US Studies Network Scholar Profile - Ali Meghji

Bio: Ali is an Associate Professor in Social Inequalities. His research puts critical race theory into dialogue with postcolonial sociology in order to understand the global dynamics of racialization and racism. In doing so, his work overcomes the methodological nationalism which characterises much contemporary race scholarship, and develops a way forward for thinking about transnational raciality.

Can you start by telling us about your academic background and how you came to Cambridge?

Ali: I’m an Associate Professor of sociology, and my work bridges postcolonial sociology with more canonical sociology of race. Broadly, I’m trying to develop a transnational understanding of race and racism, with an empirical focus on empire and anti-colonialism.

I started my post in 2018, so I’ve been in this role for several years now. Before that, I spent my entire academic life at Cambridge, but I’ve also had visiting stints at other universities. In line with the US Studies Network, I spend a lot of time in the United States. I’ve held fellowships at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and more recently at the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago. The archives I work in are mostly US-based, in places like New York, Washington DC, and Nashville (because Fisk University, one of the most well-known HBCUs, is there).

Can you tell us about your current project?

Ali: It’s really good timing, because I just finished a project about two weeks ago. I just submitted my book, and tomorrow I’m starting fieldwork for the next project. The project I just finished is called Du Boisian Sociology, after W. E. B. Du Bois. Across sociology, and the arts, humanities, and social sciences more broadly, there’s been a rediscovery of Du Bois over the last 10 to 20 years. But especially in sociology, almost all of our understanding of so-called Du Boisian theory is tied only to Du Bois’s own works. My project traces his influence on early Black social scientists of the twentieth century. 

One of the really interesting things that emerged in that project was the porous boundary between professional academia and anti-colonial radicalism. Du Bois is a case in point: he developed much of his sociological thought in tandem with anti-colonial movements. One of his most famous concepts, the “global color line,” was itself developed through the First Pan-African Conference in 1900 and sustained through his Pan-African activism.

Other figures like E. Franklin Frazier worked closely with Eric Williams to think about capitalism in the Caribbean and the problems of the postcolonial era. St. Clair Drake is another great example. He published an amazing book about Bronzeville in Chicago, Black Metropolis. People often portray him as an urban sociologist, but he attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress. He was friends with Kwame Nkrumah. He was very close to George Padmore, and he was deeply embedded in this kind of anti-colonial circuit. He himself said he was far more influenced by these anti-colonial radicals than by his mentors at the University of Chicago, yet he is still presented as an acolyte of the Chicago School. So that is what the book was doing, trying to theorise the boundary between radicalism and professional academia through a focus on Du Boisian scholars.

The next project looks at the Pan-African movement and its links with anti-racist organisations in the United States. Some of the early organisation of Pan-Africanism was funded by US groups like the NAACP and the National Association for Colored Women. Obviously, that term isn't used now, but that was the name of the organization, and other prominent figures were also from the States, DuBois again being a good example. But by 1958, when Nkrumah organised the so-called Sixth Pan-African Congress, he described Americans as “auxiliary men” in the struggle.

So my project is looking at what this shift, the “Americanisation” and then partial marginalisation of US actors, meant for the connection between anti-racist movements in the United States and anti-colonial movements across the African continent.

Hearing you talk about your research, a lot of it seems to pull on ideas that are quite international in scope. How do you position yourself as a scholar or your work geographically?

Ali: When it comes to questions of race and anti-colonialism and empire, thinking in terms of these kind of neat geographical boundaries can become quite complicated. Dubois writes this himself in his PhD, on the suppression of the African slave trade, where he points out that even after abolition, English capitalists and American capitalists were investing in a Brazilian slave trade, so they were still benefiting from enslavement, even in the abolition era.

What does that mean for the history of abolition in the states, if people were still benefiting from slavery even when it was supposedly illegal? Or even after abolition during Reconstruction, which, of course, Du Bois talks about in Black Reconstruction? If cotton and tobacco and rice, which were still being produced through the plantation economy, are the backbone of European commerce, as he says, then it means that you can't really understand the racial structure of the states, even in the plantations of the South, without thinking about how products like cotton and tobacco were incorporated into these really transnational flows of markets and capital and labor.

Coming back to your question, it's such a big sociological problem: how do we study an isolated unit without kind of reproducing methodological nationalism? A lot of the thinkers that I've studied or taken inspiration from have always kind of been very adamant that we need to look beyond the confines of nation states, and to consider what sociologists would call transboundary effects, or even relational effects, how two separate geographies can be influencing one another.

That's almost how the Pan-Africanism project was born: from thinking about the fact that one of the most famous anti-colonial movements of the 20th century did not necessarily begin in the African continent, but instead emerged from the diaspora in places like the United States and the UK and France and so on.