The sociological canon reconfigured: Empire,colonial critique,and contemporary sociology

I

What do books on the sociologist WEB Du Bois, a possible postcolonial sociology, and a sociological theoretical canon as seen from the Global South have in common? These three books, published consecutively in the last three years, represent an important shift in sociology that could potentially reconfigure the discipline and the discipline’s theoretical canon. They do this largely by making the modern experience of European empires, colonialism, and, in many instances, incomplete decolonization central to sociology. This is the common denominator uniting most people across the world in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, yet remains an undertheorized and understudied historical, social, and political reality in the discipline. As a result, these books challenge sociology’s founding narrative, redefine modernity – one of the discipline’s central concerns – by underscoring its inherently colonial nature, and contest sociology’s hegemonic Eurocentrism. Thus, they also move beyond the task of mere deconstruction, and lay the groundwork for what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat refer to as ‘colonial critique’ as a starting point of critical sociological research agendas and pedagogies.

A precursory look through oft-used Anglophone sociology textbooks demonstrates a marked origin narrative of the discipline. This narrative, common to sociology departments across higher education institutions in the Global North and South, begins with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This origin narrative is an inseparable part of yet another one, that of modernity itself. In the latter, European modernity is traced to internal European dynamics, unrelated to at least two centuries of the accumulation of surplus capital through the plundering of the resources of the Atlantic world, the extermination of indigenous communities in the Americas and the systematic transatlantic slave labor of enslaved Africans. These processes, as Southern American decolonial theorists have convincingly argued, were an inseparable part of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and thus colonial modernity. By centering empire and colonialism, the authors of these books therefore invite us to reconsider the imperial origins of sociology. In so doing, they also question the way in which the discipline’s analysis of modernity has disavowed what the sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues is modernity’s fundamentally colonial configuration of power relations, or its ‘coloniality.’

In addition, by questioning the discipline’s origin narratives and their implications in colonial modernity, the authors of the books hold up a mirror reflecting back onto the discipline of sociology its own implication in European empires and colonization. This is what the sociologist Julian Go refers to as sociology’s ‘imperial episteme.’ It is crucial to note, however, that these books are not only about historical sociology. They also demonstrate how sociology’s imperial episteme continues to shape the discipline today. For example, by discussing the fate of the Du Bois–Atlanta School, sociologist Aldon Morris convincingly demonstrates how the power to include and exclude ideas, and the canonization or total erasure of intellectual schools, is fundamentally tied to questions of political power, economic resources, and hegemonic ideologies in society. Likewise, in an attempt to bring postcolonial thought out of the humanities and in conversation with the social sciences, Go puts forward an analytic research agenda for a possible postcolonial sociology. On their part, sociologists Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha provide a practical solution in the form of a book that could mitigate some of hegemonic sociology’s shortcomings. Their book can be used by educators to provide a new generation of sociologists with tools to interrogate what is considered to be the classical canon through colonial critique, draw on Global South and women theorists, and critically consider questions that relate to empire and colonialism.

In what follows, I provide a brief summary of the three books, focusing on how they engage in the double task of the deconstruction of sociology’s complicity in empire and the construction of a colonial critique-centered sociology. This is a sociology that is invested in analyzing structural relations of power in view of the legacies of empire and colonialism. It is also one that asks questions relevant to contemporary realities for the purposes of effecting political change in the world.

II

Morris begins his The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology with a ‘well-kept secret’ that goes against the grain of hegemonic sociological disciplinary wisdom: ‘The first school of scientific sociology in the US was founded by a black professor located in a historically black university in the South’ (p. 1). With this mainstream sociological consensus-shattering statement, Morris displaces the Chicago School from the narrative of the discipline’s origins in the US and skillfully presents a counterhegemonic intellectual genealogy of North American sociology.

