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Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People
Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
Duke University Press
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7408-4
Publication date:
2016
Book Chapter
Unhopeful but Not Hopeless: Melancholic Interpretations of Progress and Freedom
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Published:June 2016
This chapter continues to examine how sorrow operates in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. In addition to the author’s homage to the spirituals in the final chapter, sorrow works in the text as a trope, attitude, and mode of attunement. Melancholy in Souls becomes a way to question, trouble, and render ambiguous cherished values like freedom, agency, and liberation. By offering a close reading of several chapters in the text this chapter shows how death, loss, and trauma haunt and unsettle political categories and ideals typically associated with black strivings and progress. The chapter provides a reading...
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