In Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought (1995), an important study of the intellectual contexts from which Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk emerged, Shamoon Zamir argues that “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” with its famous formulation of “double-consciousness” and “the veil,” takes many of its critical coordinates from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly Hegel's well-known account of the development of self-consciousness within the “Master and Slave” dialectic. In his nuanced comparison of the two texts, Zamir insists that Du Bois “does not adopt Hegel but adapts him to his own ends” (114). More specifically, he underlines Du Bois's rejection of the “all-synthesizing idealistic monism of Absolute Spirit” in order to focus attention upon “the terrible facts of African-American history” (115). Stephanie Shaw's ambitious, provocative study takes a contrary view, interpreting Souls as a kind of sequel to Phenomenology, in which Du Bois “added the nineteenth century and America to Hegel's philosophy, via the souls of black folk” (6), a project that was, of course, freighted with irony given Hegel's characterization, in Philosophy of History, of sub-Saharan Africa as being outside history.

For Shaw, Du Bois's investment in Hegelian idealism, which is conceived in universalist terms as a striving for freedom, wholeness and harmony, does not preclude sustained engagement with the particularity of African American history. Indeed, Shaw's most striking contribution is her claim that Souls should be viewed as an ambitious fusion, using “the new (rational/empirical) methods of the social sciences to document the material life and environment in which the souls of black folk moved … while also using metaphysics to explore the spiritual world (the development of consciousness)” (166, original emphasis). Such emphasis upon Du Bois's recourse to the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato and Hegel generates an alternative critical perspective on this familiar text, in which a textured rendering of African American history and culture is grafted onto a visionary account of human “striving” for work, culture and liberty that owes much to the Platonic concept of World Soul as “the spiritual principle that is the explanation for or the course of all natural phenomena” (5).

In short, Shaw contends that Souls gains coherence and unity from its consistent focus upon the soul's quest for Absolute Knowledge rather than upon “the problem of the color line” or “double-consciousness.” Such an approach generates significant new insights. In particular, readers will welcome Shaw's nuanced reassessment of Du Bois's intervention in debates about education, which has so often been characterized by a tendency to oversimplify his opposition to Booker T. Washington's educational practices at Tuskegee. Countering any straightforward polarization of liberal arts and vocational education, Shaw combines meticulous historical research into educational institutions and practices during and after Reconstruction with a thorough examination of the philosophical underpinnings of Du Bois's opposition to what he termed Washington's “Gospel of Work and Money” (22), a mode of education that neglected to foster spirituality and the soul. In this context, Du Bois's arguments about the potential dignity of education and work should be read not only against the backdrop of a history of slavery and exploitation that meant that many African Americans had “no real chance to live ‘like folks’ despite their striving” (24), but also as nuanced intervention in debates about the value of education, which draw as much inspiration from Plato's Republic as from turn-of-the century uplift rhetoric.

Elsewhere, Shaw's insistence upon a single framework through which to interpret Souls sometimes feels a little strained. This reader found the author's interpretation of the “Sorrow Songs” in the context of long-standing philosophical associations between music and concepts of order, harmony and “big, imponderable, universal questions” (158) rather abstract, not least when Shaw indulges in speculations that the use of flattened notes in the spirituals might be aligned with philosophical efforts to unite difference into “one harmonious thing,” Absolute Knowledge (154). Shaw's development of a single framework for interpreting Souls, albeit one that acknowledges Du Bois's interdisciplinary efforts to “put philosophy back into history and sociology” (60), occasionally leads her to downplay tensions that animate Du Bois's work, especially with reference to such concepts as the Talented Tenth. There is also surprisingly little attention paid to Du Bois's own pronouncements about his aims in Souls or his later writings. Nevertheless, this erudite monograph constitutes a bold contribution to a rather crowded critical field: even if the argument feels a little laboured at times, Shaw offers an extensive, and often original, reassessment of Du Bois's commitment to philosophical ideals.