Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death Reading W.E.B. Du Bois Reading John Brown

Abstract

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank
Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du
Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul
of an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to
shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form
of life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of
social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward social
death