ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the idea that while each of W. E. B. Du Bois’s scholarly products do stand alone as critical pieces of scholarship, there is significant merit in following Holt’s and others’ claims of assessing them as works in direct conversation with each other. The Philadelphia Negro was an effort to apply formal social scientific research techniques, especially ethnographic analysis, toward understanding the situation of African Americans. Ultimately, Souls of Black Folk and Negro were products of the same enduring concern that Du Bois had about how black Americans are read and regarded as social beings in turn-toward-the-twentieth-century American society, both as a collective entity and as individuals. Du Bois’s preoccupation with his own subjectivity most directly involved his effort to deal with the secondary agenda that he had in writing Negro, that concerning the existential domain.
