beyond what he felt was his more communalist politics and toward a
class and internationalist position.33
Dark Princess would be written at a different moment, then, in Du Bois’s
development from that of The Negro, at a time when he was much closer to the
Marxism that would mark his later works, like Black Reconstruction in America and
his Autobiography.34 One last aspect of his transformation needs to be mentioned
to explain the emergence of Dark Princess: it concerned Du Bois’s growing aware-
ness of what he called “the damnation of women” in one of his essays from Dark-
water.35 This “impeccably feminist” piece presented the plight of women in labor
terms, revealing that as he moved toward an internationalist understanding of race
and class, Du Bois would nonetheless place great emphasis on gender, making the
reproduction of labor and the labor of reproduction central concerns.36 As such, the
transformation of the women characters presented in Dark Princess, especially of
Princess Kautilya herself, would be crucial to understanding its significance.

Dark Princess
Through the travails and education of its hero, Matthew Towns, Dark Princess
traces Du Bois’s own intellectual, literary, and personal struggles to both name and
challenge the specter haunting modernity (to paraphrase Marx): the specter of the
color line. Fusing German Orientalist romanticism and revolutionary international-
ism with the insights of such pioneering African American reformers as Sojourner
Truth, Anna J. Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Dark Princess is a singular politi-
cal intervention. First, the novel identifies sexual domination as the central, disci-
plinary technique of not only race but also class and gender hierarchy across the
globe. Second, it proposes education and democracy as the central strategy of lib-
eration for the twentieth century. Finally, Dark Princess shifts the site of revolution-
ary liberation from metropolis to the vast rural hinterland.
Starting in the soon-rejected rural Virginia of his birth, and taking a detour
to Europe, the peripatetic Matthew—the Olaudah Equiano of his age—moves
restlessly (on trains, ships, cars, and foot) through the color-bounded and class-
riven worlds of Progressive-era (African) America, propelled by ambition and tal-
ent, revolutionary idealism and passion, despair and cynicism, before finally being
returned—humbler, wiser, and by airplane—to his widowed mother’s forty acres
in rural Virginia. Dispatched to study the condition of the American Negro by the
princess and her colleagues, Matthew experiences hard labor and humiliation: as a
Pullman porter, in prison, as an operative in black Chicago’s political machine, as

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a trophy spouse, and finally as an unskilled laborer on a subway construction site.

He also experiences love, communion, and loss, in the person of Jimmy (a fellow
porter mistaken for Matthew and lynched on a train packed with Klansmen headed
for Chicago), and, of course, through the dark princess of the novel’s title. These
developments move along the novel’s improbable, fantastical plot. They are also,
however, the crucibles in which the novel’s perspective is transformed from that
of the educated and prosperous elite of the urban north (the people convention-
ally understood to represent Du Bois’s Talented Tenth) to a world-historical one
in which working people of all nations may—and insofar as Matthew and Kautilya
marry, do—unite.
Matthew excels as a student, supported by a widowed mother whose toil on
her “little forty acres” in Virginia enables him to study, first at the little-loved voca-
tional school for colored students (Hampton), and then in the integrated classrooms
of northern institutions where, despite the prejudice and hostility of white teach-
ers and administrators, he proves his abilities and wins academic honors. Headed,
thanks to his proven abilities, for unique and highly visible success as a doctor, Mat-
thew crashes headlong into an insurmountable obstacle: the spectral vision of black
male hands on a white female body, the linchpin (grim pun intended) of modernity’s
color lines across the globe.
Nursing this injury, Matthew flees to the relative anonymity and indiffer-
ence of Europe—where “he was treated as he was dressed, and . . . could at least
eat where he wished so long as he paid” (7)—only to encounter the specter’s spiteful
twin: the spectacle of a white American tourist’s coarse and casual sexual advances
toward a beautiful and solitary woman of color seated in a Berlin café. The unfold-
ing drama fills him with anxiety, loathing, and indecision. “A cold sweat broke out
over Matthew. A sickening fear fought with the fury in his heart,” lest the American
intrude on her. The woman, however, coolly rebuffs the tourist’s unwelcome intru-
sion, inciting him to manly action. Out on the street, the white man’s “hand had
hardly touched her elbow when Matthew’s fist caught him right between the smile
and the ear. The American sat down on the sidewalk very suddenly” (10).
Over tea, the woman shows a keen interest in Matthew’s background and
views, which he, awestruck, alienated, and lonely, gladly articulates. Musing on the
coincidence of their meeting and her own recent meditations on the condition and
prospects of “American Negroes,” the woman notes that her encounter with the
American was not the first of its kind. Her account of how she happened to be at the
café confirms Matthew’s suspicion that she enjoyed a familiarity and facility with
European high culture that separated them utterly. “I had gone up to the Palace to
see the exhibition of new paintings—you have not seen it? You must. . . . I dropped
into the Viktoria, almost unconsciously, because the tea there is good and the muf-
fins quite unequaled” (17). Continuing, however, she also affirms an awareness of

