Robert Gooding-Williams teaches philosophy and African American studies at Northwestern University, where he also is director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities. He is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (2001) and a coeditor of the Bedford Books edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1997). His current projects include a book on Du Bois and Douglass as political philosophers and a collection of essays on philosophy, race, politics, and film. Gooding-Williams’s coeditor for this special issue, Dwight A. McBride, is chair and Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Author of Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (2001) and, most recently, of Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (2005), McBride also edited James Baldwin Now (1999) and coedited the 2003 Lambda Literary–winning anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-Sexual African American Fiction (2002).