“The Tenth Talented” v. “The Hundredth Talented”: W. E .B. Du Bois’s Two Versions on the Leadership of the African American Community in the 20th Century

• Authors: Marius Jucan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Comparing two essays written by Du Bois at a great interval of time, “The Tenth Talented” (1903) and “The Hundredth Talented” or the “Guiding Hundredth” (1948), the author of this article intends to deal with Du Bois’s endeavor to cohere culturally and politically an answerable and duty-bound black leadership, and to acknowledge the different accents laid by the author of The Souls of Black Folk on culture and on politics. An accomplished essayist and journalist, a foremost militant for the cause of black emancipation, Du Bois strove to persuade both white and the black audience about the role of high culture, an idea which perfectly matched the towering ideals of Victorian culture, but ran counter to the rapid urbanization of America, and later on, to the times of the Great Depression. The utopian solving chosen by Du Bois in “The Hundredth Talented” mirrors the conflict between the political convictions of a great mind and American reality, as well as the winding course of intellectual ideas which brought black emancipation into life, only in the midst of the last century.

Keywords

EN

racism; African-Americans; emancipation; black leadership; intellectuals; segregation; autobiography; essay; Victorianism; modernism

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 19
• Pages: 27-44

Dates

published

2012-12-01

online

2013-05-01

Contributors

author

Marius Jucan

• Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

References

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• Du Bois, W.E.B. Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1987.
• Frobenius, Leo. Cultura Africii. București: Editura Meridiane, 1982.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West, eds. The Future of the Race. Vintage Books, New York, 1996.
• Koselleck, Reinhart. Conceptele și istoriile lor. Semantica și pragmaticalimbajului social-politic. București: Editura Art, 2009.
• Levering Lewis, David. W.E.B. Bu Dois. The Biography of a Race. 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.
• Lilla, Mark. Spiritul nesăbuit. Intelectualii în politică. Iași: Polirom, 2005.
• Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture. Black Writers and the Making of the ModernIntellectual. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Weber, Max, 1930. The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/abcsj-2013-0002