Kwame Anthony Appiah writes the Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, he is the best-selling, award-winning author of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity; Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; The Ethics of Identity; and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.
Examines Du Bois’s evolving thought and probes the contradictions
at the heart of his conception of black identity…[Du Bois] emerges
as difficult to pin down yet impossible not to admire. Appiah
gracefully renders Du Bois’s intellectual formation in a study that
is a pleasure to traverse for both the scholar and the casual
reader.
*Books & Culture*
In this slim but splendid book, Appiah explores Du Bois’ works and
the personal and philosophical struggle behind them as Du Bois used
all the analytical tools of sociology yet lived the tortures of
racism, even more so because his education and personal elegance
did not exempt him from its indignities.
*Booklist (starred review)*
In Lines of Descent, Appiah has penned one of the most exquisite
accounts of W. E. B. Du Bois’s intellectual heritage. The most
towering figure of modern black thought and protest literature is
recast here as ‘a cosmopolitan through and through,’ drawing deeply
from the wells of learning in the early twentieth century German
academy. This is not just another book about the genius of Du Bois,
his wide learning or global predilections. Lines of Descent reveals
that some of America’s most enduring notions of race and racial
identity—from the ‘problem of the color line’ to ‘two warring
ideals in one dark body’—are based on Du Bois’s earliest synthesis
of European romantic notions of race, culture, and nation. Appiah
reminds us that over the course of his long life, Du Bois strove to
reconcile blackness as one among many, a thread in a tapestry of
global humanity.
*Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of
Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban
America*
That Kwame Anthony Appiah should turn his attention to W. E. B. Du
Bois seems foreordained: the voyages of these two thinkers meet
midstream, the one departing from Ghana and the other ending there.
Beyond that neat symmetry, there is an uncanny feeling of major
minds in mutually enriching conversation, as the intersection of Du
Bois's visionary passion with Appiah's pragmatic intelligence
yields page after page of insight. Lines of Descent is an
experience of pure intellectual elevation.
*Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise and Listen to
This*
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