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The Du Boisian Scholars Network (DBSN) is an organization composed of scholars and activists working in the tradition pioneered by W.E.B. Du Bois. The Network is rooted in sociology and welcomes others who share its goals. Seeking to enact emancipatory change both within and beyond the academy, we advance a critical intellectual agenda, collaborate with communities and movements, and create scholarly support systems for this work.
This research cluster brings together sociologists who study empires and their legacies. We discuss empires, imperialism and colonialism as social forces, their formation and operation, as well as their cultural, social, political, psychic and epistemic afterlives. Members' interests are diverse, ranging from questions of imperial state formation, racial capitalism, constructions of gender and sex, imperial knowledge production, migration politics, global health regimes and anticolonial intellectual thought, and we aim to study all parts of the globe. Join us!
“The transatlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity that took place across centuries and reached every corner of the globe. It’s impossible to understand the modern world without a grasp of the transatlantic slave trade,” director Stanley Nelson said. “The business of buying and selling human beings shaped economic, social and political institutions; established racial and geographic hierarchies; and entrenched wealth disparities. In the United States, current debates about Confederate monuments, reparations for descendants of enslaved people, and systemic racial inequality can be traced to enduring fault lines around the legacy of slavery. In order to grapple with this painful legacy, we must first understand it.”
““The Negro race has been the foundation upon which the
capitalist system has been reared, the Industrial Revolution carried through, and imperial colonialism established. If we confine ourselves to America we cannot forget that America was built on Africa. From being a mere stopping place between Europe and Asia or a chance treasure house of gold, America became through African labor the center of the sugar empire and the cotton kingdom and an integral part of that world industry and trade which caused the Industrial Revolution and the reign of capitalism.” (W. E. B. Du Bois 1947)”