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

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-125
Author(s):  
Gary Wilder
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Radical Humanism

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.

scholarly journals Resolving the problem of Algorithmic Dissonance: An unconventional solution for a sociotechnical problem

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiv Issar
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Black Feminist Theory ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Structural Inequities ◽  
Sociocultural Systems

In this paper, I propose the concept of “algorithmic dissonance”, which characterizes the inconsistencies that emerge through the fissures that lie between algorithmic systems that utilize system identities, and sociocultural systems of knowledge that interact with them. A product of human-algorithm interaction, algorithmic dissonance builds upon the concepts of algorithmic discrimination and algorithmic awareness, offering greater clarity towards the comprehension of these sociotechnical entanglements. By employing Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness” and black feminist theory, I argue that all algorithmic dissonance is racialized. Next, I advocate for the use of speculative methodologies and art for the creation of critically informative sociotechnical imaginaries that might serve a basis for the sociological critique and resolution of algorithmic dissonance. Algorithmic dissonance can be an effective check against structural inequities, and of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with running “algorithm audits”.

The Saro of West Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Femi J. Kolapo
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Port Harcourt ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Economic

During the hundred-odd-year period from 1837 to 1944, liberated Africans with their children, mostly from the Nigerian area who were resettled in Sierra Leone, returned to Nigeria. They and their descendants in Nigeria were known as Saro. While most of them were of Yoruba origin, their population included Igbo, Nupe, Basa, Hausa, and Efik. They returned to Lagos, Abbeokuta, Ibadan, Calabar, Onitsha, Lokoja, and Port Harcourt, locations of political-economic or missionary significance during the period. Isolated individuals went as far as Ilorin, Bida, Kano, Sokoto, and Zaira. In many respects, they constituted the earliest social group who, by their distinctive black Atlantic experience of cultural and intellectual hybridity, mediated Nigeria’s engagement with and introduction to the modern and colonial capitalist demands of the era. As purveyors of new sociopolitical and cultural ideas that would come to underpin Nigeria, they were the forerunners of the nation. By their vision of a homeland that was inclusive of multiple ethnicities and that conceived of a single economy emanating from a network of production centers in the interior, they laid its earliest modern foundation. Their significant economic, social, cultural, religious, and political roles in the actions, interactions, and structures that eventually led to the creation of Nigeria justify the consideration of them as founders of the nation.

The Postcolonial Contemporary

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
East Asia ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Do So

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

scholarly journals Strange Encounter of the Third Kind

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hess Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Third ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Paul Gilroy

In this paper the author takes issue with the notion of the Black Atlantic as discussed by the British scholar Paul Gilroy. While sympathising with the overall perspective it criticises Gilroy's uncritical, almost iconographic, approach to black intellectual celebrities such as W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James and particularly their discussion of Marxist tropes and communist politics.

scholarly journals Ani Loomba: Colonialism/Postcolonialism. The New Critical Idiom Series. New York: Routledge. 1998. 289 pp. $16.95
Robert J. C. Young: Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. 178 pp. $9.95

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 248-253
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real World ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Hierarchical Relationships

Ania Loomba, a professor of English, utilizes multiple Shakespearean examples to illustrate postcolonial theory (The Tempest in particular). Robert J. C. Young, also a professor of English, instead uses a montage approach, providing “real world” examples of postcolonial theory before working backwards towards a definition or some exposition on power relations. A middle road between these two authors’ works might be one that quotes not Caliban (the postcolonial posterchild) but his master/oppressor, Prospero. Referring to the duplicitous brother who overthrew him as Duke of Milan, Prospero describes Antonio as “one/Who having, unto truth by telling of it,/ Made such a sinner of his memory,/ To credit his own lie,—he did believe/He was indeed the duke.” In other words, Prospero’s brother, by performing the duties associated with the Duke, came to believe that he was the Duke. Antonio’s hierarchical relationships—with his brothers, with his peers, with his subjects— led to the creation of a specific type of knowledge. In this realm of knowledge, it is right for Antonio to seize power from Prospero. This enforced paradigm shift (Antonio’s actions creating the parameters in which “truth” is created) was labeled by Nietzsche as “will-to-knowledge.”

Tourism, Conservation, and State Parks

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
David J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
State Parks ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Park Service ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Depression Era

For Florida, conservation and tourism have always been linked. As many argued during the Great Depression era, we should conserve those elements that we can sell to visitors. This chapter looks at the development of both during the 1930s and how they led to the creation of the Florida Park Service.

Liberalism after Burczak: redistribution, worker self-management and the market process

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-542
Author(s):  
DAVID EMANUEL ANDERSSON
Keyword(s):  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Knowledge Dissemination ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Market Process ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Market Order ◽  
Redistributive Policies ◽  
Wealth Redistribution

Abstract:In Socialism after Hayek, Theodore Burczak uses Hayekian insights to argue in favor of a socialist society with real markets, but also with wealth redistribution and prohibition of wage labor. In so doing, he offers not only a socialist vision but also asks questions that may challenge Hayekian liberals to reformulate their institutional analyses. A critical assessment that combines Austrian and institutional theories leads to the conclusion that some redistributive policies may enhance the knowledge-disseminating function of markets, but that a market order that is limited to worker-managed firms diminishes the knowledge dissemination properties of the market process.

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