Eurocentrism: Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

Through the 1980s and 1990s, numerous ‘special issues’ on postcolonial theory and politics were published in the journals; but not in the sociology journals, where only a very few individual articles on these themes appeared (Mouzelis 1997, Parker 1997). Meanwhile, popular textbooks on the sociological classics (Hughes et al. 1995, Craib 1997) barely touched on the questions that Seidman and Lemert were raising about Eurocentrism in the founding fathers. And until the late 1990s, otherwise up-to-speed reviews of modern sociological theory (Maynard 1989, Craib 1992, May 1996, Ritzer 1996, Layder 1997) were devoid of mention of the postcolonial issues that seemed so pressing elsewhere. Throughout this period, cultural studies once again raced ahead of sociology as the discourse of contemporary existence, by fully taking on board those theorists of postcolonialism that were conducting explicit ‘disruptions’ of Western modernity and its disciplinary discourses.