This genealogy begins at the end of the 19th century and centers on the Massachusetts-born sociologist and activist, WEB Du Bois (1863–1963). The first black sociologist, Du Bois also developed the first empirical school of US sociology at the historically black Atlanta University and in the heart of the city’s black community. Moreover, by arguing for and empirically proving the socially constructed nature of race, and by extension, the structural nature of racial inequality, Du Bois’s political convictions and scholarship challenged the majority of his white social scientist peers. These scientists and peers could not possibly follow the example of a black scholar and were part of the widespread consensus on the biological nature of race and racial inequality in a country founded on the slave labor of black Africans. In view of this, Du Bois scholarship was suppressed in direct proportion to the extent to which it was seen as posing a threat to white social scientists. These scientists were unwilling to revise their largely speculative ‘sociology,’ to hold up their biological and social Darwinist racial inequality claims to empirical scrutiny, and unable to disassociate from their own complicity in the racial privileges that sustained their own structural privileges and the ‘truths’ of their emergent discipline.

The structural racism and inequality of early 20th-century US society, Morris contends, obliterated Du Bois and his Atlanta School from historical and intellectual memory. It also reproduced this inequality in sociology through upholding claims to black inferiority. In the first chapter, Morris sets the historical, political, and social context that saw the rise of US sociology. Less than a generation after emancipation, Southern elites needed cheap labor to remain a ruling class whereas Northern capitalists needed cheap labor for the rapid industrialization underway in the North. US sociology therefore had to address the question of race, what came to be known as the so-called ‘Negro Problem,’ which manifested in different forms of racial segregation, white terrorism, and economic exploitation in the North and the South.

In Chapter 2, Morris maps Du Bois’s life, education, and intellectual project. He outlines the importance of Berlin, where Du Bois studied political science from 1892 to 1894, for his intellectual formation as an empirical sociologist and personal liberation from US racism. Morris also sets him apart from his US peers and mainstream academic wisdom, from which he was institutionally excluded. Thus, the two distinct aspects of Du Bois’s sociology manifested in his disdain for ‘car window sociology, [or] quick and superficial generalizations about complex social phenomena like the impressions one might gather by glancing at scenes through the window of a fast-moving automobile’ (p. 25). He was also, contrary to received wisdom on his classic studies of Philadelphia and Farmville’s urban and rural black communities, a progenitor of social constructionist approaches to race. Morris argues that Du Bois formulated a pioneering sociology of race in which he tied racial hierarchies to power, economic exploitation, and social prejudices.

Morris explores Du Bois’s time in Atlanta University, the subject of Chapter 3, where he was appointed in 1897 and would remain for 13 years. At Atlanta, he taught sociology, built a sociology department, and developed a sociological research laboratory. This laboratory produced studies on black communities and convened annual conferences that were open to all scholars and that attracted white scholars like Franz Boas. In addition to these pioneering landmark academic meetings, a first and second generation of black sociologists educated in the North were mentored by Du Bois as researchers in Atlanta. Their commitment to empirical sociological studies of black communities, novel theories, and research methods was premised on their shared belief in and dedication to racial liberation through sociology. Thus, Morris contends, ‘it is ironic that a small black university, without adequate funds and considered inferior by whites, introduced scientific sociology to the South under the leadership of a new type of sociological scholar’ (p. 97).

The resource-starved school would eventually be politically and financially smothered by one of Du Bois’s biggest ideological foes, Booker T. Washington. Washington, who was born a slave on a Southern plantation in 1856, is central to Morris’s counternarrative of the founding of US sociology. Washington went through industrial education after emancipation and became the principal of the Tuskegee Normal Institute for Industrial Education in Alabama in 1881. Washington valorized the acceptance of the Darwinist racial status quo, manual labor as best befitting blacks, and subservience to whites as the only possibility for black emancipation. Given these views, Washington was unsurprisingly embraced by white elites and given a platform that made him an important black leader and gatekeeper. Du Bois publicly took on Washington in his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He questioned whether Washington’s promotion of industrial education was an appropriate solution for black Americans. Contrary to Washington, Du Bois also advocated the black franchise and opposed racial segregation.

