Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk - Softcover

Crouch, Stanley; Benjamin, Playthell

4.13

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780762416998: Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0762416998 ISBN 13: 9780762416998

Publisher: Running Press, 2003

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Stanley Crouch teams up with noted journalist Playthell Benjamin for this thought-provoking look back at The Souls of Black Folk, the epochal, prophetic work by the great African-American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois. Crouch--an internationally recognized jazz critic, syndicated columnist, and author--and Benjamin appraise the contributions of DuBois's work, noting its uncanny relevance to today's society and its profound impact on the field of African-American studies. Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk is a fitting tribute to a literary and sociological triumph.

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About the Author:

Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, essayist, and television commentator. He has served since 1987 as an artistic consultant at Lincoln Center and is a co-founder of the department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the author of Notes of a Hanging Judge and The Artificial White Man, among other titles. He lives in New York City. Never less than penetrating and controversial, Playthell Benjamin is a veteran columnist and critic whose work has appeared on many websites as well as in publications such as The World & I and the Village Voice.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pioneering black sociologist and public intellectual W.E.B. DuBois set the terms of debate about race in 20th-century America in The Souls of Black Folk. In this vigorous dialogue, two contemporary black intellectuals assess DuBois's ideas and legacy for the centenary of his most famous work: his evocation of the "double consciousness" of African-Americans in a racist society; his advocacy of the black "talented tenth"; and his challenge to Booker T. Washington's nonconfrontational program of downplaying black civil and political rights in favor of economic advancement. In his two long and generally appreciative essays, historian and journalist Benjamin fills in the educational and intellectual milieu that influenced DuBois (especially the Romantic German nationalism he absorbed during a stint in Berlin), celebrates his nuanced, pathbreaking explorations of black culture and psychology, and defends him against charges of elitism by present-day writers. The much shorter responses by playwright and critic Crouch (Notes of a Hanging Judge) are more critical: he castigates DuBois for his embrace of black separatism, Marxism and Pan-Africanism. (That the latter two "sins" take place entirely outside of Souls doesn't seem to bother Crouch.) Crouch spins DuBois as a betrayer of the Enlightenment principles of equality and democracy that he thinks should be the philosophical foundations of blacks' struggle for freedom. The authors' vigorously opinionated styles (Benjamin attacks Cornel West for his "pretentious mumbo-jumbo" and Adolph Reed for being a "pugnacious misanthrope," while Crouch launches blistering tirades against "greasy crackers" and Communists alike) can be wearying, and the result is that this dispatch, while often provocative, just as often has little to do with the seminal book that gives Crouch and Benjamin their title.
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