Article

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Sociological Bulletin

72(3) 282–293, 2023
Indian Romance* © 2023 Indian Sociological Society
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DOI: 10.1177/00380229231172095
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Michael Burawoy1

Abstract
Former colonial powers are living through a moment of self-discovery. They
are examining the enormous benefits they reaped from colonialism as well as
the heavy costs they inflicted on the colonised. Academic disciplines have set
about questioning their own foundations, some more successfully than others.
Sociology, in particular, is experiencing its decolonial moment. In the United
States at the centre of debate is W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)—a brilliant soci-
ologist, historian, novelist, dramatist, socialist, civil rights and peace activist and
Pan-Africanist. Despite being the leading African American public intellectual of
the 20th century, he was largely ignored by academic sociology. An ardent advo-
cate of national self-determination and an enthusiastic admirer of Nehru and
Gandhi, he was the author of a surreal novel Dark Princess (2007 [1928]) that
placed India at the centre of world revolution. In this talk, I try to disentangle
the global significance of canonising Du Bois for the decolonisation of sociology.

Keywords
Du Bois, decolonisation, India, United States

Thank you for inviting me to pay tribute to the life and work of Professor
J. J. Kattakayam. I first met Professor Kattakayam in 2011 on the occasion of the
Diamond Jubilee Conference of the Indian Sociological Society. It was a festive
occasion, organised at JNU, in the open air, with planes flying above, and a huge
crowd stretching into the distance. Professor T. K. Oommen was chairing the ses-
sion, Vice President of India Hamid Ansari gave the inaugural address, and
Professor Kattakayam, then President of ISS, delivered an urgent lecture on the
importance of sociology in the social transformation of India (Kattakayam, 2012).
After outlining the distinctive features of India’s social and economic crisis,
and then treating us to an overview of the history of Indian sociology, he turned to

* This is the amended text of the Second Jacob John Kattakayam Memorial Lecture, given on
12 July 2022.
1
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Corresponding author:
Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
Burawoy 283

sociology’s place in society, insisting that sociology plays a more significant

public role, but not at the expense of professional, critical and policy sociologies.
These four sociologies balance and feed each other. I think we can say the urgency
for such an expansive sociology has only grown since 2011, whether in India or,
indeed, anywhere else in the world.
Today I want to introduce you to another visionary sociologist who moved
among all four sociologies in his long and tumultuous life. Although hailing from
a distant land William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was nonetheless entranced by
India—its history and its independence struggles. He straddled two centuries:
born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, 5 years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, he died in Accra, Ghana in 1963, 6 years after that country’s
Independence. As a scholar, he started out as a philosopher and then a historian,
the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard. His true passion was
sociology, which he picked up while studying in Germany at the University of
Berlin between 1892 and 1894. Du Bois is still under-appreciated in sociology
although it inspired his writing as a journalist, a novelist and a poet as well as his
radical reinterpretation of US history. Carrying unquestionable credentials as a
scholar he was best known as a public sociologist, probably the greatest public
sociologist to have walked this earth. He brought sociology to his advocacy of
civil rights, Pan-Africanism, socialism and peace activism.
In this talk, I will sketch his life and work through the lens of his theory and
practice of ‘decolonisation’, both at home and abroad, before examining his sig-
nificance for decolonising sociology today. I begin Du Bois’ stance towards
decolonisation with his most famous novel Dark Princess (2007 [1928]).

