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Charles F. Peterson. DuBois, Fanon, Cabral: The Margins of Elite Anti-Colonial Leadership. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ix, 160 pp.
The thesis of the book "is a historical-theoretical analysis of: contemporary issues within continental and diasporic African cultures and my positionality in relation to mass popular culture and politics "(p. 139). Based on this declarative epistemological guidepost, Peterson's study takes him on a scholarly enquiry starting from the United States, through the Caribbean and continental Africa using interdisciplinary explorations of W.E.B. DuBois, Franz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral in an attempt to enter into a thick description underpinning their theoretical and practical thoughts on the subject.
Tracing the background of DuBois from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Peterson argues that DuBois was far removed from his people. Peterson contends that DuBois had little or no sustained connection to a larger Black community (p. 36). He was particularly alienated towards blacks from the south. He was a black bourgeoisie who had disassociated himself from his own people because of his "eliteness." Peterson attacks DuBois's academic discipline, sociology, which he argues exposed him to the Afri-US life. However, he did not step in to help; instead, he became more of a pet negro relying upon a belief in colonial and historical evolution as a linear progression form.
Peterson evaluates the colonial elite with mass-popular culture and deploys it as the undergirding platform to anchor his critique challenging the credibility of DuBois as a black person in America vis-à-vis his relationship and communal identity with his fellow blacks. His work is also an indictment of DuBois pointing particularly to his philosophical worldview expatiated in The Talented Tenth (1903) and his concept of "Double Consciousness." Peterson notes, "DuBois's formulation of his ideas of Black underclass pathology revealed this conflicted...