W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
American Research

Classical American pragmatism: Practicing philosophy as experiencing life

Human Affairs ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Kegley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Problems In Living ◽  
Applied Philosophy ◽  
Democratic Life

AbstractI argue that Classical American Pragmatists—Royce, James, Dewey, Perice, Addams, Du Bois, and Locke subscribed to this view and practiced philosophy by focusing on experience and directing a critical eye to major problems in living. Thus Royce and Dewey explored the nature of genuine community and its role in developing a flourishing individual life but also a public, democratic life. Royce and James engaged in a phenomenological analysis of human experience including religious experience developing a rich understanding of human psychological, social, and religious development. Dewey, Royce and Perice applied the lessons of the scientific communal experience to problem solving in everyday life. Dewey explored life’s aesthetic dimensions. Addams, Du Bois and Locke applied philosophy to problems of living with discrimination as an immigrant or an African American.

Missionary Cultures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.

Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-117
Author(s):  
Randall Knoper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Bell Curve ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Physical Energy ◽  
Class Average ◽  
Pauline Hopkins ◽  
African American Race

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Du Bois and James at Harvard: The Challenges of Fraternal Pairings and Racial Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
William James ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.

scholarly journals Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110679
Author(s):  
Joe P. L. Davidson ◽  
Filipe Carreira da Silva
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

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