WiCDS Wednesday, 13 May. 'Sociology Hesitant: Du Bois and the multiple consciousnesses of being Black'
Please join us at 13.30 on Wednesday 13 May, in the WiCDS office and online, for a conversation between Mosa Phadi (Stellenbosch) and Cole Meintjies (WiSER/African Literature), chaired by Sandra Mbewe (WiCDS).
Sociology Hesitant: Du Bois and the multiple consciousnesses of being Black
Phadi uses W.E.B. Du Bois as both a theoretical anchor and a point of departure. First, she shows that he frames South Africa as the key node, revealing acute mechanisms of how racism is the cornerstone of twentieth-century capitalism. This perspective emerged from Du Bois’s dialectical engagements with Black intellectuals and others, through their scholarship and correspondence. Secondly, she argues that Du Bois’s theory of South Africa begins to show a common language among Black people as they conceptualize what it means to be Black. However, this conceptualization is underpinned by various ideological strains. Du Bois was aware of these tensions and navigated them. His work on South Africa gives us a language for how Black people see their world, make claims, and put forward demands. Yet this common language is also shaped by what she articulates as multiple consciousnesses. These complicate and rupture the Black experience, but also hold it together. This seminar will to show how these consciousnesses shape Black people's visions of freedom and what forms they take when the envisioned freedom is not ascertained.
Mosa M. Phadi, Senior Lecturer in the Department, of Sociology and Social Anthropology mobilises W.E.B. Du Bois to think through class formation, the State, local governance, and sociological histories of ideas. She has published in high-impact factor journals, co-edited a book, edited special journal issues, and authored high-impact reports. Mosa is currently an editor of the South African Review of Sociology.
Cole Meintjies is a PhD candidate situated at WISER and the Department of African Literature. Through Black studies, psychoanalysis and philosophy, cole's work brings liberatory politics into conversation with metaphysics, questions of the subject-as-such, and metaethics.
