Du Boisian Mutations: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Sociogenic Principle

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 16. Theories of Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

The study of race in the modern world necessitates an interrogation of the epistemic laws that produce modes of difference-making. Despite growing empirical scholarship on the explanations and effects of racial inequality, the epistemology that orients race-making has been under theorized. This paper recounts the epistemological ruptures that Du Bois makes in his theorization of race and society. It contextualizes Du Bois’s key theoretical concepts within a lineage of black radical thought, primarily that of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter. What we draw from this genealogical revisiting is twofold: (1) that Du Bois’s contribution gestures at a meta-epistemological principle that conditions and structures knowledge, society and the social and (2) it offers invitations to de-center Man in sociological theory and re-theorize law, chance and power towards an emancipatory sensitive science.

Author

• Amy Chin, Brown University