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 14 4 Radical History Review

the raced and gendered alterity they share and intimately experience, separately
and together.
I know that I should not go there unaccompanied, even in the day; white
women may, but brown women seem strangely attractive to white men,
especially Americans; and this is the open season for them. Twice before I
have had to put Americans in their place. I went quite unconsciously and noted
nothing in particular until that impossible young man sat down at my table. I
did not know he had followed me out. Then you knocked him into the gutter
quite beautifully. It had never happened before that a stranger of my own color
should offer me protection in Europe. I had a curious sense of some great inner
meaning to your act—some world movement. (17)

Emasculated by his rejection from the medical residency, Matthew is restored to his
manhood by his act of chivalric violence, provoking the woman’s interest in him, a
dinner invitation, and, by extension, the saga that follows. The woman turns out to
be Kautilya, Her Royal Highness Princess of Bwodpur, a fictional princely state in
the heart of British India.
At the party, he is delighted to discover that the other guests are all self-
appointed representatives of the “Darker Races.” Initially charmed and awed
by their multilingual urbanity and high social status, Matthew soon fi nds himself
cast as representative and spokesman of “the American Negro,” of whose capacity
for world-historical agency the other guests are openly skeptical. “Suddenly now
there loomed plainly and clear the shadow of a color line within a color line, a
prejudice within prejudice, and he and his again the sacrifice” (22). Stung by the
assumptions of superiority that his Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arab
dinner companions’ claims to racial and civilizational inheritance implied, Matthew
finds himself unexpectedly invoking genealogies from which he had long distanced
himself.
He had started to say, “I reckon there’s as much high-born blood among
American Negroes as among any people.” . . . He started to say this, but he did
not finish. He found himself saying . . . “We American blacks are very common
people. My grandfather was a whipped and driven slave; my father was never
really free and died in jail. My mother plows and washes for a living. We come
out of the depths—the blood and mud of battle. And just from such depths, I
take it, came most of the worth-while things in this old world.” (23)

When the Egyptian aristocrat contemptuously asks, “What art ever came from the
canaille,” Matthew finds himself recalling his father singing in church and belts
out “Go Down, Moses” to the startled company. When he has finished, “a chorus
of approval poured out, led by the Egyptian. ‘That’ said Matthew, ‘came out of

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 Gregg and Kale | The Negro and the Dark Princess 145

the black rabble of America.’ ” Warming to his unfamiliar argument, he proclaims,

“America is teaching the world one thing and only one thing of real value, and that
is, that ability and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but
the widespread possibility for the majority of mankind if they only have a decent
chance in life” (26). The princess and her mysterious multinational associates charge
the love-struck and riled-up Matthew with the task of discovering and reporting to
them the condition of black America. Through the rest of the novel, Matthew and
the princess navigate the hidden reefs of race, class, gender, and nation both in
solitary despair and joyful communion, physically and spiritually confronting the
consequences of their ardor (whether devastating or uplifting) for others.
This roman(ce) à clef (to coin a somewhat irreverent phrase) provocatively
contrasts this marriage of hearts and minds to other alliances—whether commer-
cial, political, diplomatic, or conjugal—contracted and enforced by law or custom.
Both Matthew and Kautilya are previously wed, he to a ward boss’s calculating and
ambitious personal secretary and she to the frail heir to a neighboring princely state
in India. Both are marriages of convenience, maneuvered and effected for political
ends, prostitution by another name for all parties, irrespective of gender. Indeed,
before she learns of the deception, Kautilya is almost married again, to a maimed
English officer she meets in London after the armistice who courts her under orders
from the India Office interested in annexing her lands and considerable revenues.
Searching for love, she overhears him commiserating with his abandoned but true
love:
What else is there for me, a poor and crippled younger son? Can you not see,
dearest, that this is a command on the field of battle? Think what it means to
have this powerful buffer state . . . in the hands of a white ruler; a wall against
Bolshevik Russia, a club for chaotic China; a pledge for future and wider
empire. . . . Hell! I’m mating with a throne and a fortune. The darky’s a mere
makeweight. (239)

