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4 books match the query 'Du Bois, W. E. B.'
Blood Talk
American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the OccultSusan Gillman
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The United States has seldom known a period of greater social and cultural volatility, especially in terms of race relations, than the years from the end of Reconstruction to the First World War. In this highly original study, Susan Gillman explores the rise during this period of a remarkable genre—the race melodrama—and the way in which it converged with literary trends, popular history, fringe movements, and mainstream interest in supernatural phenomena.
Blood Talk shows how race melodrama emerged from abolitionist works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and surprisingly manifested itself in a set of more aesthetically and politically varied works, such as historical romances, sentimental novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain, the regional fiction of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, and the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Gillman then uses the race melodrama to show how racial discourses in the United States have been entangled with occultist phenomena, from the rituals of the Ku Klux Klan and the concept of messianic second-sight to the production of conspiracy theories and studies of dreams and trances.
Blood Talk shows how race melodrama emerged from abolitionist works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and surprisingly manifested itself in a set of more aesthetically and politically varied works, such as historical romances, sentimental novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain, the regional fiction of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, and the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Gillman then uses the race melodrama to show how racial discourses in the United States have been entangled with occultist phenomena, from the rituals of the Ku Klux Klan and the concept of messianic second-sight to the production of conspiracy theories and studies of dreams and trances.
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Dark Voices
W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903Shamoon Zamir
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Dark Voices is the first sustained examination of the intellectual formation of W. E. B. Du Bois, tracing the scholar and civil rights leader's thought from his undergraduate days in the 1880s to the 1903 publication of his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, and offering a new reading of his work from this period.
Bringing to light materials from the Du Bois archives that have not been discussed before, Shamoon Zamir explores Du Bois's deep engagement with American and European philosophy and social science. He examines the impact on Du Bois of his studies at Harvard with William James and George Santayana, and shows how the experience of post-Reconstruction racism moved Du Bois from metaphysical speculation to the more instrumentalist knowledge of history and the new discipline of sociology, as well as toward the very different kind of understanding embodied in the literary imagination. Providing a new and detailed reading of The Souls of Black Folk in comparison with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Zamir challenges accounts that place Du Bois alongside Emerson and James, or characterize him as a Hegelian idealist. This reading also explores Du Bois's relationship to African American folk culture, and shows how Du Bois was able to dramatize the collapse of many of his hopes for racial justice and liberation.
The first book to place The Souls of Black Folk in its intellectual context, Dark Voices is a case study of African American literary development in relation to the broader currents of European and American thought.
Bringing to light materials from the Du Bois archives that have not been discussed before, Shamoon Zamir explores Du Bois's deep engagement with American and European philosophy and social science. He examines the impact on Du Bois of his studies at Harvard with William James and George Santayana, and shows how the experience of post-Reconstruction racism moved Du Bois from metaphysical speculation to the more instrumentalist knowledge of history and the new discipline of sociology, as well as toward the very different kind of understanding embodied in the literary imagination. Providing a new and detailed reading of The Souls of Black Folk in comparison with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Zamir challenges accounts that place Du Bois alongside Emerson and James, or characterize him as a Hegelian idealist. This reading also explores Du Bois's relationship to African American folk culture, and shows how Du Bois was able to dramatize the collapse of many of his hopes for racial justice and liberation.
The first book to place The Souls of Black Folk in its intellectual context, Dark Voices is a case study of African American literary development in relation to the broader currents of European and American thought.
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John Brown
A BiographyW. E. B. Du Bois
Westholme Publishing, 2024
In the preface to his biography of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois writes that the book “is at once a record of and a tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Du Bois alludes to this in Souls of Black Folk when he describes John Brown’s actions: “led by [Charles Lenox] Remond, [William Cooper] Nell, [William] Wells-Brown, and [Frederick] Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic.” First published in 1909, the same year Du Bois helped found the NAACP, John Brown is a studious account of the fiery abolitionist’s life, while throughout are asides intertwined in the narrative that provide additional insights into Du Bois’s thoughts on race and America. The life of John Brown carries a message that still resonates in twenty-first century, and Du Bois makes it his refrain throughout this volume: “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
This edition is introduced by John Brown scholar William S. King, who provides the background to the writing of the biography which took place during a turbulent time of race relations and competing visions from Booker T. Washington and Du Bois for the future of Black Americans. “Du Bois,” King reminds us, “remains one of the best writers on this phase of American history, which is still at our core.”
This edition is introduced by John Brown scholar William S. King, who provides the background to the writing of the biography which took place during a turbulent time of race relations and competing visions from Booker T. Washington and Du Bois for the future of Black Americans. “Du Bois,” King reminds us, “remains one of the best writers on this phase of American history, which is still at our core.”
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Photography on the Color Line
W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual CultureShawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2004
Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.
Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.
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