Contact Information
Biography Information
Dolan Hubbard is professor and chairperson of the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. He was educated at Catawba College, the University of Denver, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature, Diaspora studies, and Digital Humanities. He is currently at work on a book project, Du Bois and the Luminous Darkness and a documentary, Black Scholars in America: The Story of the College Language Association. He is author or editor of the following works: The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later. Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women's Literature, and Praisesong for Survival: The Collected Essays of Richard K. Barksdale. He is a member of the editorial board of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes and has served as editor of the Langston Hughes Review.
Project Description
This project examines how Du Bois in his classic ideological statement, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), recasts American intellectual history in terms of what Houston A. Baker refers to as an “an unruly conversation,” both within and outside of American national boundaries. Du Bois provides the reader with a paradigm that emphasizes border crossings, encounters with “others,” and a redefinition of the human.
I put Du Bois’s landmark work in conversation with The Declaration of Independence (1776), by Thomas Jefferson; Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad; The Liberal Imagination (1950), by Lionel Trilling; A Raisin in the Sun (1959), by Lorraine Hansberry; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), by Toni Morrison; and A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986). They set up a call and response between master narrative and counter-narrative as black people create counter hegemonic forms and spaces to refute their negation.