At the lavish “intra-Imperial and inter-racial” wedding in India, another counter-

point to the URC, Kautilya manages to publicly avenge the insult to her honor and
the threat to her kingdom by mobilizing not only anti-British sentiment among kins-
people and young nationalists but also the venerable authority of customary practice,
often the scourge of women like her, “widowed even before I was a wife, bearing
all the Indian contempt for widowhood.” As she explains to Matthew, “I gathered a
great bloc of young trained men and women. Long we planned and contrived and
finally with united strength turned on England.” At the height of proceedings,
[An] ancient Rajah from the hills stepped forward and interposed. As the eldest
representative of my far-flung family, he announced that this marriage could
not be. A plenary council of the chief royal families of India had been held, and

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 146 Radical History Review

it had been decided that it was beneath the dignity of India to accept as consort
for a princess of the blood a man without rank or title—unless, he added, “this
alliance was the will and command of the Maharanee herself.” (245)

Reversing the formula of Jane Eyre ninety years earlier, but pronouncing her will
nonetheless, Kautilya tells Matthew that she announced to the assembled digni-
taries, “I do not wish to marry Captain the Honorable Malcolm Fortescue-Dodd”
(245). But, at the end of the novel, Kautilya summons Matthew to Virginia, where
she is to be married—to him, as he discovers when he gets there. Reunited with
his love, Matthew discovers that he is a father, and that their son, Madhu, is to be
crowned—in a wildly ecstatic ecumenical ceremony encompassing Christian, Bud-
dhist, Hindu, and Muslim prayers—the maharaja of Bwodpur.
Kautilya is Matthew’s muse and inspiration, as well as the love of his life, and
although the reader learns that she and her associates are monitoring Matthew’s
meanderings and actions, she does not come into her own voice or narrate her own
adventures during those years until the novel’s final chapter. Her name is a curious
choice on Du Bois’s part, not least because it is not conventionally a woman’s name
at all. Rather, Kautilya, derived from a word meaning “intrigue” or “manipulation,”
is a nickname bestowed on Chanakya, an advisor of Chandragupta (321–291 BCE),
founder of the north Indian Mauryan empire (321–185 BCE). Chanakya/Kautilya
is credited with authorship of the Arthashastra, a treatise on government—“the
science of punishment”—likened by some to Machiavelli’s Prince.37 In addition to
addressing matters of diplomacy and taxation, divisions of labor, and regulation of
trade and industry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, according to Romila Thapar, “advocates
the frequent use of spies, and recommends that they should work in the guise of
recluses, householders, merchants, ascetics, students, mendicant women and prosti-
tutes.”38 In light of the roles and guises assumed by both Matthew and the princess
in the course of the novel (and in pursuit of their own singular utopian empire),
Du Bois’s choice of name for his princess appears very suggestive. First, it pushes
the characters of Matthew, Kautilya, and Madhu toward a revaluation of gender
and the gendered practices of Western society, grasping for a feminist utopia quite
different from that imagined by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland. Madhu, the
word for “honey” and “nectar,” is, Kautilya announces (on questionable authority) to
her husband, “Matthew in our softer tongue” (308). Second, it highlights the man-
ner in which counterhegemonic resistance of the twentieth and twenty-first century
would unfold. While the URC had posited social science as the cure-all, and this
had been reflected in The Negro, now it was the clandestine acts of an intellectual
elite apprised of the condition of laborers from China to India to the American
South that would pave the way for social change.
The legacy of URC, then, was evident in the novel in several ways. First,
instead of drawing on the events and ideas of the Universal Races Congress as an
influence, Du Bois endeavored to recreate it for the 1920s milieu. In place of a con-

