The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays

by W. E. B. Du Bois, Nahum Dimitri Chandler (Editor)

Overview

The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays assembles essential essays by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois – thinker, writer, scholar, activist, leader – from half a dozen years on each side, respectively, of the turning of the twentieth century, from 1894 to early 1906. In this essays are the first formulations of some of Du Bois’s most famous ideas, namely, “the veil,” “double-consciousness,” and the “problem of the color line.” Clustered around the turn of the century, they comprise a kind of essential companion to The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823254576
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2014
Series:	American Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a leading scholar, writer, and political activist. For twenty-three years he was the editor of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Apart from hundreds of essays and diverse short works, he published more than twenty book length texts during his lifetime, among the most well-known of which are The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study,and The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.

Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves on the faculty of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, in African American Studies, ComparativeLiterature, and European Languages and Studies. He is the author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought and The Problem of Pure Being: Annotations on the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro, both from Fordham, as well as Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Nahum Dimitri Chandler i-xliv

1894

1. The Afro-American (circa 1894)

1897

2. The Conservation of Races (1897)

3. Strivings of the Negro People (1897)

1898

4. The Study of the Negro Problems (1898)

1900

5. The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind
(1900)

6. The Spirit of Modern Europe (1900)

1901

7. The Freedmen's Bureau (1901)

8. The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in the South (1901)

1903

9. The Talented Tenth (1903)

1904

10. The Development of a People (1904)

1905


11. Sociology Hesitant (circa 1905)

1906

12. Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten
(The Negro Question in the United States) (1906)

References

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"Chandler's collection makes available, for the first time, a systematic, chronological tour of Du Bois' evolving vision of the global color line, as that vision was developed in the crucial opening years of his publishing life. Students, as well as advanced scholars in the field, 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

From the Publisher

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.

author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination - Robin D. G. Kelley

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.

Lehigh University - Seth Moglen

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.

Vanderbilt University - Lucius T. Outlaw

11/01/2014
An anthology of Du Bois's essays written between 1894 and 1906 (some of which were only published posthumously) that show the beginnings of ideas such as "double-consciousness," and "the problem of the color line."

Library Journal