Dark Princess: A Revolutionary Romance

Du Bois never visited India but he did have a strong imagination of your country and
its past. In 1928, two years after his first trip to the Soviet Union, already under the
influence of Comintern policies, and pessimistic about the prospects of interracial
working-class solidarity in the USA, Du Bois turns to a vision of international soli-
darity along lines of race—the unification of the ‘darker races’ for world revolution.
He gives expression to this vision in a surreal novel, Dark Princess, revolving around
Kautilya, the Indian Princess of Bwodpur and Matthew Towns, the African American
medical student, escaping the intolerable racism in the USA. The two meet in Berlin
where Matthew is living in voluntary exile. There, by happenchance, he rescues
Kautilya from harassment by two white Americans. She then introduces Matthew to
her friends meeting secretly in Berlin, a committee for international revolution with
representatives from Japan, China, Egypt and India. They all believed in their shared
racial superiority and they were attended by white servants and yet, ironically, they
were steeped in Western art and literature. Or perhaps not ironically since Du Bois
believed that Western culture did have a universal quality, one that did not recognise
race: ‘I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not’ (1989 [1903], p. 90).
At the same time, their inverted racism had its own hierarchy that displayed
itself in a contempt for African Americans, embarrassing Matthew to his face.
284 Sociological Bulletin 72(3)

Kautilya, however, disagrees with her aristocratic internationalists, calling on

Matthew to return to the USA and organise African Americans for revolution. The
novel unfolds with him trying to organise railroad porters, and then trying his
hand as a Chicago politician, dropping out at the very moment of success. Princess
Kautilya appears unexpectedly at different points in their budding romance, and
the novel ends with her bearing their child in Matthew’s birthplace in Virginia.
Kautilya proclaims the Black Belt of the South as originating a vision of a future
emancipated world. Note that 1928 was the year the Communist Party declared its
Black Belt Thesis for an independent Black Nation within the USA, a position Du
Bois would later endorse in his own version, ‘A Negro Nation within the Nation’
(Du Bois, 1970 [1935]). The novel—or it might be better referred to as ‘sociologi-
cal fiction’—is intricate and complex, exploring relations of race, class and gender
in a more nuanced way than we are accustomed to in sociology.
The back story of the novel is important (Desai, 2020). Du Bois never visited
India, but he devoted much time to studying Indian history. He had read Tagore
and learned much from his friend Lajpat Rai, the militant Hindu Nationalist exiled
in the USA. Beginning after the First World War, The Crisis—the African
American magazine Du Bois edited between 1910 and 1934—and indeed the
African American press more generally reported regularly on developments in the
Indian independence movement (Lal, 2021). For Du Bois, India was the epicentre
of anti-colonial struggles. Du Bois worshipped Gandhi as a spiritual and political
leader. But Du Bois was also drawn to Nehru with whom he shared an elite
Western education, a commitment to a modernist socialism. Both had been deeply
influenced by their visits to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Du Bois would write
encomia to both Gandhi and Nehru (Mullen, 2015).
In a fascinating article in the Economic & Political Weekly, Kapoor (2003)
identifies Du Bois neither with Gandhi nor with Nehru but with Ambedkar. It
makes a lot of sense. They wrote of African Americans and Dalits in the same
way—a despised population that inhabits a zone of non-existence. In recognising
the similarities, Du Bois often referred to African Americans as a ‘colour-cast’.
Their solutions were similarly radical. Just as for Ambedkar the liberation of
Dalits required the annihilation of caste which, in turn, entailed the abolition
of Hinduism, so for Du Bois the dissolution of the racial order and of the ideology
of white supremacy was necessary for the liberation of African Americans, which,
in turn, entailed the abolition of capitalism. If Ambedkar’s nemesis was Gandhi,
Du Bois’ nemesis was Booker T. Washington. The parallels are powerful (Du
Bois, 1989 [1903], Chapter 3; Ambedkar, 2014).
And yet, here is the paradox. In his writings on India, Du Bois was devoted to
Gandhi and rarely mentioned Ambedkar or, indeed, the struggles of Dalits. Du Bois
preferred to eulogise Gandhi’s leadership of ‘passive resistance’ in the fight for Indian
independence—a political tactic Du Bois, late in life, endorses as key to the US civil
rights movement. When Indian independence arrived on 15 August 1947, Du Bois
celebrated it as the greatest historical moment of the 19th and 20th centuries (Mullen
and Watson, 2005, pp. 145–153). On the occasions Du Bois did talk about divisions in
postcolonial India they revolved around religion or states, but not around caste, which
Burawoy 285

is all the more remarkable give his use of ‘colour-caste’ to describe the Southern USA.
For Du Bois, it was national self-determination at all costs, but for Ambedkar inde-
pendence was not enough, since it did not guarantee the dissolution of caste, the bane
of India. In the remainder of this talk, I trace Du Bois’ successive attempts to under-
stand the struggles around race and class that followed the abolition of slavery, strug-
gles absent in his enthusiasm for the decolonisation of India.

