"The Souls of Black Folk" is Du Bois s outstanding contribution
to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to
the question, What kind of politics should African Americans
conduct to counter white supremacy? Here, in a major addition to
American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment
of Du Bois s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the
conceptual foundations of Du Bois s interpretation of black
politics.
For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics
capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while
heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of
modernizing self-realization that expressed a collective spiritual
identity. Highlighting Du Bois s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller s
social thought, the German debate over the "Geisteswissenschaften,"
and William Wordsworth s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs
"Souls " defense of this politics of expressive self-realization,
and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the
picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass
sketches in "My Bondage and My Freedom." Through a novel reading of
Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois
s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing
debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black
underclass. Coming to "Bondage" and then to these debates by
looking backward and then forward from "Souls," Gooding-Williams
lets "Souls" serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for
exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.
General
Imprint: |
Harvard University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
March 2011 |
First published: |
2009 |
Authors: |
Robert Gooding-Williams
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156 x 23mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
368 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-674-06024-1 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
Politics & government >
General
|
LSN: |
0-674-06024-5 |
Barcode: |
9780674060241 |
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