In the past decade, numerous cultural critics, including Kenneth W. Warren, Paul Gilroy and Houston A. Baker, have turned their critical gaze upon African American studies, scrutinizing how the field has been constructed and institutionalized. One aspect of this metacritical turn has involved a profound questioning of the position occupied by W. E. B. Du Bois within African American intellectual history, with particular attention being paid to the limits of “double consciousness,” a concept that is often drained of historical specificity. The two books under discussion – Amy Bass's fascinating account of the battle over Du Bois's legacy in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts from 1969 and Terrence Johnson's thought-provoking study of the limitations of approaches to Du Bois that take their critical coordinates from a “contemporary liberalism built on a disembodied theory of justice” (22) – should be read as significant contributions to this larger critical conversation.

Amy Bass's meticulously researched study attends to an aspect of Du Bois's legacy that has received little attention to date. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, including oral history and local newspapers such as the Berkshire Eagle and the Berkshire Courier, Bass exposes a “legacy of disavowal that continues to surround Du Bois in his hometown” (159). The impetus for the project is derived, at least in part, from Bass's own upbringing: she grew up in the Berkshires, sixteen miles from Great Barrington. Given the prominent place accorded to such figures as Herman Melville, Norman Rockwell and Edith Wharton in local history, Bass aims to discover why she only learned about Du Bois's connections to the region when she was at graduate school.

To answer this question, Bass provides an informative account of the “evolution” of Du Bois's ideological commitments over the course of his long career (23). Attending to aspects of his career that have often been downplayed, Bass provides a clear-sighted account of Du Bois's growing disillusionment with the capitalist imperialism of US foreign policy in the final decades of his life, which led him into conflict with the government over such issues as the Korean War, nuclear disarmament and the Marshall Plan. Partly as a consequence of government policies that not only prioritized imperialist wars over civil rights but also targeted “civil rights activists, rather than Jim Crow policy” (42), Du Bois eventually joined the Communist Party in 1961 before renouncing his American citizenship and moving to Ghana. The main focus of Those about Him Remained Silent, however, is a subtle discussion of the controversy over the establishment of a memorial park to Du Bois in Great Barrington. Readers might be tempted to dismiss this as a minor incident with few resonances beyond the local frame, but Bass demonstrates that the dispute sheds new light on the politics and culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era marked by anxieties over the Cold War, civil rights and its legacies, and the Vietnam war.

Opponents of the Du Bois memorial tended to view him as “an outcast … a communist turncoat who had committed treason against democracy” (xv), overlooking his record as “a founder of modern civil rights, Pan-Africanism, and the NAACP” (35). Bass's most important contribution in this study is her nuanced analysis of the ways in which discourses of patriotism and nationalism mobilized during the Cold War converged with American race politics to push Du Bois to the margins of local history as articulated in the Berkshires. Such an approach reveals the “racial shades embedded in the Cold War battle against communism” (xix). In this context, a compelling discussion emerges when the author examines debates about the memorial in the letters pages of local newspapers. Many readers viewed Du Bois as “ungrateful to the democratic ideals that ‘allowed’ him success” (75), an argument that exposes the unspoken conditions attached to the patronage Du Bois received from some local white religious leaders and teachers who supported his academic ambitions. The high political stakes involved in the campaign are also evident in the FBI's covert support for opposition to the memorial. Bass demonstrates that FBI officials not only kept a close eye on the campaign, but may also have helped to defer any successful memorial by feeding information about Du Bois's Communist Party background to veterans' groups who were likely to oppose the project.

Bass's original, thought-provoking study interprets the battle over Du Bois in Great Barrington as one of the first attempts to grapple with the legacy of civil rights. Given the insights generated by Bass's interpretation of local politics in the global context of the Cold War, it is difficult to disagree with her about the need for regional history that seeks to “understand how national and global situations continue to be digested and dealt with at the most local levels,” exposing “the power of racial enmity hidden in efforts that proclaim to be focussed on security and well-being” (159).

Terrence L. Johnson's Tragic Soul-Life: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy follows a more familiar path, focussing as it does upon Du Bois as a thinker who articulates a moral vision that has much to teach contemporary America about freedom and democracy. This interesting study seeks to generate a new conceptual framework for understanding Du Bois by paying detailed attention to the shaping influence of religious rhetoric and black religion upon his moral imagination. Few commentators have attended to what Johnson calls “the moral problem of blackness” (5), not least because a political vocabulary of individual and collective rights has often served to obscure what he terms “tragic soul-life,” in which “the underlying principles of democracy ought to protect and promote human aspirations that reflect ideal and historic specific circumstances” (6). By focussing upon the spiritual dimensions of Du Bois's work, Johnson sets out to challenge an abiding critical tendency to “lock [Du Bois] in an iron cage of blackness, an impenetrable and ghettoized position of exceptionalism” (21), a tendency that has often led critics to neglect his engagement with issues relating to the role of “religious values in politics and public life” (x).

Johnson's starting point is the concept of “spiritual isolation” (14), a term Du Bois employs in Soliloquy, an autobiography written towards the end of his life, to describe experiences of racial alienation. For Johnson, such ideas capture Du Bois's attempt to complicate notions of democratic participation with their roots in models of political citizenship. He turns instead to a “soul-oriented model of humanity” (50), which not only attends to the interior life of slaves by way of slave religion and musical expression, but also formulates a “model of liberation built on black sorrow, despair, and hope” (11). Such an approach generates new insights. To take only one example, readers will welcome Johnson's detailed analysis of Du Bois's revisions of gospel narratives in short fiction written from 1911 to 1933, in which he portrays Jesus as black. In line with other black writers of the period, Du Bois frequently aligns lynching with the Crucifixion, but he also deploys a Christ figure to demonstrate “the irrationality of antiblack racism,” which traps both African Americans and whites in a “racial script,” hampering the development of true self-consciousness and freedom within America (89). It is this association between religion and antiblack racism that lies at the heart of Johnson's theory of “tragic soul-life”: he contends that any attempt to address political and economic inequality must get to grips with the spiritual legacies of segregation and slavery, not least because religious rhetoric was a central plank in the formulation of the nation's racial hierarchy.

Johnson's insistence upon extrapolating from Du Bois a coherent framework for interpreting democracy, which is based upon “the Du Boisian moral imagination of struggle, sacrifice, and hope” (152), occasionally leads him to downplay tensions within Du Bois's work, especially in relation to debates surrounding the concept of the Talented Tenth. There might also have been more commentary upon the ways in which Du Bois's moral or spiritual framework interacts with a vocabulary of political citizenship, as so often occurs in the pages of The Crisis. Notwithstanding these quibbles, Tragic Soul-Life articulates a passionate, engaging call for a philosophical approach to American culture and life that attends to the moral and spiritual dimensions of antiblack racism in the USA.