Constructing Colonial Peoples: W. E. B. Du Bois, the United Nations, and the Politics of Space and Scale

Abstract

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois's transnational political thought during his work with the UN and the NAACP in the 1940s. Focusing on unpublished speeches, essays, and correspondence, it explores how he exploited the conceptual elasticity of terms like “colonial status” and “colonial peoples” in order to build a transnational majority on a global scale. The conceptual capaciousness of the term “colony” and its cognates allowed him to connect disparate forms of domination and dependence across boundaries of race, nation, and empire, thus binding colonial and semicolonial peoples together in a common program of international action. The fruition of these efforts, I argue, was Du Bois's 1948 petition to the UN, An Appeal to the World. Through the appropriation of international legal discourse, he sought to politicize the jurisdictional bifurcation of domestic and international politics embedded in the UN Charter and expand the spatial scale of democracy by placing civil rights struggles in imperial context.