Description:

Philosophy visiting professor, Chike Jeffers, will present: "Politics in The Souls of Black Folk". 

Lecture: 4pm -6pm

Reception: 6pm - 7pm

Abstract: W.E.B. Du Bois is among the great political thinkers of the Western and Africana philosophical traditions. This lecture will provide an introduction to some of the most notable political themes of his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk. It will feature a discussion of his evaluation of the Freedmen's Bureau as a type of government; his taxonomy of leadership traditions among African Americans; his internal critique of Booker T. Washington's program for advancement; and the kind of elitism involved in his idea of the Talented Tenth.

CHIKE JEFFERS is a visiting professor in the Philosophy department during the Spring quarter of the 2016-2017 school year, teaching “Introduction to Philosophy as well as Philosophy, Race, and Racism.” Jeffers is associate professor in the Philosophy department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is also, notably, a Northwestern Ph.D and is returning to teach philosophy of race as a replacement for his former advisor, Charles Mills.

Jeffers specializes in Africana philosophy and philosophy of race, with general interests in social and political philosophy and ethics. Some of his major publications include “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” (Ethics 123, 2013), and “Embodying Justice in Ancient Egypt: The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant as a Classic of Political Philosophy” (British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21, 2013). He is the editor of Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013). Among his current projects is a book, Four Views on Race, co-authored with Sally Haslanger, Quayshawn Spencer, and Joshua Glasgow (under contract with Oxford University Press), and a book, Du Bois (under contract with Routledge and set to appear in the Routledge Philosophers book series). Jeffers expects to be in the middle of writing Du Bois—the first philosophical introduction to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois—while teaching at Northwestern.