Running after Du Bois
Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers Du Bois in the great diversity of his positions—from the American “Negro” all the way to global communism and Pan-Africanism, with reference to his literary and autobiographical works.
W.E.B. Du Bois was the most influential black intellectual of his time. In this talk, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will consider Du Bois in the great diversity of his positions—from the American “Negro” all the way to global communism and Pan-Africanism, with reference to his literary and autobiographical works as well. Her focus will be his analysis of the emergence of US “abolition-democracy” as reflected in Du Bois’s massive Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, a pioneering study of the societal role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War.
Meet the speaker
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. Her books are In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of A Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008). Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Readings (2014). She has translated Jacques Derrida and Bengali poetry and fiction, and…
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