Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory Unthinking Modernity
This book addresses the ideological figure of modernity, its presumed historical significance as an era, and its theoretical adequacy as a frame. It shows how sociology and modernity evoke science to prevent the sociological imagination from elaborating n
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Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory
Gennaro Ascione
Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory Unthinking Modernity
Gennaro Ascione University of Naples l’Orientale Naples, Italy
ISBN 978-1-137-51685-5 ISBN 978-1-137-51686-2 DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51686-2
(eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016946672 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: “Ael, Tutt’egual song’e creature” (2015) by Jorit Agoch, Naples, Ponticelli. Photo by Michele Pesce. Thanks to Salvatore Velotti and INWARD Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
For Lucia
Preface and Acknowledgments
On the night of 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on a deserted beach near Rome. Pasolini devoted the final months of his life to drafting some pedagogical writings.1 His pedagogy aimed at unveiling the false promises of modernity that had fed the aspirations of the post-World War II Western European generations and the cultural conformism that the faith in the salvific potential of modernization was producing. As a rhetorical device, these writings were addressed to an imaginary interlocutor: a boy from Naples, Gennariello. From this imaginary boy, Pasolini wrote, he would have learned the secrets of questioning modernity, which the life-world of Neapolitans treasured. For Pasolini Naples represented, in Western Europe, what the urban ghettos of New York meant for the United States and what other places he had filmed in Yemen, Uganda, Tanzania and India were able to express for non-Western worlds. They were sites of passive poetical resistance to modernization, where the inability of modernity to come to
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