From Double Consciousness to Diasporic Consciousness: A Du Boisian Reading of V. S. Naipaul

This paper extends W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to theorize “diasporic consciousness” as a more layered, geographically unmoored form of split subjectivity. Through close readings of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and The Mimic Men (1967), it is argued that the Indo-Caribbean diasporic experience demands a conceptual vocabulary that accounts for multiple displacements, colonial mimicry, and the absence of a recoverable homeland. While Du Bois’s double consciousness emerges from the African American’s dual positioning within and against American society, diasporic consciousness reflects a triadic fracture: the colonized subject’s relationship to the imperial center, the ancestral homeland, and the adopted colonial territory. This comparative analysis reveals how Naipaul’s protagonists embody a consciousness that is not merely doubled but multiply refracted, offering critical insights into postcolonial subjectivity and the phenomenology of diaspora.