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State of the Discipline
I could see that the scientific task of the twentieth century would be to explore and measure the scope of chance and unreason in human action, which does not yield to argument but changes slowly and with difficulty after long study and careful development.
--W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940, p. 7)
INTRODUCTION
Sociology ignored the work of W. E. B. Du Bois for a long time. Of late, however, the discipline has begun to recognize his work, paying attention to his urban and community studies and reflecting on how incorporating his insights could have changed the practice of sociology (Anderson 1996, 2000; Bobo 2000; Green and Driver, 1995; Morris 2007; Morris and Ghaziani, 2005; Wortham 2009, 2011; Zuberi 2004).Yet Du Bois's work as a sociological theorist continues to go overlooked (England and Warner, 2013; Zukerman 2004). Du Bois is thought to be a scholar of race, and he is indeed that. But his work goes beyond treating race as a discrete concept and instead situates the process of racializing and racialization (i.e., the process of intersubjectively constructing racial categories and meanings that structure the experiences of groups and individuals) at the core of the formation and the organization of the modern world. His oeuvre, which has a thematic unity over the course of nearly seven decades, was developed in a large corpus of writings in the form of empirical studies, essays, journalistic pieces, speeches, and theoretical reflections. In it, Du Bois develops a micro-analysis of self- and group-identity formation under conditions of racialization as well as a macro-analysis of the racialized world. This body of work, we argue, makes Du Bois a theorist of racialized modernity and situates his work as central to classical sociological theory and to contemporary theoretical debates.
In this article we emphasize the significance of Du Bois's theory of Double Consciousness for sociological theory and analysis. Developed mainly in Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Dusk of Dawn (1940) (hereafter, Souls and Dusk, respectively), the theory of Double Consciousness is a phenomenological description of self-formation under conditions of racialization. The theory has long been part of debates among scholars of African American studies (Gilroy 1993; Gooding-Williams 2010; Gordon 2000; Rabaka 2010; Rampersad...