Washington’s political and ideological smear campaign against Du Bois was aided by Robert Park. Park is better known for his legacy as one of the founders and leading theoreticians of the Chicago School, where he would take up an appointment in 1914 despite his meager scholarly accomplishments compared to those of Du Bois. The lesser-known Park took up employment as the head of the Tuskegee Institute and as Washington’s ghostwriter in the midst of the battle that erupted between Du Bois and Washington in 1905. Morris explores this relationship and alliance at length in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 5, Morris compares and contrasts Du Bois’s empirical sociology on black communities to Park’s pseudo-sociology that portrayed and advocated the biological and cultural inferiority of black Americans through his race relations cycle theory. Thus, Morris argues that ‘there can be little doubt that social Darwinism, racism, and white male privilege had seeped deeply into Park’s “calm,” “detached,” and “objective” sociology’ (p. 125). In contrast, Du Bois was a pioneer of public sociology. He founded and organized associations and movements like the National Negro Academy, the Niagara movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and different Pan-African congresses in both the United States and Europe in the 1920s. Moreover, Park was aware of Du Bois’s scholarship and contrasting empirical approach yet avoided directly engaging him. Morris convincingly demonstrates that, despite the Chicago School’s systematic marginalization of Du Bois, the influence of Du Bois’s ideas in books like The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and concepts like ‘double consciousness,’ had a subterranean existence. They affected later seminal works in US sociology like the five-volume classic The Polish Peasant (1918–1920) and important early concepts like Park’s notion of the ‘marginal man’ respectively.

In contrast, the sociologist Max Weber, one of three European men considered to be the discipline’s founders in sociology’s origin narrative, embraced Du Bois’s scholarship despite being a continent away. He sought his academic acquaintance and published his research in his Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik alongside the research of the likes of Georg Simmel and Robert Michels. In Chapter 6, Morris documents this relationship, and demonstrates how, contrary to received wisdom, Weber did not mentor Du Bois during the latter’s time in Berlin. The two were contemporaries who were taught and mentored by the same scholars from the German historical school of economics and took part in the same intellectual activities during their overlapping time as students. However, they also shared important differences, especially on the question of race. Morris contends that Weber’s revision of his views on the so-called ‘Polish question’ in Germany was influenced by Du Bois. He argues that there was a marked shift in his thinking on the question in terms of the subjective and therefore constructed nature of culture insofar as race and ethnicity is concerned.

In Chapter 7, Morris draws on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the scientific field and its structural inequality to ask how Du Bois built a black sociological school that produced counterhegemonic scholarship in a historically black university at the dawn of the 20th century in the US. He introduces the notion of ‘liberation capital,’ or ‘capital used by oppressed and resource-starved scholars to initiate and sustain the research program of a nonhegemonic scientific school’ (p. 188). Moreover, although Du Bois and the first and second generation of black sociologists in Atlanta like Monroe Work, Richard R Wright, Jr, and George Edmund Haynes, and white women mentees like Mary Ovington were not part of an elite intellectual network, they were nevertheless part of what Morris terms an ‘insurgent intellectual network’ (p. 193). Insurgent intellectual networks are constructed by subaltern intellectuals who are excluded from hegemonic academic networks and structures because of political, economic, and social inequalities that structure the scientific field. These intellectuals drew on liberation capital to develop counterhegemonic ideas, train students, and create mediums through which to produce and disseminate scholarship and challenge dominant paradigms.

Du Bois was to eventually leave academe to join the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. In the final chapter, Morris examines one of the legacies of Du Bois’s insurgent network beyond the first generation. He argues that the Atlanta School did ultimately shape the sociology of race in the US. He examines in detail how Du Bois’s ideas and the liberation capital of his insurgent school helped shape the foundational and highly influential sociology of race study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

