The reception to and depth of the decolonial push varies from university to university. Most commonly programmes are opening out to consider marginalised voices and refitting their reading lists accordingly. As you might expect and as the most reflexive academic disciplines, the social sciences and humanities are in the vanguard of rethinking their relationship, if not complicity with coloniality and imperialism. As part of this ongoing effort, I attended a talk a few weeks ago by Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood about their soon-to-be-published book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. It marks a major intervention by going back to classical social theory and its firmly established triumvirate: Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and performing a decolonial reading of them.
John opened the discussion by noting how practically all sociology programmes feature courses on their work and other contemporaneous thinkers. The questions and problems they raised and the explanations they proffered are everywhere key touchstones read up on, transmitted, and used to structure the undergraduate experience. The problem is the concepts they formulated and the tradition they bequethed treat colonialism as an afterthought and therefore downgrade its centrality to the formation of European and North American modernity. If imperialism and colonialism were afforded their full import, hallowed concepts like the nation state, class, and (Habermasian) ideas of modernity as an "unfinished project" are shown up as partial to the point of offering distorted narratives.
Gurminder agreed. If the canonical thinkers haven't taken colonialism seriously, even though it was embedded in the politics of their day, then what have they done? The result is something more than simple distortion. It has led to fictional theories, hence our received understanding of concepts like development, class, national state, sociological reasononing, and the subject require rethinking.
By way of illustrating the problem, Gurminder turns back to Hobbes and Locke. Their celebrated argument posits nature as harsh and unforgiving, but it's our capacity as human beings that help overcome it. Implicitly, modern society is a yardstick for measuring distance from our species' brutish beginnings. How did colonial ideas feed into this conception? For millions, the relation to nature was enclosed by dispossession, enslavement, and early colonialism. This is a concept that could only be thought through in an imperial heartland by its beneficiaries. Then there is subjectivity and how it is defined inseparably with property. Because many of the societies encountered by explorers and colonial missions were without or indifferent to private property, these people were not subjects in the same sense that the colonisers were. They were less than human, and therefore had no knowledge or experiences worth reflecting on. On class and formally free labour, Marx's argument is posited on formally free labour, but his account does not stress how unfree labour in the colonies and United States developed alongside and was intertwined with the emergence of wage labour in England. And on sociological reasoning, its task isn't so much explaining the "downsides" of modernity but how it reflected colonial realities, and naturalised it by excluding it. Therefore, decolonising theory is an argument for transforming our perspective, of returning to and rebuilding these concepts as if the colonial experience mattered.
Responding to the discussion, Su-ming Khoo said Colonialism and Modern Social Theory was a challenging book and an invitation to a big piece of work. Rethinking and renewing our canon means acknowledging sociology's complicity with and responsibilities for our absences, and think about what it means to adopt this work. Perhaps the way to approach decolonial theory is how it challenges us to address difference that makes a difference to the original canon. This is not a time-wasting exercise for boosting careers and REFability but has practical outomes. It can help reimagine solidarity and bed down reflexivity in our practice.
For her part, Michaela Benson thought the arguments offered a way of engaging with colonialism, and that makes the enterprise uncomfortable and unsettling. The book is a close reading of the canon, and looking at how colonialism is absented and addressed invites us to ask about how do we reproduce this absence in our own work. Beyond teaching, it throws down a gauntlet to sociology. We should read the book in the context of broader public sociology turns, initiatives on how to reshape and open up the sociological imagination and moving toward a broader, decolonised global social theory. The book also buries methodological nationalism and using 'the national' as the privileged frame of analysis by looking at how these commonplaces were constructed in the first place.
Responding to points, John said the book could be read as breathing life into dead white men and making them interesting and significant again. It is a critique of a form of speaking not open to listening, which is traditionally the lot of Eurocentrism. We need a space of self-understanding to look outwards and remove asymmetries. Addressing Marx specifically, he suggests a key reason why Marx's revolutionary hopes for the workers did not come about was thanks to colonialism - though this was a mildly controversial point in subsequent discussion considering how Marx did acknowledge colonialism and imperialism, albeit often in ways inconsistent with his own method.
In all, there was plenty of food for thought here. As was noted in the discussion, recasting social theory by recovering its complicity with colonialism opens opportunities for new solidarities and new politics. Promoting a decolonial perspective means better scholarship, a critique of colonial and neocolonial policy, and can strengthen the push against these interests in academia and beyond. The context for this is important. UK universities are not institutionally innocent as they invest in and collaborate with latter day agents of coloniality. Israel's ongoing land seizures and ethnic cleansing, chummy relationships with US client regimes in the global south, its inputs into feeding Western-centric ideas of "international development", and the links and sponsorship deals with extractive industries and multi-nationals. The immediate task for decolonising theory isn't just a return to the classics but using the first tools unearthed by this project as an auto-critique of the academy.
Image Credit
0 Comments