Scholar Denied: The Limits of Professional Sociology

Brought up in a largely white Methodist Community in Massachusetts, Du Bois was
educated at Fisk University, a Historically Black University in Tennessee, and then
at Harvard where he received his MA in history in 1891. He was then admitted to
the University of Berlin (1892–1994) where he completed work for a PhD, although
he was denied the formal credential because of residence requirements. Bereft of
funding, he returned to the USA, where in 1895 he would receive a PhD in history
for The Suppression of the Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870
(2007 [1896]). Clearly a brilliant scholar, his race prevented him from obtaining a
teaching position at a major US university. He was confined to Black universities,
first Wilberforce University and then a temporary research assistantship at the
University of Pennsylvania where he carried out the iconic study of African
Americans in Philadelphia—The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899. Between
1897 and 1910, Du Bois took up a position at Atlanta University—another
Historically Black University—where he developed the Atlanta School of Sociology,
which predated the famous Chicago School by some 20 years. These were his con-
tributions to professional sociology.
While Du Bois was at Atlanta University he wrote his most celebrated book,
The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, a classic of public sociology. Some know it for
its critique of Booker T. Washington, a more conservative figure but at the time
the most powerful African American in the country. Others know it for the idea of
‘double consciousness’—how African Americans live a double life, joined by the
contemptuous gaze of white society. Yet others remember it for the moving
accounts of the impoverished lives of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South or of
the death of Du Bois’ firstborn son. The Souls of Black Folk, therefore, brought
together a series of lyrical essays on African American life within, what he called
the veil. It became an instant success, read widely to this day. However, it was no
more successful than his scientific works in convincing whites that Blacks, at
least the talented tenth, were both human and gifted.
Starting out with the view that sociological knowledge would break down barriers
of racism, Du Bois soon discovered that white racism was not just a product of igno-
rance. It had an irrational component, and it was also driven by real material inter-
ests—what he later called the public and psychological wage of whiteness (Du Bois,
1998 [1935], Chapter XVI). Denied resources, status and recognition, he began to
question the purpose of his academic career. His scientific studies were powerless to
counter racial segregation, mob violence and lynching of African Americans.
286 Sociological Bulletin 72(3)

Scholar Unbound: Public Sociology from Without

And so Du Bois left Atlanta University in 1910 to enter the public realm. He
became the founding editor of The Crisis—the bimonthly magazine of the
National Association for Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organisation
that he himself had cofounded. He remained editor of The Crisis for the next
24 years, during which time he became the leading Black intellectual in the USA.
At its peak, The Crisis had a subscription of 100,000. It addressed every conceiv-
able topic of interest to African Americans, art, music, politics, economy, educa-
tion, race relations, religion, colonialism, war and international relations. Nothing
was outside its purview. Du Bois turned his training in sociology into a public
venture. He was no longer interested in convincing whites of the humanity of
African Americans. On the contrary, he sought to convince African Americans of
two things: that whites were inhuman beings capable of inflicting atrocities not
just on Blacks but on one another and, second, that, despite slavery, African
Americans were the inheritors of a great pre-colonial world civilisation.
This was the purpose of his essay, ‘The Souls of White Folk’ where he describes the
horrors of the First World War, the ruthless destruction of European nations in their
struggle for control of colonised territories. This was one of his early sorties into the
history of imperialism, how Western civilisation had grown on the backs of the darker
races of the world. ‘The Souls of White Folk’ was part of a collection of essays, called
Darkwater, published in 1920. Other essays included a graphic account of the race riot
in East St Louis in 1917, in which white capital played off cheap Black labour from the
South against more expensive white labour from Europe. Another essay entitled ‘The
Ruling of Men’ developed his idea of socialism—participatory democracy combined
with public ownership of the means of production. And then there was his famous
essay, ‘The Damnation of Women’, that anticipated intersectional feminism. Forced to
divide their lives between domestic drudgery and wage labour, women—both white
and Black, but particularly Black—were never able to develop their talents—talents
that were demonstrated by such fervent Black abolitionists as Sojourner Truth and
Harriett Tubman. These essays all pointed towards socialism as the future, but only, he
warned, if the race problem could be solved first. That is to say, only if the socialists
would make their priority the bringing together of Black and white workers into some
sort of joint solidarity. But he was disappointed in efforts in this direction, whether by
trade unions or the socialist party of the time.
Darkwater is a radical answer to and critique of The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois
moves out of the veil and into the world beyond, consonant with his editorship of
The Crisis, his participation in NAACP and his commitment to Pan-Africanism—a
commitment that began as early as 1900 when he participated in the first Pan-
African Conference and led to his pioneering role as organiser of subsequent Pan-
African Congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945. Throughout his life he was
committed to Pan-Africanism, one that stretched to Asia, and especially India where
he fantasised the origins of a Black Dravidian Civilisation that had endured invasion
after invasion (Du Bois, 2007 [1947], Chapter IX).
Burawoy 287