Central to The Scholar Denied are therefore the interrelated questions of power, racism, and history, on the one hand, and their relationship to institutional structures of knowledge production, scholarly commitments, and the insurgent and liberatory potential of activist sociology of the oppressed, on the other hand. The story of Du Bois and the Atlanta School continues to be instructive and relevant today for many reasons. First among these is that the work of Du Bois and the generation of scholars he influenced is indispensable to the sociology of race. Second, academic fields continue to reflect the structural inequalities of society, and the fate of the Du Bois–Atlanta School is therefore important for a critical sociology of knowledge that seeks to account for power in academe. Most important for the purposes of this essay, the Du Bois–Atlanta School provides for a possible Du Boisian sociology centered on colonial critique that questions, and goes beyond, hegemonic views of modernity. Morris in fact draws on Go’s argument for ‘postcolonial sociology,’ and argues that Du Bois’s scholarship was precisely based on ‘accounts [that] stood almost alone in analyzing the world from a perspective that did not privilege Western empires as directing the path of modernity. And that is why his scholarship remains relevant for contemporary social science’ (p. 223). Thus, Du Bois’s colonial critique was written from the heart and at the height of the age of empire. In Du Bois’s scholarship and political commitments, the color line clearly had global dimensions experienced differently by the racialized in the metropoles and the colonies.

III

So, what is the postcolonial sociology that Go advocates, and what would its research agenda look like? In Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Go attempts to bring postcolonial theory as developed in the humanities into a conversation with social theory as developed in the social sciences. This conversation, he argues, is necessary because the two theoretical traditions have developed in opposition to each other. Social theory, Go argues, was birthed in, of, and for empire, whereas postcolonial thought was born in opposition to it. The purpose of the book is to bring these two divergent schools of thought into conversation, and to make the case for a postcolonial sociology. What distinguishes postcolonial sociology is its attention to empire and colonialism and an analytic approach centered on postcolonial relationality, subaltern standpoint theory, and postcolonial perspectival realism. Go explores these at great length in his book.

In Chapter 1, Go maps what he periodizes as the ‘two-waves’ of postcolonial thought. The ‘first-wave’ is represented by 20th-century anti-colonial intellectuals and activists like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Du Bois. Go argues that their important theoretical interventions revolve around five common themes. First, they theorized colonialism from the point of view of the subjugated. Second, they approached colonialism as both social object and as a distinct constitutive social force. Third, they reconsidered European history through its entanglement with the history of its colonies. Fourth, they interrogated the imperial episteme of Enlightenment humanism and its claims to universalism. Finally, although indebted to Marxism, they critiqued Marxism’s disregard of the question of difference.

These anti-colonial activists and their ideas made their way to the university through what Go periodizes as ‘second-wave’ postcolonial thought. This took place through the works of scholars in the humanities who are today associated with inaugural contributions to postcolonial studies. These include Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and the scholars associated with the subaltern studies project. In his seminal Orientalism (1978), Said developed the first-wave theorists’ arguments through Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. He studied how European empires configured a knowledge structure conducive to the colonization of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire through an imperial episteme, and how this episteme ignored the reciprocal constitution of the colonizer and the colonized. In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha takes up and critiques Said’s approach. Bhabha draws on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and argues that colonial discourse is not homogeneous but ambivalent, and this ambivalence opens up spaces of possible resistance.

This emphasis on the agency of the colonized was developed further by the historians of colonial India who made up the subaltern studies project and who are also considered foundational to postcolonial studies. These scholars revisit different schools of Indian historiography and argue that extant histories have erased the colonized subaltern. They construct an alternative history from below that is inspired by, but critical of, Marxist approaches, basing it on localized categories that are aware of the particularities of colonialism. On her part, Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern studies interlocutor, furthers the first-wave’s critique of Enlightenment humanism and its claims to universalism through her Jacque Derrida-inspired deconstruction of the subaltern studies project. She argues that the question of the woman subaltern in colonial history demonstrates that the woman subaltern can never speak but is always made to speak.

Although driven by the same concerns, what sets the first- and second-wave apart, Go contends, is that the first-wave of scholars were writing during decolonization whereas the second-wave were writing in light of the lingering consequences of empires despite formal decolonization. In Chapter 2, Go reads the second-wave’s humanistic project’s emphasis on epistemic decolonization in terms of what it can provide social theory and its institutional manifestation as sociology. Postcolonial thought could be relevant to social theory as it offers a critique of the latter’s relationship to empire, with which it has at times been complicit. Likewise, it could also be relevant in terms of its corruption critique of social theory, demonstrating how social science’s claims to ‘science’ are an untenable will to power that masquerades under a will to knowledge.

