Radical Cosmopolitanism: W. E. B. Du Bois, Germany, and African American Pragmatist Visions for Twenty-First Century Europe

Abstract

This essay originally appeared in Representation and Decoration in a Postmodern Age, edited by Alfred Hornung and Rüdiger Kunow (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), 65–96. Günter H. Lenz's important essay focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois's education and experiences in Germany. Tracing Du Bois's time in Germany, from his university years there (1892–1894) to his visits in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to his last stay in 1958 when he received an honorary doctorate in Berlin, Lenz's analysis of Du Bois's work indicates how political factors and social change in Germany influenced and transformed Du Bois's interpretation of the US but also shifted the ground of Du Bois's critique to the larger forces of global imperialism and colonialism. Moving from a study of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) through an analysis of the less popular Dark Princess (1928) and on to essays and books such as Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), Lenz develops an argument for reading Du Bois's "radical cosmopolitanism" as "an open, trans (and post-)national, diasporic discourse that acknowledges and negotiates intercultural multiplicity, heterogeneous interests and positions, and hybrid publics."