The essay reviews three books that were published consecutively in the last three years, and argues that they represent an important shift in sociology that could potentially reconfigure the discipline and the discipline’s theoretical canon. This is because these books make the modern experience of European empires, colonialism, and, in many instances, incomplete decolonization central to sociology. They also question the discipline’s origin narratives and these narratives’ implications in colonial modernity. Thus, the books hold up a mirror reflecting back onto the discipline of sociology its own implication in European empires and colonization and demonstrate how sociology’s imperial episteme continues to shape the discipline today. This article reviews these books and focuses on how they engage in the double task of the deconstruction of sociology’s complicity in empire and the construction of a colonial critique-centered sociology. This is a sociology, the essay argues, which is invested in analyzing structural relations of power in view of the legacies of empire and colonialism. It is also one that asks questions relevant to contemporary realities for the purposes of effecting political change in the world.
This article builds on Indigenous and decolonial theorists’ and activists’ contention that European imperialism and colonialism are inseparable from modern knowledge production, and that the power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicated in the contemporary coloniality of the world. It examines the power relations inherent in imperialism and colonialism as they unfolded in the “before,” “during,” and “after” of a research project on Palestinian refugees that was conceptualized and initiated in the Anglo-Irish academy. It asks what kind of research can researchers, who are structurally positioned within the academies of the former/current imperialist powers and their allies, engage in while carrying out research in communities that are on the other end of the imperial and colonial equation. It concludes by discussing what the possibility of a decolonizing research practice in Palestinian refugee communities may begin to look like during the Palestinians’ settler-colonized and stateless present.
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The establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, and the forcible dispossession and destruction of the major part of Palestinian society from the conquered territories that this entailed, is today referred to as al-nakbah, the catastrophe, in Arabic. This article examines the nakbah as a concept that was first articulated and defined in a specific post-1948 Arab universe of discourse. It demonstrates how the notion of 1948-as-catastrophe was to be eventually eclipsed as a result of the defeat of the June War (1967) and how the nakbah's eventual reemergence in its contemporary Palestinian universe of discourse has led to meanings that we today associate with the (ongoing) Palestinian catastrophe. Although the notion of 1948-as-catastrophe is as old as the nakbah, the event as catastrophe and its atrocities only entered the English-language intellectual register in the 1990s as a result of Israeli “new” history and Palestinians' own attempts to revive memories of their pre-nakbah past. Through this discursive reading of the nakbah's six-decade-old shifting significations, this article therefore also explores the broader historical and sociological questions that revolve around power and knowledge when writing the history of the vanquished and the contemporary societies of the colonized.
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