W. E. B. Du Bois’s Cultural Anxiety

W. E. B. Du Bois was a prestigious African American scholar and social activist. Since the1890s, Du Bois had plunged himself into the liberation of black people in both the United States and Africa. He was the initiator of the pan-African movement, and one of the founders of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States. Throughout the liberation movement of black people, Du Bois stuck to the principle of direct fighting and objected to compromise or surrender.Cultural anxiety refers to the anxiety and worry about culture and civilization. It both originates from and concerns with culture and civilization. Du Bois’s cultural anxiety arose from African culture in the dominant white American cultural context, and meanwhile evolved from the conflict between African culture and western culture and civilization. By adopting such critical approaches as psychoanalysis, cultural studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies and discourse theories, this dissertation attempts to make a systematic study on the formation, characteristics and essence of Du Bois’s cultural anxiety.W. E. B. Du Bois’s cultural anxiety mainly consists of anxiety for his spiritual growth, anxiety about the paralysis of African American cultural psychology, anxiety for African American cultural identity, and anxiety for black people’s cultural discourses. These four aspects of Du Bois’s cultural anxiety respectively exist or are reflected in his journey of pursuing a better and higher education, his racial thought of "double consciousness", his ideal of "the talented tenth", and his pan-Africanism system. It was Du Bois’s cultural anxiety that paved the way for his academic achievement, shaped his spiritual character, and endowed his racial thoughts with unique insights, ethnic characteristics and cultural values.