The merest mention of W. E. B. Du Bois can sink the spirit these days. Few things are quite as depressing as an undergraduate essay that cites double consciousness without bothering to venture beyond page 694 of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. On the conference circuit, too many use Du Bois as a rubber stamp; postcolonialists, since discovering him, have taken to emphasizing his visionary theories in terms ill-suited to his rather Victorian prose. Indeed, the work of some postcolonialists can confirm what the American discourse has long suggested: that critics are often tempted to see Du Bois more as prophet than as man, and can seem sad and surprised when his writings succumb to contemporary racial or patriarchal assumption.

Next to the Color Line could exacerbate this situation. Several of its essays already exist in public form, and have been reconfigured or lifted from monographs to prove the existence of a distinct disciplinary field that Gillman and Weinbaum term “feminist studies of Du Bois.” Yet while these editors insist that “fugitive figurations of gender and sexuality” appear throughout Du Bois's oeuvre, the weight that they and many of their contributors continue to accord to Darkwater's famous commitment to the “uplift of women” ironically suggests that this commitment was indeed what it looked like: an uncharacteristic pronouncement by a man more preoccupied with empire and race. Even as it struggles to marshal primary evidence to support its editorial rationale, Next to the Color Line continues to encourage the suspicion that Du Bois's powers of prophecy were not limited to race, interrogating his work for future visions of gender equality. Sometimes this proves a recipe for disappointment. A chapter republished from Joy James's Transcending the Talented Tenth (1997) emphasizes Du Bois's failure to acknowledge the writings and interventions of Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Wells-Barnett. Like other appraisals, James's complaint that Du Bois sought to “diminish … black female activism in order to project images of black female victimization” is well judged and utterly persuasive. But it also suffers from its own false expectations. Put simply, James seems surprised to find that this Victorian figure was so Victorian in outlook.

It seems no accident that the most effective contributions to Next to the Color Line show little interest in ascertaining whether Du Bois was or was not a “profeminist,” to use James's term for a “male advocate … of women's equality.” Roderick Ferguson's insistence that he is interested not in Du Bois but in the modern, posthumous “discourse that goes by that person's name” establishes a distinction that Next to the Color Line could elsewhere heed. And, though it stands at a strange angle from Ferguson's fidelity to the text, Claudia Tate's renowned biographical approach to Dark Princess (1927) likewise places Du Bois back into his contemporary context. By reproducing such readings, Next to the Color Line would certainly benefit anyone looking to develop a more sophisticated view of Du Bois. Its editorial claims, however, sometimes struggle to convince.