Modernity Hesitant

Modernity Hesitant

W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin were expressly concerned with bearing witness to modern civilization from the vantage point of the oppressed. The ailments Du Bois and Benjamin find in western civilization result from the belief in unmitigated progress, which rests on the exclusion of groups and factors deemed 'non-civilized.' In their writings, Benjamin and Du Bois seek to not only draw attention to the costs of progress, but also to occupy marginal spaces in modernity in order to reclaim what has been disavowed by the mainstream. Moreover, both authors wrote in many genres: essays, sociological studies, poetry, biography, novels, critical (literary) histories, and autobiography. The individual chapters of Modernity Hesitant focus on questions of literary collage and quotation, autobiography and childhood, photography and statistical graphics, architecture and urbanity, messianism and violence.

A significant portion of Modernity Hesitant is about the role of photography & graphics in Du Bois' & Benjamin's thinking and about the editorial history of their works.

The slideshow below highlights some of those materials.

This page contains a list of online archival materials related to Du Bois & Benjamin.

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