Abstract
This special issue addresses the growing concern with the Eurocentric nature of the sociological tradition (broadly understood) and its inadequacy in dealing with questions of power, race and coloniality. In pursuit of a global sociology, the special issue draws its contributors from a wide range of geographical locations and the articles address topics rarely considered within these debates, including, surprisingly, issues of gender. Broadly, they re-engage with standard debates from innovative theoretical positions and via new research from what are often regarded as peripheral locations. Together, the articles seek to contest the dominance of Europe and the US in the production of knowledge and transform the ways in which we understand sociology from a global perspective.
I
Recent years have witnessed a growing concern with the Eurocentric nature of the sociological tradition and its limited ability adequately to address issues of power, race and coloniality in the study of modernity. These lacunae have been identified in the growing movement coalescing around the theme of ‘global sociology’, with particular attention being paid to the politics of knowledge production. So far, the standard relationship between colonialism and modernity in social thought has been analysed and diverse sociological traditions outside the West have been identified (Bhambra, 2007; Magubane, 2013; Patel, 2010; Ray, 2013). This special issue supports these developments, and extends and deepens the pursuit of ‘global sociology’ by making two interrelated interventions.
First, the articles in this collection move beyond general critiques of the relationship between coloniality and modernity to implicate race and colonial rule in the development of specific academic fields and particular concepts that are of importance to sociology and the social sciences more generally. Second, the collection pushes substantive sociological investigations beyond the common sense boundaries of the West/non-West and colonizer/colonized to include the associated actors, relations and spaces. Through these developments, the collection suggests a deeper implication of power, race and coloniality in the constitution of modernity and the development of (global) sociology. This impels, in turn, greater urgency in developing a global sociology adequate to address these extended geographical, temporal and disciplinary horizons.
The International Sociological Association, both through its meetings and its journals, International Sociology and Current Sociology, has provided an important space for the articulation and wider dissemination of ideas of global sociology from scholars based in locations other than Europe and the US. The 1980s, for example, saw extensive debate on the possibilities for the ‘indigenization’ of the social sciences, centred on the arguments of Akinsola Akiwowo (1986, 1988, 1999), and the relationship between indigenization and the internationalization of sociology. This was followed in subsequent decades with discussion around the development of autonomous or alternative social science traditions. These arguments were put forward by scholars such as Syed Hussien Alatas (1974, 2006), Syed Farid Alatas (2006, 2010) and Vineeta Sinha (2003) and focused on the need to recognize multiple, globally diverse, origins of sociology. Scholars based in Western/Northern locations have also entered the fray arguing, as Michael Burawoy (2005) does, for a ‘provincialized’ social science, or, then, in Raewyn Connell’s (2007) words, for Southern theory.
The most recent examination of the possibilities for creating global sociology comes in the wake of the two conferences of the National Associations Committee of the International Sociological Association. The first was organized by Sujata Patel (2010) and resulted in the publication of the ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions. The second conference was titled, ‘Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology’, and was organized by Michael Burawoy, together with Mau-kuei Chang and Michelle Fei-yu Hsieh. The papers from this conference have been collected into a three-volume set under the same name (Burawoy et al., 2010).
Both conferences brought together sociologists from across the world in order to think through what creating a global sociology might entail. While the primary aim of the first conference was to address the diversity, and possibilities for unity, of sociological traditions globally, the second was more focused on the challenges in the way of creating ‘global sociology’. The collected articles for this special issue follow in the established footsteps of these earlier debates and discussions, and support the call for a global sociology. They seek to extend the arguments being made by focusing on the issues at stake in concrete theoretical and substantive case studies. In the process, they hope to contribute to the ongoing development of sociology such that the discipline can more adequately address the issues of a globalizing world.
II
The first article in this collection, by Ari Sitas, addresses the silence of African realities within standard sociological accounts of modernity. He suggests that the promise of sociology within Africa had been to move beyond both the colonial past and the colonial anthropology of the past and it was hoped that sociology would provide a more adequate analytical tool with which to address the postcolonial modernizations within the continent. Sitas points to the obstacles that have been in the way of the full flourishing of sociology in and of Africa, before discussing the key points of its success. These latter revolve around four key nodes of thought: the development of endogenous forms of knowledge; the work on underdevelopment and world systems focused on Africa; writings on decolonization, both material and epistemological, and political reconstruction; and, finally, the substantial body of work in the area of labour studies. While these areas were central to much sociological work within Africa, Sitas suggests that they were not necessarily priorities of sociological work outside Africa and it is this gap that he also focuses attention on. The following article, by Gurminder K Bhambra, examines the development of racially differentiated traditions within US sociology over the twentieth century and questions the continued exclusion of sociologists such as WEB Du Bois, E Franklin Frazier and others from the US sociological canon. She also examines the consequences of this exclusion for the way in which we understand sociological concepts contemporaneously; looking, in this instance, at understandings of emancipation and equality. Bhambra locates the history of US sociology within the broader history of enslavement, segregation and divided labour markets that have characterized the very different experiences of Black and White Americans. In this way, she brings the tools of postcolonial critique directly to bear on understanding the hegemonic form of sociology as expressed by US sociology and offering the possibility of a different way of understanding the modern, as well as a different way of understanding sociology.
