Journal of Transnational American Studies

This article offers an introduction to the hitherto unpublished early essay by W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Afro-American.” More precisely it outlines the problematic of the essay and places the essay amidst Du Bois’s writings of the 1890s and the production of the text that became The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches of 1903. In so doing it proposes a path for the initial reading of this essay by rendering thematic the worldwide horizon that framed Du Bois’s projection from this early moment and by bringing into relief the interwoven motifs of the global “problem of the color-line” and the sense of “double-consciousness” for the “Afro-American” in the United States.