In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

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.

Table of Contents:
CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The Authority of Du Bois 1 Politics, Race, and the Human Sciences 2 Intimations of Immortality and Double Consciousness 3 Du Bois’s Counter-Sublime 4 Between the Masses and the Folk 5 Douglass’s Declarations of Independence and Practices of Politics 6 Inheriting Du Bois and Douglass after Jim Crow Notes Index

Review :
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