Rhoda Reddock, in her article, assesses the relationship between intellectual scholarship within a specific area, here the focus is on radical Caribbean social thought, and what is seen as the ‘international’. Similarly to Sitas, she highlights internal intellectual discontinuities as being as much a part of the problem as the international hierarchies of knowledge production in the development of alternative traditions. Reddock explores early race thinking in the English-speaking Caribbean and seeks to locate it as a precursor of global intellectual traditions culminating in what we understand as critical race theory today. Through her attention to diasporic connections, both across the communities of the Caribbean, as well as across to the continent of Africa, she locates her analysis of radical Caribbean thought firmly within an understanding of global connections and histories. She concludes by arguing for global sociology today to engage with this early tradition and to further develop a critical global consciousness as a result. In turn, Ishita Banerjee-Dube examines the genealogies that inform understandings of caste and race within debates in South Asia and further afield. Drawing on the work of Ambedekar, Banerjee-Dube assesses his scepticism of the standard understanding of caste as race and looks also at the way in which this understanding has been used politically by Dalit activists in India and elsewhere. Any discussion of caste, she argues, has to be cognisant of the colonial context within which many of the debates were located and to be aware of how these debates were shaped by that context and continue to be so shaped. This is true, of course, not only of how we think about caste, but also other concepts and paradigms as well. By taking seriously the colonial disciplinary structures that (continue to) govern our ways of knowing in terms of debates on caste, Banerjee-Dube points also to the challenges that lie before us in the development of a global sociology more generally.
Pei-Chia Lan’s article presents a specific case study of global sociology in practice, that is, she uses the resources of global sociology to look at the way in which parenting discourses in postwar Taiwan have changed in relation to particular global and local conditions. She focuses on two periods of discursive transformation and uses the concept ‘glocal entanglement’ through which to examine the changes under discussion. In contrast to the standard modes of explanation, which either see all change as endogenous or then as a consequence of external factors, Lan looks at the complex interactions between the global and the local and the differential access to the global as significant aspects of any explanation. This complex understanding of the global as central to theorizing sociology itself, is followed up in Raewyn Connell’s article focusing on gender relations in the global South. She argues that while postcolonial feminists have been somewhat effective in their critique of the hegemony of Western feminism, the dominant understandings of gender within the international circuits of sociology are still usually drawn from feminists in the global North. To counter this, Connell looks at the work of a number of feminists from the global South and discusses the global import of their work and how it could contribute to the establishment of a genuinely global sociology of gender. From the global sociology of gender, Zine Magubane turns to examine the critical histories underpinning a possible global sociology of race. Her article focuses on the relationship of Robert Park to Booker T Washington and examines the consequences of this for the future development of sociology in the US. In particular, she addresses its long-standing failure to adequately address its own colonial and imperial histories as part of the context for the emergence and shape of the discipline.
The collection of articles ends with Walter Mignolo’s discussion of the place of the social sciences within the global hegemony of the US over the twentieth century and the move to a multi-centric world in the twenty-first. He contests the dominance of European knowledge by focusing on two authors from the global South who call for the de-linking of the former Third World from the former First World, at the same time questioning the labels that continue to be imposed. The political and economic shifts in global power, Mignolo argues, are also having an impact on the epistemologies underpinning the social sciences and it is this trajectory that he is outlining here. Eurocentrism, as he writes, is not a geographic issue, but an epistemic one. And it is one that the articles gathered together here tackle head on, both individually and collectively.
We are at a crucial juncture in global politics, confronting issues of justice and sustainability. It is important that these issues are addressed in a dialogue that embraces multiple voices, including those of sociology itself. However, if sociology is to answer the call to be part of this dialogue it needs urgently to address its own knowledge claims in light of the hierarchies and exclusions that they may contain. It is only by acknowledging the significance of the ‘colonial global’ in the constitution of sociology, as I have argued elsewhere, that it is possible to understand and address the necessarily postcolonial (and decolonial) presents of ‘global sociology’ (Bhambra, 2013). This task is enjoined in Sujata Patel’s Afterword and her call for a responsive and responsible global sociology. Her afterword and this special issue are contributions to this endeavour.