Scholar Radicalised: A Critical Sociology of

the Period of Reconstruction
One of the most significant moments in Du Bois’ life was his first visit to the
Soviet Union in 1926. Until then, he had been agnostic about the Russian
Revolution. Violent revolution was not a solution to the problems that plagued the
USA—there had been enough violence already—but it might be a solution else-
where. After spending two months in the Soviet Union, impressed by the serious
attempt at eliminating poverty, the apparent absence of racism, and forthright
support for anti-colonial movements, he declared that if what he had seen and
what he had heard was Bolshevism, then he was a Bolshevik. That experience and
then the beginning of the depression years in the USA led him down a Marxist
path, although he was careful to keep a distance from the Communist Party, USA.
In 1935, Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America—an avowedly
Marxist account of the US Civil War of 1861–1865, the post–Civil War period of
Reconstruction 1865–1876, and the capitalist and racist reaction to Reconstruction
that would follow. This is now regarded as his masterpiece, so let me give you a
flavour of its contribution to the sociology of decolonisation.
Written at a time when white historians and folk wisdom viewed the period of
Reconstruction after the Northern victory in the Civil War as a period of utter
depravity and unmitigated catastrophe—a view that reflected contempt for
African Americans. Du Bois’ account of Reconstruction turned this picture upside
down. For him, Reconstruction was a short period—a decade—when African
American men assumed the vote, when Black politicians assumed a modicum
power, when progressive social legislation was passed—to be sure in some
Southern states more than others—and when universal education expanded to
include Blacks and poor whites. All this would be reversed after Reconstruction.
Du Bois not only challenged the reigning interpretation of Reconstruction, but
he also introduced a novel account of the origins and conduct of the Civil War
itself. Against the idea that it was fought to preserve the union, Du Bois gave it a
global capitalist twist, arguing that the expansion of the British textile industry in
the first half of the 19th century, led to increased demand for cotton and, thence,
to the intensification and expansion of slavery. To meet demand, Southern plant-
ers needed to extend slavery to new geographical areas and that, Du Bois argued,
was anathema to Northern industrial capital and, of course, to the Abolitionists.
The Republicans in power could accept confining slavery to the Confederate
states but they would not allow it to move West or North. The expansion of slavery
was the real bone of contention that precipitated the Civil War.
Once the war began, it looked as though the distribution of military forces
would favour the South. Inspired by the presence of Unionist troops, however,
half a million of the 4 million enslaved fled the plantations, eventually turning the
balance of power in favour of the North. Their disaffection disrupted supplies for
the Southern armies, but more important the Northern armies enlisted the fugi-
tives, first reluctantly and then enthusiastically. For when they fought, African
Americans did so with courage and determination, possessed as they were by the
288 Sociological Bulletin 72(3)

