Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death: Reading W.E.B. Du Bois Reading John Brown

Abstract

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form of life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward social death.

Repository attribution: Andrew Santana Kaplan. Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death: Reading W.E.B. Du Bois Reading John Brown. Black Theology Papers Project, 9(1), issue year 2023; article page publication date 2023-11-21. Original: source article. DOI: 10.52214/btpp.v9i1.12518. Original PDF reproduced without changes under CC BY 4.0. No endorsement is implied. Copyright (c) 2024 Andrew Santana Kaplan | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0