Abstract
Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.
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Notes
A simple google search of “postcolonial theory” and “syllabus” shows a huge number of literature courses. Alternatively, this author has only found two sociology courses in the U.S. devoted to postcolonial theory.
The American Sociological Association does not have data on best selling introductory textbooks. I used the best-selling lists from Amazon.com. The textbooks I consulted are Conley (2008), Henslin (2009), Macionis (2008), Schaeffer (2011), Ferris and Stein (2009), and for comparison Giddens et al. (2011).
Top five best sellers are from Amazon.com’s sales rankings. They are Calhoun et al. (2007), Ritzer (2009), Applerouth and Edles (2007), Allan (2010) and Johnson (2010). One exception (Applerouth and Edles 2007) includes E. Said and G. Spivak, but this is not a separate section on postcolonial theory; rather just a subsection of the section on “The Global Society,” which is about globalization and includes Wallerstein and Sklair (Applerouth and Edles 2007). I have found one book, Seidman and Alexander’s New Social Theory Reader (2008), that has a brief section on “postcoloniality.” But this is not a best-seller nor is it a standard textbook on sociological theory; its purpose is explicitly to cover niche areas of social theory such as “performativity” and “biopolitics.”
Calls for postcolonial sociologies have emerged in the European context (Bhambra 2007a; Boatcâ and Costa 2010). Other sociologies informed by postcolonial theory, such as “indigenized” or “Southern” sociologies that I discuss later, have been largely restricted to the non-North American context, finding most relevance, for instance, in journals such as Current Sociology and International Sociology rather than the dominant U.S. journals. As noted, the dominant U.S. journals in sociology have not paid serious attention topostcolonial theory, though one notable exception is the works by Connell (Connell 2006, 1997).
Early thinkers often thought of as originators of postcolonial theory, such as Fanon or C.L.R. James, had strong affiliations with the Marxist critique of colonial capitalism. The Subaltern Studies group of Indian historians containing the seeds of some strands of postcolonial theory were similarly working within Marxist problematics (in this case of the failure of class-consciousness to take root in India). Contemporary thinkers like Gayatri Spivak draws upon Gramsci and Marx’s analysis of capitalism. See Moore-Gilbert (1997, pp. 79–81) for more.
Seth (2009) draws upon postcolonial theory to criticize sociology on the grounds that it does not recognize how knowledge constitutes the social; that it fails to acknowledge that knowledge “can create, not merely describe” (p. 337). But this is a critique of traditional positivist sociology and does not recognize the multiple ways in which sociology has indeed problematized and theorized knowledge. Critical realism, for instance, is premised upon the idea that knowledge can both describe and constitute “the real” (see Steinmetz 1998).
It is the case, though, that Bourdieu’s early work discussed colonialism (Bourdieu 1961; Goodman and Silverstein 2009) and in fact, as recent scholarship shows, Bourdieu had a theory of colonialism worth recognizing (Go 2011b). It is in his reception and his later work on practice that colonialism gets overlooked. This still demonstrates the overarching point about sociology’s elision of colonialism. Other sociologists in the French context, not least George Balandier (1966), did theorize colonialism, but this was largely in the context of anthropology (Balandier was picking up the themes of his anthropologist adviser Michel Leirus) and never become canonized in North American sociology.
This applies to the tendency among some sociologists to reduce postcolonial theory’s contribution down to its analysis of representations of the colonized or to colonial discourse. As I have argued, postcolonial theory offers sociology much more than this. For an early critique of studies of “colonial discourse” in history, see Parry (1987).
Similarly, though scholars like W.E.B. DuBois wrote much about postcolonial themes, and while sociologists have begun to pay DuBois new attention, much of the new work remains focused on North America and it overlooks Dubois’s global focus, as Morris (2007) argues.
There is a parallel here with postcolonial approaches in literary studies, that is, the call for non-Western authors and texts that make up the study of non-Anglophone “Commonwealth” literature. On this count too Southern Theory is akin to feminist standpoint epistemology (Harding and Hintikka 2003) or Black Feminist Theory (Hill Collins 2000) that makes the concrete experiences of actors the starting point of inquiry.
Said noted that Fanon’s and Césaire’s work set the groundwork for this strategy (Said 2003).
Prakash accuses Latour of failing “to take into account empire’s constitutive role in the formation of the West,” but this does not mean that the conceptual apparatus of actor-network theory could not be useful for postcolonial studies (Prakash 1999, p. 12). Prakash here attacks the empirical account Latour offers but this is distinct from its theoretical potentiality. Kempel and Mawani (2009) and Bhambra (2007b) also highlight the potential of ANT for postcolonial studies though my deployment differs in its focus upon relationality.
Some have argued that import-substitution in England with tariffs against Indian calicoes explains mechanization (O'Brien et al. 1991), but this overlooks the wider network, which included the European and not just English markets.
Recent work on colonialism and imperialism has employed Bourdieu’s field concept also (e.g., Go 2008b; Steinmetz 2007, 2008). But whereas some of this work uses field theory to incorporate the agency of colonized peoples and relations between metropole and colony, others only use it to focus on colonizers themselves (e.g., the field of relations among colonial officials), thereby neglecting how colonized peoples should also be incorporated into the analysis as more than objects but as actors.
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Versions of this article have been presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association and the Social Science History Association. For comments on this article or parts of the argument, the author thanks Neil Gross, Rob Jansen, Raka Ray, Isaac Reed, the Editors of Theory & Society, and two anonymous reviewers.
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Go, J. For a postcolonial sociology. Theor Soc 42, 25–55 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9184-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9184-6