Go cautions against allowing this postcolonial–postmodern critique of social theory to render sociology completely useless because the social sciences are not homogeneous. What is at stake for Go in terms of what sociology can learn from postcolonial studies is postcolonial theory’s productive critique of certain assumptions and analytic tendencies in social theory. Thus, the postcolonial critique is an invitation for sociology to reconsider its imperial and colonial standpoint in terms of its historical formation and analytic frameworks and assumptions; its persistent orientalism, Eurocentrism, and historicism; its occlusion of empire and resultant analytic bifurcation and repression of colonial agency; and, finally, its metrocentrism, or the viewpoint from the former and current empire’s metropoles that is ahistorically and apolitically universalized.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Go examines how certain analytic tendencies within sociology, like relationalism, feminist standpoint theory, and scientific perspectivism, could be fruitfully developed through a conversation with postcolonial theory. He argues that such a conversation can and should develop into a ‘third-wave’ of postcolonial thought based in the social sciences. Thus, the notion of relationalism in social theory, especially through Bourdieu’s social fields and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theories, can be mobilized through a postcolonial critique to overcome the occlusion of empire and colonized agency, analytic bifurcation, and orientalism. ‘Postcolonial relationalism,’ Go contends, attends ‘to the mutual constitution of the powerful and powerless, the metropole and the colony, the core and the postcolony, the Global North and Global South. It is relationalism taken to the geopolitical scene, scaled upward and outward to critically apprehend imperial interactions and their enduring legacies that have been for too long covered up by extant social science’ (p. 142).

Postcolonial relationalism, however, does not necessarily overcome the question of metrocentrism, or from where and how relational social theory claims are articulated. Go addresses this by bringing recent postcolonial trends in the social sciences – as represented through efforts to ‘indiginize, decolonize, autonomize,’ or advocate ‘Southern’ sociology by Syed Fari Alatas, Raewyn Connell, Gurminder Bhambra, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al., among others – into conversation with feminist standpoint theory. Addressing this trend’s critics, Go makes the case for a postcolonial sociology based on a ‘subaltern standpoint.’ A subaltern standpoint is one rooted ‘in geopolitics and global social hierarchy . . . [a] position, constituted historically within broader relations of power, which embeds the viewpoint of peripheral groups’ (p. 159). Thus, it is also a relational analytic approach, rather than identity, an effect of power relations that emphasizes epistemic difference. Such a standpoint must also be grounded in ‘perspectival realism’ so as to avoid lapsing into subjectivism and relativism, or the idea that truths are a convergence of the physical world as well as the knower’s social perspective. Such an approach allows sociology to provincialize categories, reconstruct and better understand social meanings and practices, and generate new theories and new objects of analysis. In conclusion, Go develops the notion of postcolonial perspectival realism as the basis of a postcolonial sociology grounded in postpositivism. Postcolonial perspectival realism is predicated on the complexity of the social world and the impossibility for single theories, concepts, or categories to explain events and social relations, processes, forms, and objects.

Go’s intervention in sociology, like that of Morris, ultimately rests on making visible the relationships between power and knowledge. Although the central question for Morris revolves around race and the color line, the central question for Go revolves around empire and colonialism. Moreover, unlike Morris, Go is invested in postcolonial studies as developed in the humanities, and in bringing this body of work into conversation with the social sciences for his envisioned third-wave postcolonial thought. Thus, his call for postcolonial sociology is a welcome and much-needed intervention in the social sciences, one that foregrounds the question of empire in the discipline’s formation and ongoing analytic categories and assumptions. However, one point of sympathetic contention with Go’s proposal is his collapsing of the distinction between the ideas of what are in fact anti-colonial activists, and a later generation of academic professionals in the university who read the ideas of the former as mediated in large part through French poststructuralism for the purposes of an academic postcolonial studies project in academe.

