posted by Mari Christmas

on May 23, 2007

Today I started working with Amy and others on the Du Bois Project at the UPenn School of Design. Amy and I went over some of the intense work that other students have done in the past and are currently working on. It is an impressive project with an incredible amount of dedication and interest -- I hope to be able to match that enthusiasm as part of this team. I watched the video W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices over at the Undergraduate library (which wasn't far away so that meant I didn't get lost on the enormous campus) and picked up so much new information that adds so many dimensions to how I will be able to interpret the up-coming research.

Now for a tangent -- Something that I found incredibly interesting in the video was on Du Bois support of the Russian/Soviet Revolution.

At Haverford College I had just finished taking a class on the Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia from 1700-1917 and seeing Du Bois interpreting that kind of mass political change (Russia in 1905 and later in 1917) in comparison to his idea of a "second reconstruction" (1934-48) seemed like the collision of two polar opposites. Yet although Du Bois, the democratic bourgeois, later converted to Communism, seemed to foster the growth of a peaceful political global agenda with the identification of marginalized communities. This specifically seemed relevant to the idea of a "re-identification" that stemmed from growing idea of the "American" or the "nationalist" that further and further isolated the marginalized members of societies.

Something I also found similar to the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia in Du Bois work was his dedication to the printed word -- especially with the publication of the magazine The Crisis which illuminated many of the political views of Du Bois and framed much of public opinion. I found him analogous to the Russian romanticist Alexander Herzen who is better known as the founder of Russian socialism but more importantly as the founder of the first Free Russian Press (the Bell) in London (which he printed in Russian and out of the jurisdiction of Russian censorship and smuggled into Russia). His dedication to public opinion and social justice seemed equivalent to Du Bois passion for executing pen to paper. Finding this out about Du Bois made him so interesting from a global political perspective -- I had only imagined him from a specific application to US politics earlier.End of tangent.

Talking to Amy after the movie made me more curious to see Du Bois not only as an intellectual but really as a whole person outside of the political and the political voice that he possessed. His social interactions with people and his treatment of those closest to him seemed to be cold and careless. It made me wonder that Du Bois' wife knew that she had married a man that belonged to the world, and, later in their marriage, less and less to her. Du Bois was incredibly complicated as a person and his perseverance in the political seemed to not leave him with much more energy for anything else. Especially in confronting issues of race now, as a racial minority, I hear myself and my friends constantly stating how tired they are of having to explain themselves and their personal narrative alongside the underbelly of race. But Du Bois did this everyday and maintained the vigor and resilience that many of us lack. Although I have yet to read about Du Bois as a man outside of the political, his eloquent way of seeing and describing the things in this world required an intense amount of creativity and perspective that, in a way, he did not even belong to us. I am incredibly excited to be a part of this team and learn from the research of others and what they too have learned from Du Bois. I hope our varying perspectives can be weaved together and that we can capture a truer sense of his work and an interpretation to its application to current social and political issues.