Pan-Africanism and Sociology: A Research Agenda

Thanks to the work of postcolonial sociologists (see Go 2016), we now recognise that anticolonial thought - in many cases - can be understood as a form of social theorising. Such postcolonial sociologists have thus made our discipline both more capacious and more critical. Less attention has been paid to professional sociologists who also were anticolonial figures. In my talk, I will focus on the cases of Du Bois and St Clair Drake, analysing their attempts to craft a 'Pan African sociology'. In both cases, we see how Drake and Du Bois acted as interlocutors between anticolonial publics and professional sociologists, blending the putatively disparate scholarly and 'activist' communities.