Distinguished W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

W.E.B. Du Bois in Today’s World

Please note that this event takes place at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Audimax theater (Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin). For more information, please see Humboldt’s website.

The Distinguished W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures offer new contributions to intercultural dialogue by inviting outstanding American scholars and public intellectuals to give a lecture and teach a seminar addressing important issues of public culture, of the social and political role of cultural differences, of intercultural translation, and of the interactions between cultures, seen from a transatlantic perspective. The lectures have been named to honor W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the most influential intellectuals, scholars, public figures, and writers of twentieth-century America. He was a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University (in 1895), and was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Humboldt-Universität in 1958.

In this Distinguished W.E.B. Du Bois lecture, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers a new reading of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, with reference to Antonio Gramsci and Tillie Olsen. Her readings will be in the context of the largest sectors of the electorate in Africa and Asia today, and their relationship with Du Bois’s struggles as they developed out of recognizable German contexts, Gramsci’s invocation of the production of the subaltern intellectual, and Tillie Olsen’s background in Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass Strike.

In cooperation with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.