BOOK: Adom GETACHEW and Jennifer PITTS (eds.), W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 300 pp., ISBN 9781108491648, £69.99

 

(image credit: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety of his preoccupations, intellectual sources, and interlocutors.

Table of contents: 

Democracy and Empire: An introduction to the international thought of W. E. B. Du Bois select chronology of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
1. The present outlook for the dark races of mankind (1900)
2. To the nations of the world (1900)
3. The African roots of war (1915)
4. Of the culture of white folk (1917)
5. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to President Woodrow Wilson (1918)
6. To the world (Manifesto of the second Pan-African congress) (1921)
7. Worlds of color (1925)
8. Liberia and rubber (1925)
9. Liberia, the League and the United States (1933)
10. Where do we go from here? Address to the Rosenwald economic conference (1933)
11. Inter-Racial implications of the Ethiopian crisis: A Negro view (1935)
12. The clash of colour: Indians and American Negroes (1936)
13. The union of colour (1936)
14. What Japan has Done (1937)
15. Black Africa tomorrow (1938)
16. The realities in Africa: European profit or Negro development? (1943)
17. Prospect of a world without race conflict (1944)
18. Colonies and moral responsibility (1946)
19. A cup of Cocoa and chocolate drops (1946)
20. An Appeal to the world: A statement of denial of human rights to minorities, Introduction (1947)
21. Colonies as cause of war: Address to the world peace congress, Paris (1949)
22. On the West Indies (1952)
23. To the world peace council, Budapest (1953)
24. Colonialism and the Russian revolution (1956)
Index

About the editors: 

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019). Her writing has appeared in Dissent, Nation, London Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her previous publications include A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (2005) and Boundaries of the International Law and Empire (2018). She is co-editor of The Law of Nations in Global History (2017) and the editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery (2001).

More information can be found here.