Classics and Du Bois, with Mathias Hanses

 

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about race in the period directly after Reconstruction. He was also, briefly, a professor of Classics, and he engaged closely with a number of Greek and Roman writers, including Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. Shivaike Shah speaks to Dr Mathias Hanses, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, about his characterisation of Du Bois as a ‘Black Cicero’. What light does Du Bois shed on Cicero’s relationship with race in orations like Pro Archia Poeta? And how does an acknowledgement of Du Bois’s engagement with the Classics – and of the limitations of his approach to Black empowerment – reposition us in relation to the field today?

Bibliography

Open-source

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, ‘How I Teach This Text: Cicero’s Speech in Defence of the Poet Archias’, Teagle Foundation YouTube video

Paywalled

Irene Aigbedion, ‘Atalanta, the Soul of Atlanta? Rewriting Ovid in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903)’, IJCT 26 (2019)

Carrie Cowherd, ‘The Wings of Atalanta: Classical Influences in The Souls of Black Folk’, in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, ed. Dolan Hubbard (University of Missouri Press, 2007), 284-297

Harriet Fertik, ‘Hell to Pay: Aristotle and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy in “Of the Ruling of Men”’, IJCT 26 (2019)

Mathias Hanses, ‘Cicero Crosses the Colour Line: Pro Archia Poeta and W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26.1 (2019)

  • ‘W.E.B. Du Bois’s De senectute (1948)’, Classical Receptions Journal 11 (2019)

Tom Hawkins, ‘The Veil, the Cave, and the Fire-Bringer’, IJCT 26 (2019)

Shirley Moody-Turner, ‘“Dear Doctor Du Bois”: Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing’, Melus 40 (2015)

Jackie Murray, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece: The Education of Black Medea’, TAPA 149 (2020)

Patrice D. Rankine, ‘Afterlife: Du Bois, Classical Humanism and the Matter of Black Lives’, IJCT 26 (2019)

David Withun, Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.