Thus, it seems that the challenge for postcolonial sociology is to disentangle the social theories of anti-colonial thinkers from their academic institutionalization through a particular theoretical orientation in the humanities. This could take place by revisiting these thinkers for the purposes of a sociology that asks and attempts to answer questions relevant to our present political moment. An insistence on ‘colonial’ rather than the ‘postcolonial’ critique would also always configure ongoing processes and relations of coloniality in the world. Go argues that ‘the word “postcolonial” does not connote that the legacies of colonialism are actually over . . . [nor] a historical reality after colonialism’ (p. 9). Rather, Go argues, the meaning of ‘postcolonial’ when appended to thought, theory, and studies refers to an epistemological orientation and relational position against and beyond colonialism. In view of this, a return to anti-colonial thinkers through a colonial critique-centered sociology is also about constructing a contemporary sociology whose questions are relevant for our political moment. This moment’s `problem-space’, as David Scott has argued, is different to that of both ‘first-wave’ and ‘second-wave’ postcolonial theorists. This sociology names ongoing experiences of colonialism, and one that is also invested in a politics beyond epistemology and the university.

IV

The interrelated interventions by Morris and Go have most recently been enriched and furthered by Alatas and Sinha’s Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon. Just as Morris references Go’s project for a postcolonial sociology and Go conjures Morris’s seminal sociological work on Du Bois, there are also references to Alatas’s attempts to further an autonomous sociology in Go’s book. Likewise, Alatas and Sinha include the early 20th-century Indian social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949) in their book. Sarkar is explored at length in one of the chapters in Postcolonial Sociology, edited by Go (2013). Thus, the three books are clearly part of a new and emergent conversation in sociology. They share the same premise of the relationship between power and knowledge, and the discipline’s historic and contemporary occlusion of the question of empire, colonialism, race, and, in the case of Alatas and Sinha, gender.

Contrary to the first two US-based authors, however, Alatas and Sinha are based in Singapore and have devised a sociology book to practically help educators mitigate the problems of what they argue is sociology’s persistent Eurocentrism and Androcentrism. Their book is not meant to discard Western sociological theory altogether. Rather, their main concern is how to interrogate the classical canon in a way that is relevant to students who live amid the continuing legacies of empire in the Global South. A second and interrelated concern is to provide students with a cross-section of theorists from the formerly colonized world who tackle the realities of colonization and decolonization in a way that is relevant to these students’ lives and histories. They also introduce women thinkers to the canon with the aim of rectifying yet another shortcoming in sociological theory.

Thus, Alatas and Sinha’s book is an attempt to redress the way in which sociology is taught in universities in Asia and Africa, which they argue largely follows the European and North American model. In so doing, and in contrast to Go, they make a distinction between social thought and social theory. For Alatas and Sinha, ‘social thought differs from social theory in the sense that it is less formal and less systematically expressed’ (p. 13). This distinction, however, unnecessarily creates an intellectual hierarchy that also structures the way social theorists and thinkers are discussed throughout the book.

Alatas and Sinha examine 10 different social theorists and social thinkers and draw on very different writing genres for their analysis. A common theme across these thinkers, they contend, is the question of freedom. This commonality, they argue, is testament to the universality of social theory. Rather than examining every theorist in their book, in what follows, I provide an overview of what I contend are Alatas and Sinha’s most important contributions. These revolve around their attempt to establish Ibn Khaldun as a progenitor of sociology with relevance to a contemporary Khaldunian sociology; to interrogate the classics against the context of empire and colonialism; to introduce women thinkers to the canon; and to incorporate anti-colonial activists and sociologists from the Global South into sociological theory.

