W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life of Critical Engagement
Head back to school for a good reason. The UW Havens-Wright Center, the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies are sponsoring this deep dive into W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. And he truly was a renaissance man: a scholar, novelist, poet, editor, socialist and civil rights activist. Michael Buraway of University of California, Berkeley launches this four-part series on April 2 with a look at Du Bois as a “public sociologist”; the next three lectures follow at 3 p.m. on April 4, noon on April 8 and 2 p.m. on April 10. Free, but tickets required (a Zoom option is also available): tickettailor.com.
media release: UW Havens-Wright Center hybrid in-person (Room 8417) and online event. If you would like to attend online, you must register in advance.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the great US public intellectuals of the 20th century. Educated at Fisk, Harvard (first African American PhD), and the University of Berlin, he became a leading historian and sociologist. As a literary figure he was a novelist, critic and a poet as well as for 24 years (1910-1934) the founder and editor of The Crisis, the popular magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As a political activist he was a socialist, a Pan-Africanist, a civil rights advocate, and a leader of the international peace movement. For much of his life and afterwards, his race, his intellectual scope, and his intrepid independent radicalism marginalized him within the academic world. His public stances against imperialism and capitalism would make him an enemy of the US state, leading him to take up exile in Ghana for the last two years of his life. While other disciplines have engaged his life and work, sociology has been slow to adopt him and when they have, their attention has been focused on his early, more conservative writings rather than his later Marxism. The lectures will address the significance of the totality of his oeuvre, how and why they shift over the 20th century and with what implications for contemporary social science.
Lecture 1: Critical Engagement vs. Public Sociology, April 2, 2 pm
W.E.B. Du Bois is often viewed as a “public sociologist,” but public sociology has been defined by its relationship to professional, policy and critical sociology, part of an “introverted” academic discipline. Du Bois’ marginalization/withdrawal/expulsion from the academy led to an “extraverted sociology” of critical engagement, more akin to sociology of the global south. The changing sociology of Du Bois can be attributed to his engagement in the politics of a changing world, not just in the US but in the world at large, as well as his evolving reflection on that engagement. Accordingly, his life followed 4 phases: scholar denied, scholar unbound, scholar radicalized and scholar persecuted.
Lecture 2: Race, Class and Capitalism, April 4, 3 pm
One of the most fraught inter-disciplinary debates in recent years has focused on the relationship between race, class and capitalism. Inspired by studies of apartheid South Africa, Cedric Robinson developed the concept of “racial capitalism” associated with the Black Radical Tradition in which racism drives capitalism both historically and globally – a view he distinguishes from conventional Marxism in which capitalism drives racism, what we might call “racialized capitalism.” The writings of W.E.B. Du Bois have become a terrain for conducting the debate. Accordingly, we will evaluate the competing claims of these alternative perspectives by looking at the full scope of Du Bois’ writings.
Lecture 3: Decolonizing the Canon, April 8, noon
Sociology is a peculiar discipline in that its foundations lie in the work of “canonical” intellectuals, most prominently Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Du Bois presents a counter-point to the canon and a lightning rod for “decolonization” that is sweeping through US academia and beyond. It is possible to discern four academic responses to “decolonization”: restoration of the canon by insisting on the old foundations with concessionary additions at the periphery; rejection of the very idea of a canon as problematic; revolution in which an entirely new canon is born; reconstruction in which we rebuild the foundations through the introduction of a new candidate. The lecture undertakes such a reconstruction by putting Du Bois into dialogue with Marx, Weber and Durkheim and examines the radical consequences for our vision of social science.
Lecture 4: Black Marxism, April 10, 2 pm
As an alternative to the Black Radical Tradition and Decolonizing sociology, we can place Du Bois at the center of a Black Marxist tradition that would also include such figures as Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Stuart Hall. We can begin to think of such a tradition by putting Du Bois into dialogue with Fanon. Both begin by interrogating the phenomenology of racism before making an epistemological break to Marxism – the one focused on the struggle for emancipation before during and after the US Civil War and the other focused on the struggle for emancipation during and after colonialism. How does each reveal and cover blind spots in the other?
About the Speaker
For nearly 50 years Michael Burawoy taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an ethnographer of workplaces in the US, Zambia, Hungary and Russia. In various books, including The Color of Class on the Copper Mines (1972), Manufacturing Consent (1979), The Politics of Production (1985), The Radiant Past (with Janos Lukács) (1992), Public Sociology (2021), he has advanced theories of advanced capitalism, state socialism and postcolonialism, while developing the distinctive methodology of The Extended Case Method (2009).
This event is presented in collaboration with the Department of History and Department of African American Studies at UW-Madison.
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