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 Gregg and Kale | The Negro and the Dark Princess 147

gress of “authorities” debating openly the scientific merits of different perspectives

on race, he described clandestine, revolutionary meetings occurring in “gray Berlin”
(“the red heart of the world”), and in Egypt among leading representatives of the
world’s different races (3). Once Du Bois’s thoughts moved in more counterhege-
monic directions, as they did in the aftermath of World War I, it was only natural
that his prescriptions should take on an almost Bolshevik cast. His description of
the economic crash (a prediction that would prove accurate almost within the year)
provided the setting for the emergence of a new child of the revolution, the son of
an African American and an Indian.
A second legacy becomes evident if we read between the lines of the novel.
David Levering Lewis has said that the model for the character of Matthew Towns
was, not surprisingly, Du Bois himself, though he does not take this point much fur-
ther, seeing Matthew as merely the mouthpiece for some of Du Bois’s ideas.39 But
given that the novel is a bildungsroman in which the main character goes through
a transformation of understanding about his place in the world, through the aus-
pices of and directed by an Indian princess, it becomes in a way an allegory for Du
Bois’s own education—or a parallel version of it. What Du Bois showed through
Matthew’s transformation was both how he and his ideas were tied to a larger social
landscape and the process by which Du Bois himself became internationalized, not
necessarily by his own volition, but at the hands of often all-knowing guides through
the world of the veil.
Since much of Dark Princess is presented as an almost Orientalist romance,
few commentators have had the same high opinion of it that Du Bois himself had—
he claimed it as his favorite work. But seen in relation to the URC and Du Bois’s
intellectual development, one can begin to see why he was so attached to it. In light
of these things, the migration of people across the world, and the multiple roles that
they end up playing—from princess to labor organizer, medical student to sleeping
car porter and corrupt politician—disrupt any incipient Orientalism. The relation-
ship between Matthew and Kautilya becomes an allegory for the changing world
that Du Bois believed would emerge in the face of capitalism’s predicted collapse.
The romance becomes a vehicle that helps bring both the character and the author
to an awareness of the potentials of global anticolonialism, just as Marx was trans-
formed by his reading of Romantics like Goethe. Read within the context of the
United States alone, Du Bois’s romance becomes almost too fanciful to digest; but
within the global context that Du Bois believed crucial at least since 1911, the novel
becomes quite prescient in its description of a world that would emerge from the
dual collapses he predicted—economic and political.

Conclusion: Of Race and Class

In his writings from The Negro onward, the conception of race that Du Bois deployed
bore little or no relation to that of his work prior to 1911 and the URC. Two pas-
sages, one from Dark Princess and the other from Black Reconstruction, highlight

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 148 Radical History Review

this altered sensibility. In Dark Princess, the title character, the princess, toward
the end of the novel writes rapturously to Matthew of the lessons she has learned
through the years of longing, study, labor, and suffering they have both endured.
Invoking the great migrations of people across the globe, she cautions:
To be in the center of power is not enough. You must be free and able to act.
You are not free in Chicago nor in New York. But here in Virginia you are at the
edge of a black world. The black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges
reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up into the
heart of white America. Thus I see a mighty synthesis: you can work in Africa
and Asia right here in America if you work in the black belt. . . . You may stand
here, Matthew—here, halfway between Maine and Florida, between the
Atlantic and the Pacific, with Europe in your face and China at your back; with
industry in your right hand and commerce in your left and the Farm beneath
your steady feet; and yet be in the Land of the Blacks. . . . I believe, I believe
in the unlovely masses of men. . . . Civilization cannot stand on its apex. It
must stand on a broad base. . . . Workers unite, men cry, while in truth always
thinkers who do not work have tried to unite workers who do not think. Only
working thinkers can unite thinking workers. (286)

