Interpreting Du Bois' thoughts on race and culture in a broadly philosophical sense, this volume assembles original essays by some of today's leading scholars in a critical dialogue on different important theoretical and practical issues that concerned him throughout his long career: the conundrum of race, the issue of gender equality, and the perplexities of pan-Africanism.

Introduction Editors' Introduction; Part 1 The Question of Race; Chapter 1 "Conserve" Races?, Lucius Outlaw; Chapter 2 Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois's "The Conservation of Races", Robert Gooding-Williams; Chapter 3 Du Bois on Cultural Pluralism, Bernard R. Boxill; Chapter 4 Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois's Discourse on Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference, Bernard W. Bell; Part 2 The Question of Women; Chapter 5 The Margin as the Center of a Theory of History, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes; Chapter 6 The Profeminist Politics of W. E. B. Du Bois, Joy James; Chapter 7 Du Bois's Passage to India, Arnold Rampersad; Chapter 8 Nature and Culture in The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Emily R. Grosholz; Part 3 The Question of Pan-Africanism; Chapter 9 The Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Manning Marable; Chapter 10 Kinship of the Dispossessed, Segun Gbadegesin; Chapter 11 Culture, Civilization, and Decline of the West, J. Moses Wilson; Chapter 12 In Search of a Theory of Human History, B. Stewart James; afterword Afterword, Arnold Rumpersad;