For too long, questions of racism and colonialism have not been part of historical sociology’s understanding of modernity. Yet, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, placing racism and empire at the center of their inquiries. This new generation looks to previously marginalized scholars for guidelines and inspiration. In line with this shift in historical sociology, this paper brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in the Black Radical Tradition to bear on longer-standing analytic and methodological debates: How do these authors allow us to think about theory-building and comparison? What is the goal of explanation? How should we approach archives and sources? Building on these insights, this paper explains how the work of Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition provides a model for a new historical sociology, and a framework that allows us to see the connections between racism, colonialism, and modernity.
While technologies are often packaged as solutions to long-standing social ills, scholars of digital economies have raised the alarm that, far from liberatory, technologies often further entrench social inequities and in fact automate structures of oppression. This literature has been revelatory but tends to replicate a methodological nationalism that erases global racial hierarchies. We argue that digital economies rely on colonial pathways and in turn serve to replicate a racialized and neocolonial world order. To make this case, we draw on W.E.B. Du Bois’ writings on capitalism’s historical development through colonization and the global color line. Drawing specifically on The World and Africa as a global historical framework of racism, we develop heuristics that make visible how colonial logics operated historically and continue to this day, thus embedding digital economies in this longer history of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Applying a Du Boisian framework to the production and propagation of digital technologies shows how the development of such technology not only relies on preexisting racial colonial production pathways and the denial of racially and colonially rooted exploitation but also replicates these global structures further.
This article rethinks sociological approaches to difference and inclusion. It argues that civil sphere theory replicates colonial dynamics through abstracting civil codes from their role in colonial governance. Through a case study of French colonial Algeria, the article illuminates the historical co-constitution of the French Republic and the colonial subject. This imperial history explains how civil codes came about through the same social process as the domination of the colonial other. Given these entangled histories, building solidarity requires we move beyond a process of civil repair that rests on incorporation to one of civil construction, which takes account of historical wrongs and the colonial layer of meaning embedded in categories of civil discourse. Theorizing from suppressed histories allows us to question the content of the civil sphere’s classificatory system and turn our attention to a resignification of the core group in the wake of colonial histories.
The authors seek to connect global historical sociology with racial formation theory to examine how antislavery movements fostered novel forms of self-government and justifications for state formation. The cases of Haiti and Liberia demonstrate how enslaved and formerly enslaved actors rethought modern politics at the time, producing novel political subjects in the process. Prior to the existence of these nations, self-determination by black subjects in colonial spaces was impossible, and each sought to carve out that possibility in the face of a transatlantic structure of slavery. This work demonstrates how Haitian and Liberian American founders responded to colonial structures, though in Liberia reproducing them albeit for their own ends. The authors demonstrate the importance of colonial subjectivities to the discernment of racial structures and counter-racist action. They highlight how anticolonial actors challenged global antiblack oppression and how they legitimated their self-governance and freedom on the world stage. Theorizing from colonized subjectivities allows sociology to begin to understand the politics around global racial formations and starts to incorporate histories of black agency into the sociological canon.
This article describes a class that draws on postcolonial insights to create a global sociological imagination. Postcolonial approaches can make visible how global connections have shaped our local environments even if these relations are not always immediately visible. Specifically, students in this class highlight how global relations, such as the slave trade, settler colonialism, racial formations, or migrations, constitute the local. If we start to reconnect global ties, how do we interpret local inequalities differently? Whose voices do we fail to listen to, and why are these global linkages and histories silenced or forgotten? The article describes the development of the curriculum and local student research projects as the main class assignment. It then discusses how students grapple to understand how global ties are and always have been crucial to our everyday lives and think critically about giving voice to perspectives that have conventionally been marginalized.
Examining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial representations and to provide new, anticolonial imaginaries. It demonstrates how the experience of the racialized and diasporic subject, respectively, creates a kind of subjectivity that makes visible the work of colonial cultural narratives on the formation of the self. The article first traces Fanon’s and Hall’s transboundary encounters with metropolitan Europe and then shows how these biographic experiences translate into their theories of practice and history. Living through distinct historical moments and colonial ideologies, Fanon and Hall produced theories of historical change, which rest on epistemic ruptures and conjunctural changes in meaning formations. Drawing on their biographic subjectivities, both intellectuals theorize cultural and colonial forms of oppression and seek to produce new knowledge that is based on practice and experience.
“„I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children‘s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don‘t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom.“ (Stuart Hall 1994)”
Artist: Reena Saini Kallat, Untitled (Map/Drawing)