Here the color line is no longer defined along the axis of Negro and white, as it had
been in both The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk. Now the Black
Belt emerges as an extension of a belt encompassing much of the world.
Given this statement, it is also not altogether surprising that Du Bois turned
from his most fanciful and international work to his seemingly most materialist and
insular American study, Black Reconstruction in America. But for Du Bois, as the
above statement suggested, what happened in the South’s Black Belt was inextrica-
bly tied to a larger black belt. A study of Reconstruction in America would be linked
inevitably to the kinds of labor conditions experienced elsewhere, conditions that he
would have learned about from Gokhale and Rai in the second decade of the twen-
tieth century, and about which he continued to learn in the 1920s from Roy and the
new anticolonial radicals emerging from India to Ghana.
Thus, at the end of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois’s study of the aftermath of
the Civil War in the American Black Belt, Du Bois once again connected the dots of
racial exploitation to create a chain of colonialism, capitalism, and class: “In Africa,
a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in
China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in
London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jeal-
ous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.”40 Clearly
the dual vision of Souls, that double consciousness, had long been discarded in order
to comprehend a proletariat of universal races.

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 Gregg and Kale | The Negro and the Dark Princess 149

Du Bois’s biographers have largely neglected the importance of all three

elements discussed in this essay—his involvement in the Universal Races Congress
and the two books we have considered. This article, then, has attempted to com-
pensate for the oversight and has tried to resituate world history at the heart of
the African American experience as this was interpreted by one of the foremost
intellectuals of the twentieth century. While Du Bois has been understood in inter-
national terms, scholars, with few exceptions, have tended to conform to a kind of
Wilsonian perspective, one that expands out from Du Bois’s interpretation of race in
the United States to a larger embrace of global conditions. As such, Du Bois and the
United States remain at the heart of the story. An alternative reading of Du Bois’s
giant steps through colonial and postcolonial terrain—witnessed in the URC, in
The Negro, and in Dark Princess—would recognize the ways in which Du Bois was
prompted by his interactions with non-Americans to push aside the veil of American
categories of race to recognize that he was merely “at the edge of the black world.”

Notes
The authors wish to thank Pramod Kale for his generous assistance, as well as Ian Fletcher and
Duane Corpis for their comments on earlier versions of this essay and for organizing the panel
on the Universal Races Congress at the 2003 World History Association annual meeting.
1. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Close Reader; Both Sides Now,” New York Times Book
Review, May 4, 2003, 31.
2. Ian Christopher Fletcher, “Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era,”
in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 246–59.
3. For Du Bois at the Paris Exposition, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social
Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 1998), 15.
4. To some extent, his position in relation to these intellectuals was analogous to that
described by Stanley Wolpert of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (who represented Indians at
the URC) in relation to Lokamanya Tilak, who was then serving a sentence for sedition
in the Andaman Islands; Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in
the Making of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Politically,
prior to 1911, Du Bois was nestled between Booker T. Washington and his more radical
opponents.
5. Du Bois undertook the Atlanta University studies between 1897 and 1912; see George
Shepperson, introduction to The Negro, by W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1970), xx–xxi.
6. Booker T. Washington’s envoy to the URC, Robert Moton, found nothing objectionable in
Du Bois’s presentation at the congress; see David Levering Lewis’s discussion of Moton’s
reception of Du Bois’s paper at the URC in W. E. B. Du Bois: The Biography of a Race
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 439.
7. Du Bois, “The First Universal Races Congress,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader,
ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56.
8. Ibid., 55.

