The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-195
Author(s):  
Emily Coit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Mode Of Action ◽  
William James ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

Chapter 5 shows how Henry Adams's Education intervenes in a conversation about the agency of the educated elite amongst Harvard-affiliated thinkers including William James, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles William Eliot. Identifying Du Bois as a New England liberal, the chapter notes that both he and Eliot call 'college-bred' men to duty and advocate for liberal education in a sincere, direct mode. Adams's Education opposes such arguments partly by being ironic. Observing that its celebrated ironies are crucially constituted by sincere statements from liberal thinkers, the chapter shows that The Education takes up words and ideas that are salient in Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Its ironic rewriting of elements from that text flamboyantly exercises (and thus consolidates) the power that belongs to its author. Disparaging action grounded in consensus, collectivity, and sincerity, which he associates derisively with Boston and Harvard, Adams advocates an alternate mode of action that inheres in irony, doubt, indirection, and individual disruptiveness. In enacting this mode, The Education demonstrates its formidable potency. But Adams's showy performance of power via inaction nevertheless becomes a key source for the twentieth-century narrative about impotently passive 'genteel' thinkers.

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.

The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk

2014 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-287
Author(s):  
A. R. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

SHADOWS OF DU BOIS

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Turner
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Color Line ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

Political theory is catching up to Du Bois. More than a century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997), political theorists have begun to realize that “the problem of the color-line” (pp. 45, 61) is constitutive of modernity. That it has taken this long for political theorists to recognize what Du Bois saw so clearly more than a century ago reflects the field's all-too-frequent parochialism. At the same time, the field is home to dissenting voices which insist that we cannot understand modern politics without confronting the White supremacist character of the modern West.

scholarly journals Double Consciousness in Today's Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-125
Author(s):  
L.E. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Black America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document