For a postcolonial sociology
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For a postcolonial sociology Julian Go
# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution. Keywords Eurocentrism . Historical sociology . Relationalism . Actor-network . Field theory In 1995, Russell Jacoby wrote that the term “postcolonial” had become “the latest catchall term to dazzle the academic mind” (Jacoby 1995). No doubt, “postcolonial theory” (aka “postcolonial studies”) has been a major intellectual trend in the humanities in the United States. Driven by theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha (just to name a few early proponents), postcolonial theory since the late 1980s has “taken its place with theories such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and feminism as a major critical discourse in the humanities” (Gandhi 1998: viii). The same could be said for its influence in adjacent disciplines like history or anthropology (e.g., Loomba et al. 2006). Not so for sociology. On the one hand, postcolonial theory has recently had some influence on sociology in Europe and elsewhere in the world (e.g., Bhambra 2007a; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al. 2010; Kempel and Mawani 2009). And postcolonial J. Go (*) Department of Sociology, Boston University, 96 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Theor Soc
themes have recently surfaced in the form of “indigenous” or “Southern” sociologies (Akiwowo 1986; Alatas 2006a; Connell 2007; Keim 2011; Patel 2010), in new interest in thinkers such as W.E.B. DuBois (e.g., Morris 2007), and in new historical sociologies of empire and colonialism (Go 2009, 2011a). But North American sociology has yet to engage directly the sort of postcolonial theory that has had such a profound influence in humanities. For example, Homi Bhabha, one of the more popular postcolonial theorists in the humanities, is referred to at least 50 times in the main humanities journal The Modern Language Review (from 1
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