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SoSe 22: Reading W.E.B. Du Bois across Genres and Institutions

Alexander Starre

Comments

When in 1903 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” he not only voiced a prophetic outlook, he also positioned himself as the intellectual leader whose approach would help to confront, study, and ultimately improve race relations in the United States. In this course, students will read a generous selection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s sprawling oeuvre from the first half of his career (roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s). We will encounter an enterprising scholar-activist who worked tirelessly at finding the right style, the right form, and the right institutions to spread his ideas on the history, sociology, and aesthetics of Black culture in the USA. Du Bois’s writing stretched across the domains of scholarship, journalism, civil rights activism, and belles lettres; he produced statistical analyses, qualitative surveys, historical accounts, and social theory while working within the genres of the academic monograph, the essay, the manifesto, the (auto-)biography, the short story, the novel, and the editorial. A foundational figure both for the civil rights movement and for the field of Black Studies, Du Bois articulated the injustices and paradoxes of Jim Crow America like no other. ----- While we will spend time with Du Bois’s most widely read book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the focus of our readings will be on a variety of less canonical texts including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Darkwater (1920), as well as excerpts from The Crisis magazine and select archival materials. close

14 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Tue, 16:00 - 18:00 14 Class schedule

Tue, 2022-04-19 16:00 - 18:00

Lecturers:
Dr. Alexander Starre