Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another `Missing' Revolution?

Abstract

Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is frequently understood as sociology"s special object with sociology itself a distinctively modern form of explanation.The period of sociology"s disciplinary formation was also the heyday of Keywords: feminism, identity, modernity, multiple modernities, postcolonialism, sociological theory ------------------------------------------------The "modern" idea of the social, as a number of commentators have argued, was delineated in the emergence of sociology itself and in relation to the combined upheavals of the political and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century (Nisbet, 2 1966;Hawthorn, 1976;Giddens, 1987;Heilbron, 1995). The new social theory that emerged was seen to correspond to these new social relations and the problems they brought forth. Modernity was framed as "the one great transformation in history" and sociology was seen as the attempt to understand how this transformation had begun and the means of intervening in terms of how it would be completed (Badham, 1984).Sociology, thus, became ineluctably tied to the categories of modernity in its selfunderstanding.These developments, however, were usually considered from a narrow, Eurocentric point of view where colonial and postcolonial encounters were written out of hegemonic accounts (Bhabha, 1994).1 As Seidman remarks in his discussion of Edward W. Said"s Orientalism, sociology"s emergence coincided with the high point of Western imperialism, and yet, "the dynamics of empire were not incorporated into the basic categories, models of explanation, and narratives of social development of the classical sociologists" (1996: 314). Outside the canonical "twin revolutions", then, the potential contribution of other events (and the experiences of non-Western "others") to the sociological paradigm has rarely been considered (see Calhoun, 1996;Chakrabarty 2000;Bhambra, 2007).The neglect of colonial relations is, perhaps, particularly surprising in the case of British sociology, given Britain"s past as an imperial power and the fact that the Sociology is also frequently represented as a discipline peculiarly associated with issues of order and integration, and with social movements calling that social order into question (Habermas, 1984). Initially, these were associated with problems of class, but in recent decades new social movements, such as feminism and the lesbian/ gay movement, have been particularly significant in sociological debates. However, scholars who have attempted to revise the discipline from the perspective of these new social movements have frequently come to believe that sociology is particularly (unusually, even, when compared to other disciplines) immune to influence.This, in essence, is the argument made by those proposing revolutions in thought -for example, "feminist" and "queer" -which are "missing" in sociology (Stacey and Thorne, 1985, 1996;Seidman, 1994;Stein and Plummer, 1994;Alway, 1995;Stacey, 2000;Stanley, 2000; Thistle, 2000...

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“¿De dónde eres realmente?” Apuntes sobre las ciencias sociales y la “crisis de la sociedad homogénea”

“…Si "nuestra ciencia, en la que nos encontramos y de la que estamos intentando salir, es fundamentalmente una reflexión sobre la sociedad secular-urbana-industrial-nacional" (Pérez-Agote, 1996: 11), lo fue dentro de un contexto histórico donde la sociedad y el Estado eran imperiales y coloniales bajo la hegemonía de Occidente (Bhambra, 2007b). El orden político imperial y la confianza en la supremacía blanca/occidental, ratificados en la Conferencia de Berlín de 1884-85 y puestos en causa durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, son fundamentales para comprender la investigación sociológica (Füredi, 1997;Steinmetz, 2013).…”

A Decolonial Imagination: Sociology, Anthropology and the Politics of Reality

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