ABSTRACT
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. It consists of 14 essays on racism, some of which had already been published in the literary and cultural magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. In Souls, Du Bois uses a range of literary techniques to describe the conditions of racism and inequality in what was known as Jim Crow-America. In Du Bois's view, racism undermined both democracy and humanity. America will be a true democracy, humanity in general will transcend everything else and the American soul will be at peace. Souls lies at the intersection of African American studies, critical race and ethnicity theory and postcolonial studies. The book has huge interdisciplinary value, because it has been a starting point for further scholarship in a number of fields, ranging from history to sociology and from economics to politics.
