"Beauty as Propaganda: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois" by Robert Gooding-Williams
 

Beauty as Propaganda: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois

Publication Date

2021

Publication Title

Dewey Lectures

Streaming Media

Abstract

What has art or, more exactly, beautiful art, to contribute to a politics that would break the color bar and dismantle racial hierarchy? In this essay, Robert Gooding-Williams explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s answer to this question, which he adumbrates through a series of publications extending from the 1910 appearance of “The Souls of White Folk” to the well-known “Criteria of Negro Art,” an essay that initially appeared in the October 1926 issue of The Crisis. The substance of his answer, Gooding-Williams proposes, is that beautiful art, by casting moral goodness in an unfamiliar light, can help to undermine racial oppression.

Link to audio file

Lecture Date

January 1, 2021

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