Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Researcher of the Year 2020

I was touched to have been awarded the School of Humanities and Communication Arts Researcher of the Year award 2020 at my institution, Western Sydney University. The prize was awarded for the paper, ‘Looking As White: anti-racism apps, appearance and racialized embodiment’, published in the journal Identities, and soon in…

Comments closed

The scholars, scholarship and scholarly histories denied

W.E.B. Du Bois

This is the fourth blog post in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series for my course at The New School Department of Sociology in Spring 2017. This week we are beginning to discuss books, mainly new works, in race critical studies. The rest of the syllabus is here (leave a comment if you want access to the Google folder with all the readings). This week we are beginning with  discussion of Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. My review of the book can be read here. And you can listen to Aldon Morris discussing the book here. In this post, I attempt to link Morris’s discussion of Du Bois’s intellectual legacy for global sociology to a discussion of both the race blindness of sociology and, Zine Magubane puts it, its paradoxical foundations in wholly racial social contexts. I ask what Du Bois’s invocation to treat race as central, and not marginal, to sociology (and the social sciences in general) signals in terms of the challenges facing sociology today in the face of the pressing need for a truly global sociology attentive to the formational role played by race and coloniality. In this I am guided by the vital work of Gurminder Bhambra and would like to thank RCDS student William Borstall for suggesting the work of Zine Magubane on ‘America’s Racial Ontology’ which I did not previously know.

“Racism is more objected to than understood in sociology” (Barnor Hesse 2014: 141).

“For the rest of his very long life, Du Bois was to be politically and theoretically as actively engaged in the global, world-systemic series of ‘gaze from below’ anti-color line, therefore anti-colonial cum antiapartheid struggles, as he was to be in his own ‘local’ U.S. one – a position Fanon would similarly adopt” (Wynter 2015: 51-2).

Comments closed

Digital Antiracisms Website

Justine Humphry and I have launched a new website for our work on digital antiracisms. Please visit to stay abreast of events, publications and other initiatives including the recent visit tp Sydney of Jessie Daniels, author of White Lies and Cyber Racism. Save

Comments closed

State Murder – Updated

This post has had to have been updated to another death of a young man – a victim of state racism leading directly to the neglect of his health and ultimately the loss of his life – on Nauru on May 11 2016. Rakib – from Bangladesh, died of multiple…

Comments closed

Luqman Onikosi’s deportation shows we are all being asked to become border guards

I was asked by the Campaign to Stop the Deportation of Luqman Onikosi and Luqman himself to write an article drawing attention to his case and, crucially, to the infiltration of the border into all realms of life. Luqman is adamant that this campaign not be framed in the individualist…

Comments closed

Antisionisme et philosémitisme d’État

My talk on antisemitism and philosemitism has been translated into French by Grégory Bekhtari for the French journal, Contretemps. L’article récent d’Houria Bouteldja du Parti des indigènes de la république, « Racisme(s) et philosémitisme d’État », tentait d’éclairer le récit national autour de l’antisémitisme à travers le soutien occidental à l’État d’Israël.…

Comments closed

The Case for Open Borders

This article was originally published in Overland on August 5, 2013. Underlying Bernard Keane’s article – ‘“Let them all come” is “stop the boats” for progressives’ – is a deep sense of indignation about the idea that Australians are racist. The oft-repeated argument is that elitist, disconnected, latte-sippers tut-tut over…

Comments closed
Alana Lentin