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Annotations

On the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois

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Pages: 200

Published: May 2023

Author: Nahum Dimitri Chandler

In Annotations Nahum Dimitri Chandler offers a philosophical interpretation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1897 American Negro Academy address, “The Conservation of Races.” Chandler approaches Du Bois as a generative and original philosophical thinker-writer on the status and historical implication of matters of human difference, both the fact of and the very idea thereof. Chandler proposes both a close reading of Du Bois’s engagement of the concept of so-called race and a deep meditation on Du Bois’s conceptualization of historicity in general. He elaborates on the way Du Bois’s thought in this address can give an account of the organization of the historicity that yields the emergence of something like the African American, at once with its own internal dimensions and yet also as an originary articulation of forces and possibilities that have world historical implications. Chandler refigures Du Bois’s thought as a vital theoretical resource for rethinking our concepts of differences among humans and, so too, our understanding of modern historicity itself.

Praise

“In Annotations, Nahum Dimitri Chandler turns his extraordinarily well-honed orientation to and capabilities for close readings of texts to W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay ‘The Conservation of Races.’ Scholars will welcome Chandler’s attentive, deliberate, and immersive reading of this signal text, through which he offers a nuanced and intricately fashioned interpretation. In short, for me Chandler is the foremost scholar on the writings of Du Bois.” - Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., author of On Race and Philosophy

“Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s Annotations is a major contribution to the study of Du Bois’s early philosophical thought and an invaluable meditation on the 1897 essay, ‘The Conservation of Races.’ Few if any Du Bois scholars have approached Du Bois’s writing with the patience and nuance that Chandler insistently shows it demands. His detailed discussions of DuBois’s words, sentences, and paragraphs are invariably challenging and always insightful.” - Robert Gooding-Williams, author of In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

"A complex and detailed philosophical analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois’ early thought. ... Chandler’s a sophisticated thinker and crafty wordsmith with broad knowledge, a vast vocabulary, and a writing style ripe with complex analytic musing and artistic stylization."

- Sean Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies

". . . Annotations will nevertheless provide such a detailed tracing of Du Bois’s intellectual development as to make this study an essential study for all readers interested in this towering figure and his place in the ongoing struggle for American society to move beyond the color line." - John K. Young, Textual Cultures

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Nahum Dimitri Chandler is Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Beyond This Narrow Now”: Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois, also published by Duke University Press, and X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  xv
Note on Citations  xvii
Part I. On Paragraph Four of “The Conservation of Races”  1
Part II. On the Question of the Illimitable in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois  81
Afterthought  145
Notes  147
References  161
Index  173

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1842-1 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-1579-6 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2302-9 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478023029