 W.E.B. Du Bois took a Hegelian approach that understood African peoples in the post-slavery diaspora as engaged in a dialectic process of self-formation in light of their racialized treatment. Slaves had been violently dispossessed of their languages, ethnic cultures and religions as a means of domination and control. Yet, rather than simply assimilating to the Anglo-European culture of North America, black people even under slavery were creatively producing new forms of cultural expression and communal forms of life that gave voice to the sensibilities of their unique and shared historical experience (Du Bois 1903 [1997]). Historical forces had shaped the conditions in which blackness became a feature of the self, albeit a dynamic and variable one.