Slavery Is Another Name for War
Boko's dissertation project is a close reading of W.E.B. Du Bois' work that grapples
with two primary research questions: 1) Does Du Bois' understanding of racial slavery
align with frameworks that posit slavery as a form of war? 2) What would a sociology
of war look like from the position of the black slave? By proceeding through a deep
meditation on the social scientific tools and discourses that have defined the sphere
of war by leaving racial slavery unthought, Boko aims to stage a confrontation between
sociology, which claims a universal "social realm" as its object of analysis, and
the structural position of the black slave, which exists as an "antisocial" condition.
In this analysis, war transforms from an aberrant and spatio-temporally bounded event
into a constitutive relational dynamic that produces the defining element of modernity
- "the color line" qua antiblackness.
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