The Search for World Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Space

The Search for World Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Space

An incisive conceptual history of global democracy in the transnational political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. The Search for World Democracy traces the language of “world democracy” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s oeuvre, stretching from his early sociological writings to his later work on world peace and anticolonialism with and against the United Nations. Drawing on original archival research, several lesser-known writings, and most centrally Du Bois’s unpublished 1937 manuscript A World Search for Democracy , Adam Dahl places his unique approach to democratic theory within the transatlantic debates about the transformation of European imperial order in the twentieth century. Dahl shows how Du Bois’s vision of the spatial scale of democracy situated struggles for popular control, decolonization, industrial democracy, and racial enfranchisement in their shifting, multidimensional geographic contexts. Less a specific model of global governance than a radical politics of space and scale, Du Bois’s idea of world democracy challenges the boundaries between domestic and international politics by linking local sites of democratic struggle within and against the global color line. The Search for World Democracy shows how, for Du Bois, the radical transformation of the United States into a multiracial democracy would require an equally dramatic transformation of the imperial lineages of world politics. "Adam Dahl   draws on a stunning range of archival and published sources to illuminate Du Bois’s shifting vision of multiracial democracy as a transnational project. Du Bois’s insights into the political problems of the twentieth century come alive on the page, as Dahl skillfully teases out Du Bois’s strategies for reconstructing self-governance after empire—in his time and ours." -- Lawrie Balfour | author of "Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom" "Reading Du Bois’s unpublished novel  A World Search for Democracy  alongside a remarkable range of his published writings and vast archives, Adam Dahl offers a powerful account of Du Bois’s global democratic project. For Du Bois, as Dahl argues with insight and analytic clarity, the only hope for genuine democracy and peace lay in transnational political struggles, operating at multiple scales, against the formidable, intertwined forces of racial domination, colonial rule, and financial capital." -- Jennifer Pitts | University of Chicago Adam Dahl is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the author of Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought .