ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois made his famous prediction that the problem of the coming age was going to be ‘the problem of the colour line’ (Du Bois 1903: vii). Consequently, he spent his long lifetime thinking about race and racism, arguing vehemently against discriminatory practices that defi ned racial groups in order to privilege one against the other. For Du Bois, race was fi rst and foremost a political category, yet with a strong emotional appeal.1 He was also well aware of the slipperiness of the concept, which made it irreducible to a clear-cut entity. Thus he argued in 1940 that race was not so much an ontological given or a concept as such, but rather was constantly made and remade through ‘a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies’ (Du Bois 1940: 133). Many of these contradictions lay in the simultaneity of the violence inherent in dominant regimes of racial classifi cation and the emancipatory power of self-identifi cation and solidarity among all those who ‘must ride “Jim Crow” in Georgia’ (Du Bois 1996 [1923]: 68). Moreover, ambiguity was inscribed in the classifi catory practices themselves, which made up racialized bodies between biological taxonomies and other forms of dividing practices (see Foucault 1982).
