W E B Du Bois On Africa

This book brings together, for the first time, W.E.B. Du Bois's writings on Africa across half a century in magazine and journal articles, poems and book chapters, highlighting his role among the most important intellectual figures in modern African social thought.

W. E. B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent African American intellectual of the twentieth century. As a pioneering historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, and as a novelist and autobiographer, he made the problem of race central to an understanding of the United States within both national and transnational contexts; his masterwork The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is today among the most widely read and most often quoted works of American literature. This Companion presents ten specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars which explore key aspects of Du Bois's work. The book offers students a critical introduction to Du Bois, as well as opening new pathways into the further study of his remarkable career. It will be of interest to all those working in African American studies, American literature, and American studies generally.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Written in very accessible prose, these two booklets, originally published in 1930, allowed W. E. B. Du Bois to reach a wide audience with an interest in Africa. What is so incredible about the two Africa booklets is their lasting relevance and value to the study of Africa today. Coupling Du Bois's breadth of scholarship with his passion for the subjects, the analyses in these booklets are integral to the study of Africa. Many of his arguments foreshadowed the issues and debates regarding Africa in the twentieth century. Expertly synthesized in an introduction by Emmanuel Akyeampong, this edition of the two Africa booklets is essential for anyone interested in African history.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Collected in one volume for the first time, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy are two of W E. B. Du Bois's most powerful essays on race. He explores how to tell the story of those left out of recorded history, the evils of colonialism worldwide, and Africa's and African's contributions to, and neglect from, world history. More than six decades after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, they remain worthy guides for the twenty-first century. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and two introductions by top African scholars, this edition is essential for anyone interested in world history.

This book provides a new interpretation of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most important African American scholars and thinkers of the 20th century. This revealing biography captures the full life of W.E.B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, author, editor, and a leader in the fight to bring African Americans more fully into the American landscape as well as a forceful proponent of their leaving America altogether and returning to Africa. Drawing on extensive research and including new primary documents, sidebars, and analysis, Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly offer a portrait of this remarkable man, paying special attention to the often-overlooked radical decades at the end of Du Bois's life. The book also highlights Du Bois's relationships with and influence on civil rights activists, intellectuals, and freedom fighters, among them Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Louise Thompson Patterson, William Alphaeus Hunton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The biography includes a selection of primary source documents, including personal letters, speeches, poems, and newspaper articles, that provide insight into Du Bois's life based on his own words and analysis.

2015 Reprint of 1947 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Can the freedom-loving modern world close its eyes and ears to the exploitation by foreigners of a continent three times the size of Europe and four times that of the United States, and to the centuries-old oppression of its widely scattered people?" This is the question which the author raises in this work. To document his declarations concerning the injustices which have been meted out to blacks by their white exploiters, Dubois recounts the entire history of the continent-the vast contributions of ancient and modern Africa to world culture, industry and development, contributions that have often been overlooked by mainstream historians.

Widely known for his probing analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois's early work, in this book Nahum Dimitri Chandler references writing from across the whole of Du Bois's long career, while bringing sharp focus on two later texts issued in the immediate aftermath of World War II—Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History. In these texts, "the problem of the color line," which Du Bois had already characterized as the problem not only of the twentieth century, but of the modern epoch as a whole, is further figured as a global problem, as a horizon linking the contemporary conjuncture of the history of modern systems of enslavement with the ongoing impact of modern colonialism and imperialism on the world's possible futures. On this line of thought, Chandler proposes that the name of "Africa" is a theoretical metaphor that enables a hyperbolic re-narrativization of modern historicity. Du Bois thus emerges as an exemplary thinker of history and hope for the world beyond the limit of the present.

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."