I am re-reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk for my social theory class.
In that book, published at the dawn of the previous century, he famously argues that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." I had read this argument before as Du Bois correctly discerning the long hard civil rights struggle in the United States.
What I had not appreciated until this reading was that he clearly meant the entire global question of the interaction of the white and non-white races. He had in mind European colonialism just as much as American race relations.
In making my social theory class I am trying to pick pre-eminently transformative books. One good test is whether the book itself, and not just the author, has its own Wikipedia page.
The Souls of Black Folk was prescient not just about civil rights in America, but about colonialism and post-colonialism all over the world.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
What do you make of the idea or fact that many countries that were colonized are better off today than those that were not? Is this idea given a hearing by or your colleagues?
Which countries were not colonized?
Fine then, don't answer the question.
If there is no comparison group, it is hard to say whether they are better off. Better than what?
If there is no comparison group, it is hard to say whether they are better off. Better than what?
Du Bois, like Tocqueville, recognized the inevitability of the next half-century or so in their writings. (I mean the half- centuries between roughly 1835 and 1885 and 1905 to 1965). Where Tocqueville seems to have been blinded was in sensing the actual destructive power capitalism has on democracy. Du Bois, for his part, seemed incapable of recognizing that capitalism was equally friend and foe of those "within the Veil."
Could this point to something intrinsically weak in observers of modern democracy?
Post a Comment