Drs. Marilyn Fischer & Denise James lead SIAP Seminar July 26- July 31 2010

Drs. Marilyn Fischer and Denise James led the seminar titled "Rereading W.E.B. Du Bois"

Souls of Black Folk has been called "Poetic History". The telling is dense, as tragedy and promise move contrapuntally through the book’s pages. We reconstruct DuBois’s alternative to the master narrative of America as land of freedom and progress and place DuBois in conversation with black intellectuals of his day, including Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Marcus Garvey, focusing on their discussions of Pan-Africanism, race, gender, and class. Although DuBois grants the color line global scope in The Souls of Black Folk, the book’s focus is on the spiritual strivings and the double-consciousness of those living within the veil in America. In Darkwater the transnational dimensions of the color-line are explicitly explored, as DuBois describes how the souls of white folk are infiltrated through and through with imperialist frenzy. We approach Darkwater through the transnational experiences of peoples of color with imperialism and industrial capitalism, and note the resulting distortions of democracy. We trace how DuBois weaves the layers of the transnational and the national, into and through his achingly beautiful excavations of individual souls.