About the Symposium

W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark book The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, has long been recognized as a founding text for the academic discipline of African American Studies. Ostensibly, a rigorously interdisciplinary collection of essays on history, sociology, religion, politics, and music, The Souls of Black Folk reads in important respects like a personal exposition of the collective African American experience. The text introduces several key concepts that resonate in African American Studies. In one of them, Du Bois uses the metaphor of “life within the veil,” through the text to denote “the shadowy yet substantial line that separated whites from persons of African descent in the turn-of-the-century United States,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the book’s forethought, Du Bois prophetically announced that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Finally, Du Bois brilliantly revealed the dualities and conflicts in self-perceptions African American experienced that he called “double-consciousness.”

This Symposium provides an opportunity for many of the scholars who have inherited, engaged, and extended Du Bois’s legacy to critically celebrate the centennial publication of The Souls of Black Folk. The emphasis upon a critical celebration points to a dual purpose of this symposium: it acknowledges the unquestioned centrality to African American Studies of The Souls of Black Folk, and simultaneously, it affirms the need to critically engage the book in light of contemporary insights and developments from intellectual enterprises such as cultural and gender studies.

The Symposium will feature presentations by panelists, a debate by Bates College Brooks Quimby Debate Team, a staged adaptation of the short story “Of the Coming of John” from The Souls of Black Folk, a concert of spiritual and jubilees, and a one-woman show based upon interviews with survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1917.

The dates for the Symposium are 10-11 October, 2003. All panel presentations are located in The Edmund Muskie Archives. The theatrical performances are located in Gannett Theater located in Pettigrew Hall. The location for the concert is the Olin Concert Hall.