idea that this was their war, especially after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
of 1863. Du Bois termed this defection from the plantations as a General Strike,
not only to liken them to a revolutionary proletariat, but also to underline the way
that African Americans had temporarily taken history into their own hands,
thereby becoming authors of their own future.
After the war, the Northern military established itself in the South in an attempt
to contain the reign of white terror that had spread through the Confederacy but
also to support the extension of franchise, education and a broad racial equality.
However, once the Northern capital had vanquished the planter class and with it
the slave system of production, they were ready to strike a compromise that would
see the Northern armies leaving the South a decade later. Power was handed back
to the planter class that set about inducing poor whites to throw in their lot with
white rule rather than join forces with Blacks. The ‘wages of whiteness’ divided
white from Black, even though both were engaged in new forms of tenancy and
share-cropping. If Reconstruction demonstrated the possibility of an interracial
democracy, it nonetheless proved to be a failure, what Du Bois called a ‘splendid
failure’. He understood why the enslaved saw emancipation as ‘the coming of the
Lord’—the winning of freedom—and how that anticipation was dashed by the
‘counter-revolution of property’—a lesson in the obstacles to decolonisation.
It took conventional US historians another 30 years to catch up with and accept Du
Bois’ ideas. Such was the genius of Du Bois, today his ideas are taken as received
wisdom. As for so many the 1930s were a turning point in Du Bois intellectual life.
His radicalism became unpalatable to the NAACP and he was forced out of editing
The Crisis. He returned to Atlanta University in 1933, plunging into the writings of
Karl Marx (Du Bois, 1995 [1933]). As he was writing Black Reconstruction, Du Bois
was searching for a socialist vision for the contemporary United States. He found it,
ironically enough, in racial segregation. His vision was to build a ‘A Negro Nation
within the Nation’ (Du Bois, 1970 [1933]), a cooperative commonwealth that would
be separate from the mainstream economy and take on socialist characteristics (1985
[1936]). This was another splendid failure—one that barely got off the ground.

Scholar Persecuted: The Politics of Anti-imperialism

Du Bois was 10 years at Atlanta University before being expelled, formally
because he had exceded the age of retirement, but his independent radicalism
once again became a thorn in the side of the administration. At the age of 76, he
left the university to rejoin NAACP for four years, before again clashing politi-
cally with its leadership. He was cast out of the NAACP in 1948, whereupon he
began to fight battles on new terrains, battles that turned increasingly to Africa and
other Third World countries where anti-colonial struggles were heating up.
Following the Second World War, his energies were divided between two
projects—one was directed towards the struggle for independence among colo-
nies in Africa and Asia, both at the United Nations and at the Pan-African Congress
of 1945. In this period he wrote two books. Color and Democracy, published in
Burawoy 289

1945, underlined the importance of self-determination for the colonised people of

the world. Democracy will only survive, he claimed, if it takes root across the
world. The second book, The World and Africa written in 1947, extended ideas he
had presented in two earlier books (Du Bois, 1973 [1939] and 2007 [1915]), elab-
orating the history of Africa and its civilisation, the way imperialism had plun-
dered the continent, first through the slave trade and then through the exploitation
of its labour for the extraction of natural resources.
If his Pan-Africanism was his first project his second project was a deep
involvement in the international peace movement, organising and attending the
post-war opposition to nuclear arms. This put him in the Soviet camp and in direct
opposition to the US state. He was indicted by the Justice Department as an unde-
clared agent of a foreign principal and put on trial in 1951. Du Bois campaigned
far and wide in his own defence, and letters of support poured in from all corners
of the world. At the trial itself, it became clear he was being framed by a colleague
who had turned state witness and the judge threw the case out. Du Bois was free
but in revenge, the State Department revoked his passport (Du Bois, 2007 [1952]).
He could not travel until 1958 when the Supreme Court deemed the confiscation
to have been illegal. He was now free at the age of 90, to travel. And travel he did!
To Europe, the Soviet Union and China. Wherever he went in the communist bloc
he received VIP treatment—an internationally renowned critic of the USA who
openly declared his support for socialism (Du Bois, 1968).
Here his two projects became one as he took the Soviet Union and China to be
models from which Africa and other former colonies could learn as they became
independent nations. Returning to the USA after nearly a year of being dined and
wined by world leaders, fearing imprisonment he and his second wife, Shirley
Graham, accepted President Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation to make his home in
Ghana. He moved there in 1961, where he died in 1963 at the age of 95—the end
of an extraordinary life.

