Reading Shakespeare Matters: Symbolic Struggles over Literary Taste among Black Intellectuals (original) (raw)
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W.E.B. Du Bois: Reshaping the American Civil Rights Movement - In Contrast to Booker T. Washington
William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois was the preeminent scholar, thinker, writer and African-American social realist, who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocated for the strengthening of black civil rights, voting rights, equality and higher educational opportunities. In his greatest literary production, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois tackles the most important and highly-divisive issue of his time, the color line between blacks and whites in America. He speaks to the African-American struggle of coping with the “double-consciousness” that afflicted the black man’s sense of worth and made him look at himself as if through the eyes of others. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His childhood was one of fun, family and friendship, but he would learn where he stood as a young black man early on when he found himself rejected by a white girl in school. Du Bois would harness lofty ambitions, his thirst for knowledge and graduate from Fisk University in 1888. Later that year, he began his graduate studies at Harvard University and then graduated 1892 with a degree in History. Du Bois would commence his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin before moving back to the United States and returned to Harvard where he wrote The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 as his doctoral dissertation. This inaugural production would become one of his most famous literary works and it would earn him his Ph.D plus the honor of becoming the first African-American to do so. After a stint at the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois moved on to Atlanta University in 1897 where he would teach Sociology and begin his intense research and study into African-American history and life. Du Bois would forever refocus his energies towards activism for black rights soon after he found a black man, who was accused of rape and murder, whom he was scheduled to present an appeal for, brutally lynched, dismembered and burned at the stake. Six years later, in 1903, Du Bois would release The Souls of Black Folk, a far-reaching and learned sociological study of the quest for black equality and civil rights in a country that neither guaranteed them their rights and looked upon them as sub-human, property and ⅗ of a man. One particular chapter in The Souls of Black Folk castigates Booker T. Washington’s stance regarding black suffrage, equality and civil rights. It would be damning indictment against a man, in Washington, who up until then, was looked upon and revered as the preeminent black scholar and advocate for African-American rights. Du Bois would forever change how the black community, whites in the South and North, and history in general view Washington’s soft-handed and conciliatory tone toward the oppressive white masters in the South.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Basic American Negro Creed: The AAAE, Censorship, and Repressive Tolerance
2007
The authors examine W.E.B. Du Bois Basic American Negro Creed and argue that its exclusion from the Carnegie Corporation funded Bronze Booklets series represents an example of repressive tolerance by the AAAE. W.E.B. Du Bois is arguably the brightest star in African American intellectual history. He is frequently cited in adult education literature for his concept of double consciousness along with his educational and socio-political theory of the talented tenth. His oft cited book, Souls of Black Folk originally published in 1903, is an intellectual and literary masterpiece. Yet Du Bois can be understood as a complex figure who continually reassessed evolving American racial, political, and economic dynamics and to formulate a progressive educational, political, and economic agenda. As Du Bois grew older, his views became increasingly radical and controversial which served to marginalize him not only from mainstream liberal minded whites but also among the black intellectual commun...
Transilvania, 2021
Starting from José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown’s 2020 book, The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois, this article discusses the contribution of Du Boisian sociology to the field of postcolonial literary studies, arguing that his main concepts and his methodology might help untangle some of postcolonialism’s current debates. Keywords: postcolonialism, race, subjectivity, double consciousness, literary studies.
Du Bois, Politics, Aesthetics: An Introduction
Public Culture, 2005
The attempt, then, to treat a literary text by a black writer as a text (a spate of discourse operating according to certain formal principles) need not exclude the critic's whole consciousness, but, of necessity, draws its plenitude into specifi c concentration. Hortense J. Spillers, "Formalism Comes to Harlem" T he essays collected in this issue celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903 by A. C. McClurg, Souls is Du Bois's biting dissent from the racist and nationalist ideologies animating the public, political culture of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow America. Announcing that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," it is Du Bois's best-known attempt to explore the