Students of sociology often come across the Tunis-born scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in the inserts of sociology textbooks as a possible progenitor of modern sociology. His ideas are often briefly discussed before moving onto the classics. In contrast, Alatas draws on the Muqadimah (Prolegomenon), the first volume of Ibn Khaldun’s three-part study Kitab al-‘Ibar wa Diwan al-Mubtada’ wa al-Khabar fi Ayyam al-‘Arab wa al-‘Ajam wa al-Barbar (Book of Examples and the Collection of Origins of the History of the Arabs and Berbers), to provide a detailed exposition of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas and their relevance for a contemporary sociology. Alatas argues that in his book, Ibn Khaldun sought to understand the underlying causes of political change and the rise and fall of civilizations. The key to Ibn Khaldun’s endeavor was to understand the past and to treat it systematically in order to understand the structure of historical change. Given that such an approach to history was lacking in the extant literature of the time, Ibn Khaldun argued that his approach required a new science that would enable scholars to test a historical report for its probity. This is the science of human society, or sociology.

Ibn Khaldun expanded on this science in the Prolegomenon and examined the main factors that affect how human societies are organized, such as ‘modes of making a living or occupation, social cohesion, authority and the state, and the sciences and crafts’ (p. 20). He also elaborated a theory of the rise and decline of states that was fundamentally tied to different forms of social organization (e.g., pastoral-nomadic and sedentary). Alatas locates Ibn Khaldun’s method in the classical Islamic scientific tradition, which ‘inherited the tradition of the philosophers of Islam who learned and enhanced the Greek methods of argumentation’ (p. 23). Ibn Khaldun’s originality lay in furthering this method for the study of history and human society. In conclusion to the chapter, Alatas examines the marginalization of Ibn Khaldun, and argues that his ideas are relevant for a contemporary Khaldunian sociology that analyzes the modern state.

Alatas and Sinha also devote three chapters to the ideas of Karl Marx, Weber, and Emile Durkheim, the three European men considered to be the founders of sociology in the discipline’s origin narrative. Unlike other sociology books, however, they interrogate these men’s ideas from the perspective of those who came under European domination at the height of European empires, the era during which these men formulated their ideas and theories. Thus, whereas Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels believed that the uniqueness of European feudalism led to the development of capitalism, Alatas points to how they also argued that non-Europeans societies had intrinsic barriers against the organic development of capitalism. Marx argued that the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was a barrier to the development of capitalism outside of Europe. This is because this mode of production revolves around a centralized state that appropriates economic surplus, an absence of private property, and the concentration of agriculture and manufacturing within small self-sustaining communities. As a result, Marx viewed ‘the basic ingredient of historical progression, class struggle, missing and Asiatic societies, as a result, stagnant’ (p. 57). These societies instead gave way to what Marx argued is ‘Oriental despotism,’ a trait inherent to so-called ‘oriental’ societies and political formations. As a result, and in relation to the 19th-century Indian example, Marx argued that colonialism would destroy these Asiatic societies’ mode of production and lay the material foundations for the advent of capitalism on the road to socialism, and eventually, communism.

Following the same approach to the classics, Alatas lays out Weber’s main contributions to sociology and interrogates Weber’s orientalism. Although Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is considered a classic, the later Weber attempted to interrogate whether non-Christian religious traditions could give rise to capitalism in the same way as Puritanism. Alatas contends that much of Weber’s writings on Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Islam interpreted these heterogeneous belief systems textually. As a result, Weber essentialized them, imposed a Christian notion of ‘religion’ on different belief systems, and dehistoricized Islam and Muslim practices. Likewise, Sinha problematizes Durkheim’s understanding of religion in his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). She points to a body of work that has been critical of Durkheim’s definition of religion, his notion of ‘primitive religion’ that he derives from colonial ethnographies of aboriginal Australian communities, and his social evolutionism. In addition, Sinha argues that contrary to Marx, Durkheim was strikingly silent on the question of colonialism, despite its centrality to his concern with the question of modernity.

Alatas and Sinha also add three women thinkers to the canon. These include the English professional travel- and journalistic-writer Harriet Martineau (1802–1876); the English nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale (1820–1910); and the Indian social reformer Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922). Given the relationship between Martineau and social thinkers who are considered central to the founding of sociology, it is worth briefly sketching her main contributions. This is because the nature of her contributions demonstrate the extent to which Martineau has been erased from the discipline’s intellectual memory.