US Sociology’s Appropriation of Du Bois

Why am I telling you all this? First, I want to convey to you, with this thumbnail
sketch of Du Bois’ life, what it can mean to be a politically engaged scholar. I
want to give you a sense of his ideas and how his ideas were shaped by his politi-
cal engagement. I want to convey how he wove together the professional, critical,
policy and public sociologies with a view to understanding and challenging the
limits of decolonisation in the United States and beyond.
But I’m telling you this story for a second reason. W. E. B. Du Bois has been
discovered by US sociology, and in recent years he has become central to ‘decolo-
nising’ our discipline. A major figure in today’s renaissance of Du Bois is Aldon
Morris—an African American sociologist, President of the ASA in 2021 and
author of a very important book on the battle for civil rights in the South—but, no
less important, author of the 2015 book, Scholar Denied, an account of the
way Du Bois has been systematically ignored, excluded and disparaged by the
290 Sociological Bulletin 72(3)

sociology profession, a sign according to Morris of its racism. Morris argues that
Du Bois’ leadership of the Atlanta School between 1897 and 1910 makes him the
true founder of US sociology and not Robert Park of the famed Chicago School.
A number of things have to be said about Morris’ powerful intervention in
sociology. First, and most important, is his bringing of Du Bois to the forefront,
accelerating a process that had been taking place for the previous 20 years.
Second, there is no doubt that racism was key to the exclusion of Du Bois from
the sociology profession, but racism was not the only issue as other African
Americans were accepted by white sociologists.
A further factor is professional sociology’s repudiation of public sociology, or
at least a public sociology that is advanced not from within the university but from
the trenches of civil society, from the public sphere. Du Bois did spend a good
proportion of his life in the university, in toto some 25 years after receiving his
PhD, but his real power as a public sociologist came as editor of The Crisis, his
writings in numerous magazines and newspapers, his lyrical essays and his writing
of novels, and then his more directly political role in the NAACP, in the Council
for African Affairs and the Peace Information Center. Professional sociology
turns it back on sociologists who dare to pronounce on matters of public impor-
tance outside the control of the academic community. Such adventurers are con-
demned for their politicisation of sociology. Du Bois, however, did not bend
before such critics. Indeed, his innovations, his scientific breakthroughs came
about precisely because he was not the prisoner of professional sociology. He had
internalised the strictures and rigors of academic work, but he pursued them
outside the academy for a wider public audience.
To make matters worse, as he was excluded from the academy, as he turned to the
public sphere, as he fought for civil rights, at the same time he became ever more criti-
cal of the USA, ever more radical in his politics. While he only became a member of
the Communist Party just before leaving the USA in 1961, a final symbolic gesture of
hostility to the US state, nonetheless he never made a secret of his sympathies for the
Soviet Union and China. He never made a secret of his commitments to socialism and
Marxism for the last 30 years of his life. You can be sure that did not win him friends
within US sociology, at that time a largely conservative discipline.
Consistent with an image of professional sociology, Morris and others confine
their attention to the early Du Bois of The Philadelphia Negro and the Atlanta School,
the more conservative and empiricist of his writings. Even the Souls of Black Folk,
written in 1903, undoubtedly a work of sociological genius, had a conservative ethos,
appealing to the humanity of whites. As I have argued, by the time he publishes
Darkwater written 17 years later, he has given up on the humanity of whites, now
portraying them as inhuman—brutal to Blacks but also to one another, manifested in
the atrocities of the First World War. Darkwater, therefore, addresses African
Americans, giving them the confidence to fight for civil and political rights, giving
them a vision of an alternative socialist world. Even to this day, the Du Bois embraced
by sociology is largely the professional Du Bois, the conservative Du Bois, and above
all the Du Bois focused on the USA, conveniently overlooking his Pan-Africanism,
and his campaigns against imperialism and his enduring commitment to socialism.
Burawoy 291

