The Negro (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780812217759)

Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. So begins The Negro, the first comprehensive history of African and African-derived people, from their early cultures through the period of the slave trade and into the twentieth century.

Originally published in 1915, the book was acclaimed in its time, widely read, and deeply influential in both the white and black communities, yet this beautifully written history is virtually unknown today. As a wellspring of critical studies of Africa and African Americans, it directly and indirectly influenced and inspired the works of scholars such as C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Herbert Aptheker, Eric Foner, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the most important books on Africa ever written, it remains fresh, dynamic, and insightful to this day.

The Negro is compelling on many levels. By comparing W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis with subsequent scholarship, Robert Gregg demonstrates in his afterword that The Negro was well ahead of its time: Du Bois's view of slavery prefigures both paternalistic perspectives and the materialist view that the system was part of the capitalist mode of production. On black contributions to the Civil War and to the emancipation of slaves, historians have yet to acknowledge all that Du Bois delineated. In his discussion of Reconstruction, Du Bois preempts much later historiography. His identification of segregation as an issue of class rather than race is almost forty years ahead of C. Vann Woodward's similar thesis. As to the matter of race, Du Bois is clear that the concept is a social construct having no foundation in biology.

Intellectually and historically prescient, Du Bois assumed globalization as a matter of course, so that his definition of the color line in The Negro links all colonized peoples, not just people of African descent. With the resolution of the Cold War and the ascendancy of the global market, Du Bois's sweeping vision of Africans and the diaspora seems more relevant now than at any time in the past hundred years.

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
ISBN-10: 0812217756
ISBN-13: 9780812217759
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Language: English
Published: 05/22/2001
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.70w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2001 pg. 701
Library Journal 08/01/2001 pg. 172
Library Journal 01/01/2002 pg. 160
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2001 pg. 137
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2002 pg. 18 - Strongly Recommended