First, it was Martineau who translated Auguste Comte’s six-volume The Positive Philosophy into English in 1853. Second, her How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), written 60 years before Durkheim’s own Rules of Sociological Method, proposes a systematic process for the observation of society. Third, she tackled questions of political economy in her Illustrations of Political Economy, published between 1832 and 1834, and contributed to the question of women and education and women and labor in On Female Education (1822) and Household Education (1848), respectively. Finally, Martineau traveled extensively and wrote Society in America (1837). Sinha argues that this forgotten work has been compared in its comprehensiveness, multidimensional account and experience of American society to Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America (1835–1840).

Finally, Alatas and Sinha also introduce Global South thinkers and activists to the canon. These include the Filipino thinker, activist, and ophthalmologist, José Rizal (1861–1896), Sarkar (mentioned above), and the Kurdish theologian Said Nursi (1877–1960). Rizal stands out among these thinkers given the dearth of thinkers and activists from Southeast Asia in sociology. Alatas summarizes the principal contributions of Rizal as centering on three main questions: the conditions and nature of colonial society, colonial knowledge, and the meaning and prerequisites of freedom.

Rizal analyzed the complicity of the Catholic Church in the Spanish colonial bureaucracy’s exploitation of Filipinos, intentionally underdeveloping their society. He argued that the destruction of precolonial records obliterated memories of a flourishing Filipino precolonial past and also justified the colonization of the ‘backward,’ ‘indolent,’ and ‘lazy’ Filipinos by the Spanish. Such traits, contrary to colonial knowledge, were a direct result of colonial rule and served an important ideological function that justified colonialism. Alatas also discusses Rizal’s ideas on freedom and revolution, largely expressed in poetic prose. Although Rizal was to be executed for treason against Spain, Alatas notes that he was reluctant about the readiness of Filipino society for a successful revolution in terms of preparation, the ability of leaders to put aside personal interests and put up a united front for freedom.

In conclusion, Alatas and Sinha argue that they are not invested in making the case of yet another must-read sociology list. Rather, their aim is to add names to the existing canon in order to enable a cosmopolitan sociology. Although a welcome corrective to sociology classrooms, one of the weaknesses of their approach is found in their lack of justification of their choices of theorists. More importantly, however, their argument echoes a multicultural approach, and is in fact similar to Go’s argument for postcolonial perspectival realism and the multiplicity of maps through which to see the world. Yet such an approach does not tackle the difficult question of power, knowledge, and change in the world, even though the books examined foreground the centrality of the relationship between these. A colonial critique-centered sociology must attempt to broach this difficult question, and one way to do this is to move the conversation beyond academic sociology and to what sociology ought to do beyond the university. Thinkers like Du Bois, Fanon, and Rizal that inspire the books examined in this essay, after all, were not primarily invested in the multiplicity of knowledge systems that have been violently suppressed through colonialism, empires, and racism. Their main concern was how to overcome the racial caste system and colonialism. They therefore understood their truths to be indivisible and not perspectival, cosmopolitan, or multiple.

V

The three books examined in this essay are important contributions to sociology. They engage in the double task of deconstructing sociology and constructing a colonial critique-centered sociology. Through Du Bois and the example of his insurgent intellectual network, a colonial-critique approach allows us to see the global connections and implications of empire and colonialism, whether through the experiences of turn of the century black Americans in Atlanta or by Africans at the height of the scramble for Africa. Likewise, a third-wave of postcolonial thought based in the social sciences paves the way for the possibilities and potential of a colonial critique-centered sociology directly derived from 20th-century anti-colonial thinkers. Finally, expanding the sociological canon through colonial critique also allows for the centering of the Global South in the sociological canon. When read together, and in view of their shared concerns centering on the questions of power and knowledge, these three books also allow for the imagination of a sociology beyond the university. This is a sociology that – in the spirit of the Du Bois–Atlanta School – is invested in analyzing structural relations of power in view of the legacies of empire. It is also a sociology invested in asking questions relevant to these contemporary realities for the purposes of effecting political change in the world.