In the Shadow of Du Bois

Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

ISBN 9780674060241

Publication date: 04/15/2011

The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics.

For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.

Praise

Gooding-Williams brings to his rich and original study of twentieth (and twenty-first) century African American thought a philosopher's respect for argument, a historian's appreciation of context and influence, a writer's care for fine and textured readings, and a political theorist's concern with power, identity, and democracy. This is an extraordinary book, one that will elicit gratitude as well as admiration for its thoroughness, intelligence, and measure.

—Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley
How should African Americans respond to white supremacy and its legacy? Gooding-Williams offers an impressively learned and probing critical interpretation of Du Bois's highly influential answer to this central question of African American philosophy. This thoroughly original book is not only the most sophisticated philosophical study to date of Du Bois's early thought, but it is also a provocative and noteworthy contribution to the contemporary debate over the content and contours of black politics in the post-segregation era.

—Tommie Shelby, Harvard University
[A] sustained and in-depth engagement with the legacy of Du Bois's thought, especially as it pertains to questions of black political activism and leadership...[Gooding-Williams] places Du Bois as a generative figure in American political thought alongside the early modern and Enlightenment stable of social-contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

—Peniel E. Joseph, Bookforum
In the Shadow of Du Bois is a thoughtful, nuanced work that challenges previous perceptions of Du Bois and modern definitions of African American politics.

—K. Anderson, Choice
[Gooding-Williams] sets out to give Du Bois's writings the same sort of judicious close reading that was on display in his earlier book on Nietzsche's Zarathustra…By attending to Du Bois's relations to thinkers like Weber, Gooding-Williams helpfully places this American thinker against the background of the education he received in Berlin.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books