This book is the first comprehensive account of the history and current state of South African sociology. Providing a holistic picture of the subject both as it is taught in universities and as a field of research, it reveals the trajectories of a discipline in a challenging socio-political context. With the support of historical and scientometric data, it demonstrates how the changing political situation, from colonialism to apartheid to democracy, has influenced the nature, direction and foci of sociological research in the country. The author shows how, during the apartheid era, sociology was professionally fragmented and divided along language and race lines. It was, however, able to flourish with the advent of democracy in 1994 and has become a unique academic movement. This insightful work will appeal to students and scholars of the social sciences, and all those interested in the history and society of South Africa.

Apartheid vertigo, the dizzying sensation following prolonged oppression and delusions of skin colour, is the focus of this book. For centuries, the colour-code shaped state and national ideals, created social and emotional distances between social groups, permeated public and private spheres, and dehumanized Africans of all nationalities in South Africa. Two decades after the demise of official apartheid, despite four successive black governments, apartheid vertigo still distorts South Africa's postcolonial reality. The colour-code endures, but now in postcolonial masks. Political freedom notwithstanding, vast sections of the black citizenry have adopted and adapted the code to fit the new reality. This vertiginous reality is manifest in the neo-apartheid ideology of Makwerekwere - the postcolonial colour-code mobilized to distinguish black outsiders from black insiders. Apartheid vertigo ranges from negative sentiments to outright violence against black outsiders, including insults, humiliations, extortions, searches, arrests, detentions, deportations, tortures, rapes, beatings, and killings. Ironically, the victims are not only the outsiders against whom the code is mobilized but also the insiders who mobilize it. Drawing on evidence from interviews, observation, press articles, reports, research monographs, and history, this book unravels the synergies of history, migration, nationalism, black group relations, and violence in South Africa, deconstructing the idea of visible differences between black nationals and black foreign nationals. The book demonstrates that in South Africa, violence always lurks on the surface of everyday life with the potential to burst through the fragile limits set upon it and possibly escalate to ethnic cleansing.

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

In this book, Franklin Obeng-Odoom seeks to debunk the existing explanations of inequalities within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world using insights from the emerging field of stratification economics. Using multiple sources - including archival and historical material and a wide range of survey data - he develops a distinctive approach that combines traditional institutional economics, such as social protection and reasonable value, property and the distribution of wealth with other insights into Africa's development. While looking at the Africa-wide situation, Obeng-Odoom also analyses the experiences of inequalities within specific countries; he primarily focuses on Ghana while also drawing on experiences in Botswana and Mauritius. Comprehensive and engaging, Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa is a useful resource for teaching and research on Africa and the Global South.

The sociological and political writings of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane on African political history, political economy and political philosophy constitute a vital portion of a monumental legacy to later generations by an African intellectual who came to maturity through an historical consciousness that emerged during the 1960s. This was a period characterized by the radical contentious philosophies of history: African marxism, African nationalism and the reactionary ideologies aligned with imperialism and colonialism.The essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane stand at a fascinating intersection with the intellectual systems of Frantz Fanon, H.I.E. Dhlomo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Amilcar Cabral. They are first and foremost what Cabral and Fanon were clamoring for: an instrumentarium of the construction of a progressive African ideology or African ideologies. What enabled them to realize this remarkable breakthrough is that they are a continuation of the revolutionary thought of Fanon and Cabral. Magubane was among the first African academic scholars to have seen the historical significance of Fanon and Cabral, respectively in the mid 1960s and in the early 1970s.Written in exile during the exile period in South African intellectual and cultural history these essays until recently were not easily historically locatable within the genealogical structure of South African intellectual traditions. Undoubtedly, this had been due to the 'political philosophy' of apartheid and its ideological manifestations.

This book contends that conventional class concepts are not able to adequately capture social inequality and socio-cultural differentiation in Africa. Earlier empirical findings concerning ethnicity, neo-traditional authorities, patron-client relations, lifestyles, gender, social networks, informal social security, and even the older debate on class in Africa, have provided evidence that class concepts do not apply; yet these findings have mostly been ignored. For an analysis of the social structures and persisting extreme inequality in African societies – and in other societies of the world – we need to go beyond class, consider the empirical realities and provincialise our conventional theories. This book develops a new framework for the analysis of social structure based on empirical findings and more nuanced approaches, including livelihood analysis and intersectionality, and will be useful for students and scholars in African studies and development studies, sociology, social anthropology, political science and geography.

Black Feminist Sociology offers new writings by established and emerging scholars working in a Black feminist tradition. The book centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens is to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the essays are critical, personal, political and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity. The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book’s key themes.

In this intellectual history-making volume, multiple award-winning W. E. B. Du Bois scholar Reiland Rabaka offers the first book-length treatment of Du Bois's seminal sociological discourse: from Du Bois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and inaugurator of intersectional sociology; and, finally, from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and critical criminologist to Du Bois as dialectical critic of the disciplinary decadence of sociology and the American academy. Against Epistemic Apartheid brings new and intensive archival research into critical dialogue with the watershed work of classical and contemporary, male and female, black and white, national and international sociologists and critical social theorists' Du Bois studies. Against Epistemic Apartheid offers an accessible introduction to Du Bois's major contributions to sociology and, therefore, will be of interest to scholars and students not only in sociology, but also African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as scholars and students in 'traditional' disciplines such as history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, and religion.