printThinking Against Empire:
Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory
Go J.
Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA jgo34@uchicago.edu
Romanovskiy N.V. (Translater)
Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Prof., Russian State University for Humanities, Deputy Head Editor “Sotsiologitcheskie Issledovaniya” journal, Chief Researcher, Institute of Sociology of Federal Сenter for Applied and Theoretical research, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia socis@isras.ru
Go J., Romanovskiy N.V. Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2024. No 1. P. 15-27
Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations – among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology. Keywords:
Alatas S.F. (2006) Alternative discourses in Asian social science: Responses to Eurocentrism. Sage Publications.
Alatas S.F., Sinha V. (2017) Sociological theory beyond the canon. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Amel M. (2021) Arab Marxism and national liberation. Brill.
An Ninh N. (2012) The ideal of Annamese youth. In: G.E. Dutton, J.S. Werner, J.K. Whitmore (eds). Sources of Vietnamese tradition. Columbia University Press: 382–389.
Barkawi T., Murray C., Zarakol A. (2021) The united nations of IR: Power, knowledge and empire in global IR. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association, April 6–9th.Bhambra G. (2007) Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan.
Bhambra G. (2014) Connected sociologies. Bloomsbury.
Bobo L. (2015) Bringing Du Bois back in: American sociology and the Morris enunciation. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. Vol. 12. No. 2: 461–467.
Borch C. (2012) The politics of crowds: An alternative history of sociology. Cambridge University Press.
Cabral A. (1979) Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings. Monthly Review Press.
Césaire A. (2010) Letter to Maurice Thorez. Social Text. Vol. 28. No. 2: 145–152 [1956].
Césaire S. (2012) The great camouflage: Writings of dissent (1941–1945). Wesleyan University Press.
Connell R. (2007) Southern theory. Polity Press.
Connell R.W. (1997) Why is classical theory classical? American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 102. No. 6: 1511–1557.
Coulthard G.S. (2014) Red skin, white masks. University of Minnesota Press.
DuBois W.E.B. (1897) Strivings of the Negro people. The Atlantic Monthly, 80 (August).
DuBois W.E.B. (1903) The souls of black folk. Essays and Sketches. McClurg.
DuBois W.E.B. (2005) The color line belts the world. In: Mullen B., Mullen C. (eds). W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia. University Press of Mississippi: 33–34.
Durkheim E. (1984) The division of labor in society. Free Press.
England L., Warner W.K. (2013) WEB Du Bois: Reform, will, and the veil. Social Forces. Vol. 91. No. 3: 955–973.
Fanon F. (1967) Black skin, white masks. Grove Press [1952].
Fanon F. (1968) The wretched of the earth. Grove Press [1961].
Fanon F. (2019) Alienation and freedom. Bloomsbury Academic.
Firmin A. (2000) The equality of the human races. Garland Publishing, Inc.
Fitzhugh G. (1854) Sociology for the South, or, the failure of free society.
Getachew A. (2019) Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton University Press.
Giddings F.H. (1898) The elements of sociology; a text-book for colleges and schools. The Macmillan Company.
Go J. (1999) Colonial reception and cultural reproduction: Filipino elite response to US colonial rule. The Journal of Historical Sociology. Vol. 12. No. 4: 337–368.
Go J. (2013a) Decolonizing Bourdieu: Colonial and postcolonial theory in Pierre Bourdieu’s early work. Sociological Theory. Vol. 31. No. 1: 49–73.
Go J. (2013b) Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism. European Journal of Social Theory. Vol. 16. No. 2: 208–225.
Go J. (2013c) Sociology’s imperial unconscious: The emergence of American sociology in the context of empire. In: G. Steinmetz (ed.), Sociology and empire. Duke University Press: 83–105.
Go J. (2016a) Global sociology, turning South: Perspectival realism and the southern standpoint. Sociologica: Italian Journal of Sociology. Vol. 10. No. 2: 42.
Go J. (2016b) Postcolonial thought and social theory. Oxford University Press.
Go J. (2020) Race, empire and epistemic exclusion: Or the structures of sociological thought. Sociological Theory. Vol. 38. No. 2: 79–100.
Go J., Watson J. (2019) Anticolonial nationalism: From imagined communities to colonial conflict. European Journal of Sociology. Vol. 60. No. 1: 31–68.
Goebel M. (2015) Anti-imperial metropolis. Cambridge University Press.
Holley J. (2021) Recovering the anticolonial roots of solidarity. SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 11.
Itzigsohn J., Brown K. (2015) Sociology and the theory of double consciousness. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. Vol. 12. No. 02: 231–248.
James C.L.R. (1989) The black Jacobins. Vintage [1963].
Jung M.-K. (2009) The racial unconcious of assimilation theory. Du Bois Review. Vol. 2: 375–395.
Kellogg L.C. (2015) Our democracy and the American Indian and other works. Syracuse University Press [1920].
Khaldun I. (2015) The Muqaddimah. Princeton University Press.
Krause M. (2021) Model cases. University of Chicago Press.
Latour B. (1993) We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.
Latour B. (2005) Reassembling the social. Cambridge University Press.
Mabini A. (1931) La Revolución Filipina (Con Otras Documentos de la época). Complicados y publicados bajo la dirrección de Teodoro M. Bureau of Printing.
Magubane Z. (2016) Following ‘the deeds of men’: Race, ‘the global,’ and international relations. In: J. Go, G. Lawson (eds), Global historical sociology. Cambridge University Press: 101–123.
Majul C.A. (1996) Mabini and the philippine revolution. University of the Philippines.
Marx K., Engels F. (1978) The Marx-Engels reader. W.W. Norton & Co.
Matera M. (2015) Black London: The imperial metropolis and decolonization in the twentieth century. University of California Press.
Mignolo W. (2011) The darker side of western modernity. Duke University Press.
Morris A. (2022) Alternative view of modernity: The subaltern speaks. American Sociological Review. Vol. 87. No. 1: 1–16.
Mukerjee R. (1926) Regional sociology. The Century Co.
Mukerjee R. (1930) Ecological contributions to sociology. The Sociological Review. Vol. 22. No. 4: 281–291.
Reed I.A. (2013) Theoretical labors necessary for a global sociology: Critique of Raewyn Connell’s southern theory. Political Power and Social Theory. Vol. 25: 157–171.
Small A.W. (1900) The scope of sociology. VI. Some incidents of association. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 6. No. 3: 324–380.
Small A.W. (1904) The subject-matter of sociology. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 10. No. 3: 281–298.
Sousa Santos B. de (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Paradigm Publishers.
Tarde G. (1898) Social laws: An outline of sociology. The Macmillan Co.
Wallerstein I. (1974) The modern world-system. Academic Press.
Wallerstein I. (2002) The itinerary of world-systems analysis; or, how to resist becoming a theory. In: Berger J., Zelditch M.Jr. (eds). New directions in contemporary sociological theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
Wolfe P. (2016) Traces of History: Elementary structures of race. Verso Books.