This volume assembles essential essays—some published only posthumously, others obscure, another only recently translated—by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1894 to early 1906. They show the first formulations of some of his most famous ideas, namely, “the veil,” “double-consciousness,” and the “problem of the color line.” Moreover, the deep historical sense of the formation of the modern world that informs Du Bois’s thought and gave rise to his understanding of “the problem of the color line” is on display here. Indeed, the essays constitute an essential companion to Du Bois’s masterpiece published in 1903 as The Souls of Black Folk.
The collection is based on two editorial principles: presenting the essays in their entirety and in strict chronological order. Copious annotation affords both student and mature scholar an unprecedented grasp of the range and depth of Du Bois’s everyday intellectual and scholarly reference.
These essays commence at the moment of Du Bois’s return to the United States from two years of graduate-level study in Europe at the University of Berlin. At their center is the moment of Du Bois’s first full, self-reflexive formulation of a sense of vocation: as a student and scholar in the pursuit of the human sciences (in their still-nascent disciplinary organization—that is, the institutionalization of a generalized “sociology” or general “ethnology”), as they could be brought to bear on the study of the situation of the so-called Negro question in the United States in all of its multiply refracting dimensions. They close with Du Bois’s realization that the commitments orienting his work and intellectual practice demanded that he move beyond the institutional frames for the practice of the human sciences.
The ideas developed in these early essays remained the fundamental matrix for the ongoing development of Du Bois’s thought. The essays gathered here will therefore serve as the essential reference for those seeking to understand the most profound registers of this major American thinker.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 9780823254552
Number of pages: 384
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
"Generations of scholars have given attention to various writings by W.E.B. Du Bois. Few of us, however, have had the courage, determination, and fortitude to inhabit the whole of his historically-situated oeuvre in order to think with Du Bois as he thought. Nahum Chandler, an exemplary critical hermeneuticist, continues to live an inhabitation of Du Bois' thought. And through his critical commentary on Du Bois' "essential early essays" that he has assembled in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Chandler calls us to the responsibility to forge enhanced, even new, appreciations of Du Bois' articulated thought, and to "grappling in thought and critical reflection with the implacable matters of existence in our time." In reading these essays via an inhabitation, one cannot but experience the profound ethical and intellectual forcefulness of Chandler's inhabitation and calling." -- -Lucius T. Outlaw Vanderbilt University "This definitive collection of W. E. B. Du Bois's early essays, some having never appeared in print before, is not just another anthology among the hundreds. It is a seminal contribution to the history of modern thought. Compiled and edited by the world's preeminent scholar of early Du Boisian thought, these texts represent his most generative period, when Du Bois engaged every discipline, helped construct modern social science, employed critical inquiry as a weapon of antiracism and political liberation, and always set his sites on the entire world. We know this not by the essays alone, but by Nahum Dimitri Chandler's brilliant, original, and quite riveting introduction. If you are coming to Du Bois for the first time of the 500th time, this book is a must-read." -- -Robin D. G. Kelley author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Chandler's collection makes available, for the first time, a systematic, chronological tour of Du Bois's evolving vision of the global color line, as that vision was developed in the crucial opening years of his publishing life. Students ... can follow here the trajectory of this influential intellectual project, step by step. This volume provides a revelatory point of entry into the early thought of Du Bois and a valuable resource for all those interested in African American intellectual history and the sociology of race." -- -Seth Moglen Lehigh University
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