ABSTRACT
An inveterate transatlantic traveler who lived, studied, and lectured worldwide, W.E.B. Du Bois has recently come to prefi gure the contemporary cosmopolitan intellectual, who rejects essentialist notions of identity and chooses instead to be a citizen of the world. This is a radical departure from the conventional portrait of Du Bois as the last of the Victorian “race men,” devoted to the uplifting of African Americans and committed to the fi ght against American racism, which was popularized by the Harlem Renaissance and is still commonly accepted. Some contemporary scholars who are growing skeptical of multiculturalism, identity politics, and the focus on difference that characterized the humanities in the last three decades of the twentieth century-Paul Gilroy and Ross Posnock are prominent examples of this trend-tend to emphasize Du Bois’s cultural affi liation with a communitas transcending national borders and ethnic particularities over his life-long devotion to racial solidarity.1 They fi nd in his worldwide fl ânerie, belief in the catholic power of culture, support of anticolonialism across racial boundaries, and penchant for genre hybridity in his writings, instances of the diasporic subject’s rejection of authenticity and inclination to cultural crossovers. They place him, as a consequence, at the beginning of a line of nonconformist African American universalists which would later include the likes of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.
