This article critically evaluates whether sociologists in the ‘South’ are offered any creative breathing space by either the adoption of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought or the current indigenization drive of the African Renaissance initiative in South Africa. The article argues that neither does. It traces the impasse to which many of these currents lead, and the way they fail to overcome conventional sociology's derogation of intellectual work that does not take as its founding rules part of any canon. It then provides a suggestion for a way out, by moving away from a ‘culture of application’ and imitation and away from simplistic critiques or ‘deconstruction’ without substantive intellectual work to buttress such critical claims. Only then can an African Renaissance achieve its aims of creating a sociology that does not involve a dialectic of ‘self-abnegation’, one which says that what is ‘absent’ is what one's society does not possess of the ‘norm’; and that what has to be ‘negated’ is that which constitutes one's ‘alterity’ – be it indigenous norms, values or seemingly aberrant institutions.
This article explores what challenges African sociologists face in the contemporary period. It argues that one needs to go beyond references to resource constraint or the emphasis on the market or the state in order to fathom the deeper canonical and epistemological problems that keep work outside and distant from the sociological canon. Part of the challenge is that most coherent work on the continent occurred outside the confines of sociology as such. After exploring the snares involved, the article turns to the kind of work that animated sociological thought from indigenous and endogenous forms of knowledge, development and underdevelopment debates, violence and power and a growing emphasis on labour studies. It concludes in trying to consolidate the areas of consensus among African sociologists.
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