Review: Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds. Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

Editors Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum have assembled a collection of remarkable essays which enact a "politics of juxtaposition" defined as "a reading practice that deals with the unspoken, disrupted, or unfinished synergies that emerge among and between parts as often as with manifest content and stated import of the text" (8). This is a concept which they derive from Du Bois's own positioning of the question of gender "next to the color line." They argue that, in framing the two questions as adjacent, Du Bois at once connects them and insists on their discreteness. From this fluid image the authors derive a critical methodology that also informs their organization of the essays. The essays presented herein are clustered by categories of analysis that foster complex perspectives on the man and his work.