Du Bois. Reiland Rabaka

Du Bois - Reiland Rabaka


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of race and racism, gender and sexism, class and capitalism, and colonialism and anti-colonialism. Indeed, his work can be characterized as an interesting combination of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, male feminism, and Marxism. Consequently, Du Bois: A Critical Introduction explores Du Bois’s solutions to the “problems” of racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism. Most scholarship on Du Bois seems to isolate one period or aspect of his polymathic thought. There is also a tendency to de-radicalize and domesticate his discourse by sanitizing it of its radical and internationalist elements, especially in his later socialist-cum-communist years. Du Bois: A Critical Introduction will instead examine the strengths and weaknesses in Du Bois’s development from reformist to radical to late-life revolutionary.

      Du Bois’s early life, Lewis lamented, was “a milieu circumscribed by immiseration, dementia, and deformity.”9 As with so many African American children born within the shameful shadow of American slavery, Du Bois grew up very poor and, consequently, developed a consciousness of his lower-class status before he was aware of his race and American racism, even though he was the only black child in his all-white school. It was not long, however, before race and racism unforgivingly crept into his life, and from his first unforgettable and life-altering experience of anti-black racism he defiantly decided to “prove to the world that Negroes were just like other people.”10

      Bearing all of this in mind, throughout this book Du Bois’s evolving thought is examined as an early form of intersectionality – a framework that emphasizes that race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other socio-political categories, are interconnected and frequently combine to create intersecting systems of oppression. Loosely situated within this framework, Du Bois’s discourse can be explored as a kind of embryonic intersectionality – meaning an inchoate, not fully formed variant of intersectionality that, because of its prefigurative nature, is at times conceptually connected, and, at other times, intellectually awkward and discursively disjointed. Nevertheless, when taken together and ample attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism and sexism and capitalism and colonialism, Du Bois’s corpus registers as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of what scholars currently call intersectionality.16

      Along with his contributions to the origins and evolution of intersectionality, this book explores Du Bois’s contributions to interdisciplinarity – the practice of bringing the scholarship of two or more academic disciplines together to answer a research question or provide solutions to a problem. Du Bois’s collective coursework at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin was incredibly interdisciplinary, and resulted in a BA in classics from Fisk in 1888; a BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1890; an MA in history from Harvard in 1891; doctoral studies in history, economics, politics, and political economy at the University of Berlin between 1892 and 1894; and, ultimately, a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1895.17 After earning his doctorate,


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