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 150 Radical History Review

9. The Ranke listed in the program is not Leopold von Ranke, who was long dead by this
time, but another with the initial J, possibly Julius.
10. Du Bois, “The First Universal Races Congress,” 56.
11. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept
(Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), 231; quoted in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The
Biography of a Race, 440.
12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
All future references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. Gustav Spiller,
ed., Papers on Inter-racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress
Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911 (London: King, 1911).
13. Du Bois’s interest in migration echoed some of the participants’ at the Universal Races
Congress. See, for example, Felix von Luschan, “Anthropological View of Race,” in Spiller,
Papers on Inter-racial Problems, 21.
14. It is this focus on migration (a major preoccupation of 1990s ethnic studies programs)
that gives The Negro its current feel and that also enables it to speak to so many areas of
historical scholarship about Africa and the world that have developed since. The current
rage to internationalize American history, for example, clearly has long roots, and
one could hardly do better than to take The Negro as a guide for such an enterprise.
See Robert Gregg, “Making the World Safe for American History,” in Burton, After the
Imperial Turn, 170–85. See also Shepperson, introduction, xv–xvi; and Paul Gilroy,
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
15. A close parallel to Du Bois’s Negro as migrant is Randolph Bourne’s notion of a “Trans-
National America”; see his War and the Intellectuals (New York: Harper and Row,
1964). Also writing during World War I, Bourne saw the possibility for a humanitarian
and peaceful society lying in the fulfillment of the United States as a multicultural and
multiethnic society.
16. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 1897, in Sundquist, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois
Reader, 38–47.
17. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28. See Robert Gregg, Inside Out, Outside
In: Essays in Comparative History (London: Macmillan, 2000), 88–95; Du Bois, “The
Conservation of Races,” 40.
18. So, Appiah notes, while the attempt to highlight certain “race abilities” might lead to a
more equitable estimation of the different contributions of the races, “it might just as easily
lead to chauvinism or total incomprehension.” Appiah, In My Father’s House, 94.
19. Spiller’s comment is found in Inter-racial Problems, 35.
20. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 45; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture
beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap, 2000).
21. Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical
Review 81 (1994): 1475–90; see also Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 1994), 254–56.
22. It is not clear, however, the degree to which Du Bois here appreciated that some of his
own concepts, like the Talented Tenth, might have contributed in the past to the process of
excluding those who did not fit within his system, thereby attributing to them the narrow
definition of Negro, or a people without history. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the
Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).

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 Gregg and Kale | The Negro and the Dark Princess 151

23. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for
Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), both describe
Ovington’s exclamation. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1927; Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1995). Future references to Dark Princess will be made parenthetically
in the text.
24. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 144. It is quite likely, though, that they have a longer lineage,
going back to the 1890s with the success of Ida B. Wells’s antilynching tour among all the
British Friends of India at a time when Gandhi was studying law in London. In this regard
it is worth noting that Wells’s fame had come initially from her success at challenging
segregation in railroad cars. Since one of Gandhi’s first political acts in South Africa was
challenging equivalent laws in almost the same manner—being personally evicted from
a passenger car—the likelihood that he was familiar with Wells’s efforts is strong. Wells,
Crusade for Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
25. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 125. Lewis, meanwhile, suggests that Du Bois really did not move
toward Marxism until after World War II, when he expressed his sympathies for the Soviet
Union most clearly. He writes this in spite of the fact that he considers at length Du Bois’s
description of black southerners as a “proletariat” and that he intended to use the phrase
“dictatorship of the proletariat” until he was persuaded to do otherwise.
26. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed, 1983). Its adherents, though, reached
beyond the African diaspora.
27. C. L. R. James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt (Washington, DC: Drum and Spear,
1969; New York: Charles H. Kerr, 1995) focuses on the African and African American
revolts mentioned here.
28. Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great
Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) focuses on this nexus
between Marx and black protest.
29. Du Bois, “The Clansman,” Crisis 10 (1915): 33; “Sir Roger Casement Patriot, Martyr,”
Crisis 12 (1916): 215–16. Paul Gilroy has placed considerable emphasis on the novel Dark
Princess in turning Du Bois toward a more internationalist perspective. Gilroy, Black
Atlantic, 140–45. See also Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Biography of a Race, 440–42.
30. Bill V. Mullens, “Du Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International,” positions: east
asia cultures critique 11 (2003): 217–39. Thanks to Ian Fletcher for bringing this piece to
our attention.
31. Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942 (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1997).
32. V. B. Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography (Bombay: Nav Jagriti Samaj, 1978), 44–45.
33. Given that great stress has been placed on Rai’s influence on Du Bois while he was in New
York, and the influence of both these Indians’ actions throughout the 1920s, it is likely
that the significance of the questions of labor and race so hotly discussed as events were
unfolding in Ireland, India, and Russia contributed greatly to Du Bois’s own perceptible
shifts toward socialism. It is certainly worthy of further exploration.
34. See Robert Gregg, “Giant Steps: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Historical Enterprise,” in
W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 77–99.
35. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women,” 1920, in Sundquist, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois
Reader, 564–76.

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 152 Radical History Review

36. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality, 11–12.

37. Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 78; Encyclopedia Britannica
Online, s.v. “Kautilya,” www.britannica.co/eb/article?tocId=9044882 (accessed May 30,
2004).
38. Romila Thapar, A History of India (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 84.
39. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality, 215.
40. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935; New York:
Atheneum, 1979), 728.

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