TY - JOUR
T1 - Alternative View of Modernity
T2 - The Subaltern Speaks
AU - Morris, Aldon
N1 - Funding Information:
Precious colleagues and friends contributed greatly to this endeavor by engaging me in critical dialogue pertaining to the ideas expressed in this article. Some read earlier drafts of this article and provided valuable feedback that enhanced the quality of the final article. I especially thank Professors Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Michael Schwartz, Ruby Mendenhall, George Danns, and Walter Allen for the critical input they rendered in preparation for this article. I thank Sharif El Shishtawy Hassan for his valuable research on ASA presidential addresses for this article. I also thank many scholars, too numerous to mention here, for their ideas that always bolster clarity in my scholarship.
Publisher Copyright:
© American Sociological Association 2022.
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.
AB - This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.
KW - Du Bois
KW - Jim Crow
KW - colonization
KW - emancipatory sociology
KW - modernity
KW - patriarchy
KW - racial hierarchies
KW - resistance movements
KW - slavery
KW - western empires
KW - white supremacy
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U2 - 10.1177/00031224211065719
DO - 10.1177/00031224211065719
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85122764236
SN - 0003-1224
VL - 87
SP - 1
EP - 16
JO - American Sociological Review
JF - American Sociological Review
IS - 1
ER -