The Crisis of the Emancipation? The 1900 Paris Exposition and Du Bois’s Negotiation with Imperial Episteme

Abstract In the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, W. E. B. Du Bois deployed imperially charged terminologies such as “progress,” “nation,” and “civilization,” entangled with racism-imbued linear-progressive historiography. Rather than discounting Du Bois’s usage of these terms as a passive internalization of the imperial episteme, we regard Du Bois’s adoption of these terms (and curation in the exhibition more broadly) as a fruitful avenue for us to consider the methodological, theoretical, and public-sociological implications of using imperially entangled terms. Centering Du Bois’ embeddedness in collaborative epistemic communities and his socio-political context, we read his work for the Paris Exhibition of 1900 as a strategic response to the double crisis of social science and post-Reconstruction Black America. We argue that Du Bois subverted and dislocated the concepts of “progress,” “crisis,” and “nation” from their contemporary decontextualized usage to address grounded problems facing Black people in the United States and undertook this redefinition through his dialogic interactions with Black American and Pan-African activists of his time. With a plethora of images, statistics, books written by Black authors, photographs, and cultural artifacts, he provided a narrative of social development that challenged racial stereotypes and the developmental model favored by empire-states. Today, historical social sciences are also undergoing institutional and epistemological crises. Building on Du Bois’s subversive exhibit and adopting the conceptual framework of “reverse tutelage,” we argue that contemporary historical social scientists should also approach conceptual development and global linkages by being grounded in communities of resistance to grasp and recover radical potentialities.