Du Bois and Decolonising Sociology

Now, finally, we can come to the question of decolonising sociology. Aldon
Morris’s book is addressed to US sociologists—the claim that Du Bois’ profes-
sional sociology antedated the Chicago School by 20 years. But that’s no achieve-
ment! Indeed, it only diminishes Du Bois to compare him with Robert Park,
Ernest Burgess and the Chicago School—so provincial, so empiricist. Who now
reads the Chicago School? If we are in the business of decolonising sociology,
then the sparring partners for Du Bois have to be the more formidable troika of
social theorists—Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Decolonising sociology must
tackle the blind spots of these canonical figures, but it must do so by placing them
in the context of their times.
Moreover, engaging these figures will only strengthen Du Boisian sociology,
surface his contributions and send sociology in new directions—centring the
experiential, recognising that we are part of the world we study, making explicit
the values that drive our research rather than hiding behind so-called value neu-
trality, developing theories of global capitalism as seen from the standpoint of the
subaltern, and above all endorsing sociology’s public role. These are the issues
that Du Bois forces us to confront—that is, if we take into consideration the entire
gamut of his writings. This is how I see Du Bois’ contribution to decolonising
sociology.
It is important to attend to our founders, how their blind spots have shaped the
development of our discipline. We should attend to their Eurocentrism, to their decen-
tering of race and gender and sexuality and much more. But we should be careful not
to reproduce another colonialism in the process. US sociology is uniquely unconscious,
and, if conscious, uniquely uncritical of the way it dominates the global field of sociol-
ogy. There are obvious reasons for this domination—the USA harbours the greatest
concentration of resources for the pursuit of science, the USA controls the majority of
so-called international journals, all published in English, the USA defines what is a
good university through international rankings, US universities train the highest pro-
portion of foreign PhDs who then dominate the sociology of their home country. This
is not all bad, and fortunately, US sociology is not of a single mind on so many issues,
but still my point is that what happens in the USA does shape what happens elsewhere,
and so the issue becomes: when US sociology decolonises itself by reformulating its
foundations how does this affect its relation to other sociologies, especially Southern
sociologies.
If decolonising sociology in the USA means drawing on Du Bois’ early and most
conservative sociology, pitting him against the provincialism of the Chicago School,
then we cannot be surprised that it does not resonate with sociologies elsewhere.
Yet, even if we draw on Du Bois’ more anti-imperialist sociology, represented by his
writing on Pan-Africanism, we have to acknowledge his systematic discounting of
fundamental divisions within postcolonial nations. whether these be of ethnicity,
caste, class or gender—divisions which are at the centre of Black Reconstruction.
Thus, Dark Princess captures the paradox, combining a romantic account of the
‘darker races’ outside the USA with a much more pointed account of class and
292 Sociological Bulletin 72(3)

race within the USA. Similarly, at different times he will embrace authoritarian
regimes—Japan, China and the Soviet Union—as hostile competitors to US impe-
rialism, side-lining internal oppression. If Du Bois is to mean anything to Indian
sociology it cannot be his embrace of a fictive India but his magisterial account of
the origins and conduct of the US Civil War, Reconstruction and its denouement.
That, indeed, will bring him closer to Ambedkar than Gandhi or Nehru—stressing
the incompleteness of decolonisation.
More generally, appropriating Du Bois might mean one thing in the USA, and
quite another in India. Given the provinciality of US sociology, decolonisation there
is always in danger of appearing in the guise of colonisation elsewhere. There can
be no monopoly on the reading of Du Bois or any other theorist. As Edward Said
(1983) insisted, theories travel and as they do so, they assume very different signifi-
cances. Engaging the canon has to mean different things in different places. Just as
the canon changes over time so it must also change across the globe.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article.

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