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A clear, critical, accessible, and ultimately hopeful discovery voyage through the seas of Du Bois's language and ideas.
Offering a vision both hopeful and thoughtful, Reading Du Bois is an Afrocentric reexamination of the work of one of the most important intellectuals of our time. Du Bois wanted to solve the issue of race dividing American society. Aaron X. Smith and Molefi Kete Asante take one of Du Bois's key concepts, the idea that the problem of his century was going to be the color line, and demonstrate that such a reader of that concept provides fresh insights into our present interpersonal and political situation. The application of Du Bois's concept such as the color line reveals the subject place of African American people is not merely a marginal space but rather a central space to all who seek to bring justice, democracy, and optimism.
"Du Bois's notion of the 'the problem with the color line' is well known to scholars and yet, despite being one of the most central observations of his early career, one that shaped the trajectory of his public life, we lack a complete study critiquing this idea. Reading Du Bois provides the reader with an in-depth and very engaging rendering of Du Bois's foundational idea from an Afrocentric perspective." — Adisa A. Alkebulan, San Diego State University
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. A Performative Biography: Who was Du Bois?
2. Du Bois's Central Contributions to the Race Discourse
3. The Entrapment of Ambition: Talented Tenth
4. The Narrative of Socialism Considering Democracy
5. Restorative Imagination in Du Bois's "The Comet"
6. Du Bois and the Color Line, Battling the Toxic Social Construction of Race
7. The Evolution of Du Bois into a Pan African Race Organizer
8. The Afrocentric Corrective at the Crest of Victory
Notes
Bibliography
Index