Reading Du Bois’s Revelation: Radical Humanism and Black Atlantic Criticism

Abstract

This essay analyzes W.E.B. Du Bois’s Depression-era program for black self-management through economic cooperatives. I suggest that this plan started from his belief that racial emancipation would never be possible under capitalist arrangements and socialism could never be realized as long as a color bar existed. I demonstrate how Du Bois hoped through this experiment in black mutualism to enact and contribute to the creation of a multi-racial democratic and socialist society that would promote dis-alienated forms of life in and beyond America. I argue that Du Bois’s radical humanism and non-liberal universalism has become illegible to critical and postcolonial theory today, just when it may speak directly to current intellectual dilemmas and political imperatives – primarily by displacing the false opposition between abstract universality and concrete particularity.