Rethinking Postcolonial Sociology: Canons, Decolonization, and Close Reading

• In Event: 21055 - Decolonizing and Intersectionalizing the Canon

Abstract

This paper is centered around the project of rethinking postcolonial sociology as a method of close, contextualized reading. A reimagined postcolonial sociology can shed light on questions of sociology’s canon and intellectual “decolonization.”
The first part argues that postcolonial sociology, like postcolonial theory, should be a method of close reading and careful historical contextualization. While this methodology is interested in sociologists’ participation in colonialist ideologies, it is even more interested in the ways some scholars may brush up against, criticize, and transcend such ideologies. As for the idea of contextualization, I rely on the sociology of knowledge and field theory for understanding the various constraints sociologists face that are located at both macroscopic and disciplinary scales.
Part two illustrates the advantages of close reading through the example of Émile Durkheim, a frequent target of calls for decolonization. I demonstrate that Durkheim’s views of colonialism and empire were uncompromisingly critical. They were more critical than the views of his academic contemporaries, and resembled those of his friend, the socialist Jean Jaurès, France’s anti-colonial conscience at the time. Durkheim analyzed colonial and land empires as anomic and amoral formations. He rejected any hierarchy of religions, moralities, civilizations, and mentalities. He refused any use of “race” – a category guiding European colonial practices -- as an analytic category in sociology.
The conclusion argues that we should still read sociological classics, but for reasons other than those suggested by the quasi-religious ideas of “canons” and “Indexes.” Historic writers may provide new questions, methods, and insights. Revisiting past sociology may be part of a reflexive investigation of one’s own spontaneous analytic categories. The study of past science can illuminate the conditions for scientific flourishing or decay, and it may play a role in explaining the genesis of public policies and other social processes.

Author

• George Steinmetz, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor