APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

I am pleased to welcome back Leonard Harris as the book review editor for NPBE. As many of you know, Leonard has spent the past year as a visiting scholar at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. All book review inquires should be referred to Leonard Harris at his Purdue University address.

This issue of the Newsletter contains a letter from the chair, and four articles that are different in focus and subject, although two bear directly on the issue of race, while the other two have a more direct concern with the problem of racism. Following DuBois, Ronald R. Sundstrom’s article: "The Prophetic and Pragmatic Philosophy of ‘Race’ in W. E. B. DuBois’ ‘The Comet,’" is an analysis aimed at establishing that ‘race’ is a social/political construction. At the same time, Sundstrom appeals to DuBois’ pragmatism to establish the compatibility of DuBois’ persistence in holding to the notion that there are races, while races as such are held by him to be absent from an ontological point of view.

In contrast to Sundstrom’s characterization of ‘race’ as a social construction, Earl Stewart and Jane Duran’s article "Coleridge-Taylor: Concatenationism and Essentialism in an Anglo-African Composer," argues favorably for essentialist parts in compositions of music. The work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is analyzed as an essentialist’s case in point, inasmuch as a "racial signature" can be identified in persons whose experiences have not been particularly ‘racial’.