Black Transnationalism (12 February)

Wednesday 12 February 2025 15:00-17:00 GMT
Seminar Room 2, Chrystal Macmillan Building
A seminar with Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
This is a pre-read seminar. Please read:
- WEB Du Bois, Democracy and Color (chap 4) and ‘Peace and the Colonies’ (chap 5) both from The World and Africa and Color and Democracy.
- Anténor Firmin, European Solidarity (chap 16) from The Equality of the Human Races
This seminar will explore the visions of transnational politics developed by WEB Du Bois (1868-1963) and Anténor Firmin (1850-1911). Led by Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach (Amsterdam) and Jared Holley (Edinburgh), we will relate Du Bois’ thoughts on the need to attend sufficiently to the different dimensions of democracy with his call to develop transnational networks. In his middle-period writings, Du Bois suggests that these networks will serve as sites in which African Americans could work alongside similarly placed people on the globe to co-create new concepts. Du Bois’ positions will be contextualized via comparison with Anténor Firmin’s earlier critique of European imperialism as a global practice of domination rooted in false ideas of white racial superiority. In his political writings, Firmin developed an account of global politics to combat the epistemic and material structures of European racial and political hegemony, which he attempted to put into practice in transnational anticolonial networks. The seminar will compare Du Bois’ and Firmin’s views on the color line, the need for group consciousness, especially for structural minorities, as well as the making of a new (transnational) community.