Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaw247
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoThis is the sort of thoughtful and challenging book that remains with you, that gets you nodding your head unconsciously in agreement, muttering disapprovals, racing to the bookshelf to look up something. It is an essential addition to the canon of W. E. B. Du Bois scholarship. Bill V. Mullen argues that Du Bois's long and winding intellectual trajectory from double consciousness to exilic Communism can be illuminated by investigating his engagement with the “world revolution” concept, devised by the Communist International, revealed by Du Bois's multidecade reflections on the Russian Revolution of 1917, and pursued via his “cumulative historical method”—an effort to uncover revolutionary formulations in the present by recovering revolutionary agency in the past (p. 4). This perspective, Mullen writes, requires a thoughtful reading of late-period Du Bois, long marginalized by scholars, and giving particular attention to Du Bois's writings on Russia between 1926 and 1961, which offer a roadmap of Du Bois's uneven and gradual embrace of Marxism and the world revolution concept. Mullen wonderfully braids Du Bois's intellectual journey to an eclectic group of revolutionaries likewise drawn—at various times and in different ways—to the project of communist internationalism: Jawaharlal Nehru, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and others. And he explores Du Bois's engagements with liberation struggles in India and China, Japan's global emergence, the specter of Stalinism, and the global peace work engendered by a dynamic cadre of leftist black women, particularly Claudia Jones and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Mullen's treatment of Smedley, Strong, and Jones is particularly sharp and illuminating.
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