Lecture: Jeffrey Ahlman, "W. E. B. Du Bois's The Negro and the Promises of African History"
Lecture: Jeffrey Ahlman, "W. E. B. Du Bois's The Negro and the Promises of African History" In-Person
In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois published what would be his first major work on Africa. Titled The Negro, this relatively short book offered a survey of the continent’s history dating back to what he understood to be the continent’s initial peopling. Driving the book’s conception was a frustration that he outlined in the book’s first pages, namely that so many people still believed they could “write universal history and leave out Africa.” Du Bois would return to this frustration innumerable times throughout his life, including in each of subsequent major histories of the continent. This lecture explores The Negro in the development of Du Bois’s intellectual and political relationship to Africa. In doing so, it presents the book as a transitional text in his career that not only exhibited his budding personal interest in Africa, but that also reflected his growing desire to transform narratives of past African civilizational accomplishments into a re-reading of the history of the modern world.
Speaker Bio
Jeffrey Ahlman is a 2026 W. E. B. Du Bois Center research fellow and the Gwendolen Carter Chair in African Studies and Professor of History at Smith College. He is currently working on a book project titled W. E. B. Du Bois’s Africa: History, Theory, and the Politics of Knowledge. He has previously published three books: Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017); Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation (Ohio University Press, 2021); and Ghana: A Political and Social History (Zed, 2024).
- Date:
- Monday, October 19, 2026
- Time:
- 4:00pm - 5:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- W. E. B. Du Bois Library, East Asian Reference Collection Room (Floor 22, Room 2267)
- Audience:
- Alumni Faculty General Public Graduate Students Library Donors Staff Undergraduates
- Categories:
- Lectures W. E. B. Du Bois Center
