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2006-2007 Fellows

 

Eric Porter

University of California, Santa Cruz
Department of American Studies

Eric Porter (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1997) is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. His interests include black cultural and intellectual history, US cultural history, comparative ethnic studies, and jazz studies. His current book project examines W.E.B. Du Bois's writings from the 1940s and 1950s.

Project Summary

The Knot of Race: The Challenge of W.E.B. Du Bois' Mid-Century Writings surveys and analyzes iconic African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois's thought during the 1940s and 1950s, with an eye toward using it to help us understand race as an overdetermined social category and racism as a multilayered, protean, global phenomenon articulated both through affirmations and disavowals of race. Du Bois's mid-century thinking provides important insights for developing a social analysis and an antiracist politics relevant to the present.