W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture: “Berlin as Intellectual Laboratory”

Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, this talk reconstructs W.E.B. Du Bois’s Berlin years (1892–1894) and traces their legacy through 1925, as a formative site that helped forge the analytical toolkit later mobilized in his anti-imperial critique and in his formulation of the “global color line” as a structuring principle of modern world politics. Using a genealogical approach, I argue that Berlin operated as an epistemic workshop in three ways: (i) Du Bois’s intensive training in the historical-structural method of the German Historical School, especially in Gustav von Schmoller’s and Adolph Wagner’s seminars; (ii) the consolidation of a comparative, transnational sensibility sharpened by investigative travels across Central and Eastern Europe; and (iii) the experience of academic inclusion alongside racial marking, foreshadowing double consciousness as an epistemic advantage. I then trace how these elements reappear across key moments in Du Bois’s work, “The Philadelphia Negro” (1899), “The African Roots of War” (1915), and “Worlds of Color” (1925), as he moves from a local sociology of race to an account of international order structured by empire and racial capitalism. The talk concludes by suggesting that Du Bois’s disciplinary erasure reflects not theoretical “absence” but structural mechanisms of racial exclusion that shaped the canon of International Relations.

Renato Xavier is a postdoctoral researcher at CEBRAP (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) in São Paulo, supported by a FAPESP fellowship. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (2023), where his dissertation examined W.E.B. Du Bois and the Howard School as a Black internationalist critique of early twentieth-century International Relations, revealing the discipline’s foundational silencing of race and anti-imperialism. His research explores the racial foundations of international order, with particular attention to Black radical thought, empire, and the historical exclusion of race in International Relations theory. From March 2026 to February 2027, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin, supported by a FAPESP-BEPE fellowship.

Learn more about the W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series.