W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater and an anti-colonial, internationalist anthropology

Abstract

In 1920 W.E.B. Du Bois's Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil issued a call for an anti-colonial, internationalist approach to historical and social science scholar? ship. At a time when anthropology's institutional stance as the science of localized and isolated "primitive" cultures was still being forged, Darkwater offered an alternate mapping of the discipline, one centered on an understanding of capitalism as a racialized, interconnected global system that continually produced inequality and difference. It should not surprise us that Boasian anthropologists at the time shunted aside Du Bois's proposals. After all, Boas himself actively ignored the vociferous struggles of indigenous cannery workers for decent wages and unions while he conducted his fieldwork among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast. Nor should it surprise us that the relational approach of Du Bois, an African-American scholar speaking from the social and disciplinary margins, is still largely ignored today. But if Darkwater's path-breaking proposals were actively marginalized within hegemonic anthropology, their influence is continually registered, if unacknowledged or even forgotten, within a loosely conceived tradition of radical anthropology. Of course, Du Bois is not alone in his exclusion. Many important scholars who helped shape an anti-colonial and internationalist perspective in