Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Postcolonialism, Sociology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production -- Part 1: Sociology and its Historiography -- Chapter 1: Modernity, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial Critique -- Chapter 2: European Modernity and the Sociological Imagination -- Chapter 3: From Modernization to Multiple Modernities: Eurocentrism Redux -- Part 2: Deconstructing Eurocentrism: Connected Histories -- Chapter 4: Myths of European Cultural Integrity – The Renaissance -- Chapter 5: Myths of the Modern Nation-State – The French Revolution -- Chapter 6: Myths of Industrial Capitalism – The Industrial Revolution -- Conclusion: Sociology and Social Theory after Postcolonialism – Towards a Connected Historiography.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book outlines what theory for a global age might look like, positing an agenda for consideration, contestation and discussion, and a framework for the research-led volumes that follow in the series. Gurminder K. Bhambra takes up the classical concerns of sociology and social theory and shows how they can be rethought through an engagement with postcolonial studies and decoloniality, two of the most distinctive critical approaches of the past decades.

The concern to think about the place of caste as a conceptual category – within, and in relation to, broader sociological understandings of inequality – was the primary motivation of the British Sociological Association Presidential event on 'Caste and its Implications for Sociologies of Inequality' held at the London School of Economics in late autumn 2023. It sought not only to engage with caste sociologically but also to ask the question of what a consideration of caste could bring to sociological thinking more generally.

The continuing coronavirus pandemic has combined with other global crises to highlight some of the fundamental challenges of inequality that currently face us. They are global both in their current configuration and their historical constitution. Similarly, any solutions to the challenges represented will be global. The continuing relevance of the social sciences will rest on their ability adequately to conceptualise the global processes involved. It is only by acknowledging the significance of the 'colonial global' that it will be possible to understand and address the necessarily postcolonial present that is the context for issues of inequality in the present. This article argues for the need to consider our colonial past as the basis for thinking about contemporary configurations of the global. This is followed by an address of the implications of these arguments for how we understand citizenship and belonging in the present. What is needed is a 'reparatory social science' committed to undoing the inadequacies that have become lodged in our disciplines and working towards a project of repair and transformation for a world that works for all of us.

AbstractTheorists working within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory have not been immune to calls to "decolonize" that have been circulating in and beyond the academic world. This article asks what it means to seek to decolonize a tradition of thought that has never explicitly acknowledged colonial histories. What is needed, instead, this article suggests, is consideration of the very implications of the "colonial modern"—that is, an acknowledgement of the colonial constitution of modernity—for Frankfurt School critical theory's idea of historical progress. The issue is more extensive than simply acknowledging the substantive neglect of colonialism within the tradition; rather, this article suggests that its categories of critique and their associated normative claims are also necessarily implicated by this neglect and require transformation. Acknowledgment of colonial histories requires material reparations for the substantive inequalities bequeathed as legacies of the past, but these reparations also require a transformation of understandings and a recognition of "epistemological justice."

Standard accounts of the emergence of the modern global economic order posit its origins in the expansion of markets or in the changing nature of the social relations of capitalist production. Each fails to acknowledge the significance of colonial relations underpinning these processes, as formative of, and continuous with them. This is a consequence of the dominant understandings (across different theoretical perspectives) of capitalism as a distinct and self-contained economic formation of modernity, the origins of which are seen to be endogenous to Europe and north America. As such, there is a concomitant failure to acknowledge, or regard as significant, the global connections forged through colonialism that are the condition of capitalist-modernity. I argue for the need to recognize the significance of historical colonial relations to both the establishment and continued reproduction of global political economy. In this article, I seek to reorient our understanding of the histories that underpin theories of capitalism to be inclusive of colonial relations and for the framework of analysis to be transformed by their appropriate consideration.

The European project of modernity is usually associated with the development of nation-states (of citizenship bound to territoriality as Weber put it), but is better understood as founded through colonial endeavours, that is of empires rather than nations. In this context, the 'modern' is, in fact, the 'colonial modern', where territoriality involved domination and preferential inclusion for 'domestic' populations within a racialized political community across borders. This has implications for how we think about sociology and its associated concepts and categories. In this contribution, I question the association of Europe with progress and seek to demonstrate how the very structuring of our discipline makes it difficult to account for illiberal practices both within and outwith the continent. Whereas ethno-nationalism is usually perceived as a feature of postcolonial 'new' nations, we can also understand it to be a feature of Europe after (and through) empire. A 'connected sociologies' approach that recognizes Europe's constitution through colonialism would provide us with more adequate resources for dealing with the problems that currently face us.