Events

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Global Color-Line: The Critique of Empire and the History of Black Internationalism

When:
Friday, May 28, 2021 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Where:
Zoom
Register now
Speaker:
Aziz Rana, Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; Adom Getachew, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago; Jennifer Pitts, Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; Natacha Nsabimana, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago
Description:

W.E.B. Du Bois famously began The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by declaring that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” This claim, which was to prove central to his critique of American racism, and ultimately of racial capitalism, was one Du Bois had already deployed in a global context in his analysis of “the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind.” In an address to the First Pan-African Conference in London in July 1900, for example, Du Bois argued that the global color-line denied the right to share in the “privileges of modern civilisation” to over half the world. More than a critic of American racism, then, Du Bois was a leading figure in the global anti-colonial movement. Please join us for a lecture by Aziz Rana, followed by a conversation with Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts, which will explore Du Bois’s contributions to the critique of empire and to the history of Black Internationalism.

Hosted by the Classics of Social and Political Thought and Power, Identity, and Resistance core sequences