Tragic Soul-Life

"Johnson's brilliant analysis of Du Bois's moral imagination as the basis for his dissection of anti-black racism in the U.S. is a major contribution to the scholarship on a major American intellectual. Scholars will find Johnson's meticulous inquiry into Du Bois's probing of 'the moral problem of blackness' nothing short of breath-taking. For feminist scholars, Johnson does not disappoint, because of his attention to the gendered aspects of Du Bois's creative and political writing."-Beverly Guy-Sheftall, co-editor of Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies "Terrence Johnson brilliantly brings the epic thought of W.E. B. Du Bois and that of the liberal political philosopher John Rawls together not simply as comparison but as a productively critical tension through which to address the travails of American political life. In one direction, he examines the religious aspects of American life; in another, race; and even further, the rhetorical and critical forces of the tragic, an aesthetic-ethical category, with music. It is, indeed, a work on Du Bois and American religious and political thought that was screaming to have been written."--Lewis R. Gordon, author of An Introduction to Africana Philosophy "W.E.B. Du Bois remains one of the most insightfully gifted hermeneuticists of African American soul-life. Terrence Johnson's Tragic Soul-Life compels us to come to a new appreciation of Du Bois's philosophical explication of this soul-life as the basis for Johnson's passionate argument for interweaving religion, democracy, and morality in American life as a whole."-Lucius T. Outlaw, author of On Race and Philosophy