Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1368-8790 (Print) 1466-1888 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20

Postcolonial entanglements

Gurminder K Bhambra

To cite this article: Gurminder K Bhambra (2014) Postcolonial entanglements, Postcolonial

Studies, 17:4, 418-421, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2014.963926

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.963926

Published online: 04 Dec 2014.

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Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 4, 418421

Postcolonial entanglements
GURMINDER K BHAMBRA

George Steinmetz (ed)

Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline

Empire, imperialism, imperial ideologies colony, colonialism, colonial assump-

tions these themes, topics, descriptors, and concepts are used in the variety of
chapters that make up Sociology and Empire. Edited by George Steinmetz and
consisting of around 600 pages of analysis, research and argument, the volume
aims to address, to quote the subtitle, the imperial entanglements of a discipline.
While it certainly offers an impressive array of scholarly research on a number of
themes that could conceivably be understood to be a part of such a broad-ranging
undertaking, it does not offer a framework through which these contributions
might be able to speak to each other. This is, of course, a difficult task for an edited
volume, but it is one that needs to be taken up within the discipline, together with a
more adequate address of what could be called the subaltern constituencies of
empire. An issue that reverberates through all the essays in this review forum is
the differential positioning of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. In
my own reflections, I would like to start with a discussion of sociology and
anthropology and their particular relations to understandings of colonialism and
empire, before going on to address the specificity of postcolonial critique to
the same.
As sociologists have long argued, sociology is not just one discipline among
other social sciences; rather, it is seen to be central to the very organization of the
modern social sciences. It differentiates politics and economicsas disciplines of
the system and of the rational individualfrom itself, that is, sociology, as a
discipline concerned with the social and cultural.1 This division between
system and social, however, occurs alongside a more profound division and
one rarely discussed at length by sociologists. This is the division between
sociology and anthropology; or, in other words, between the social sciences
whose remit is the modern world, and anthropology, whose remit is the
traditional. Given that understanding the other is the very basis of anthropology
and that those others were very often colonized others, anthropology has not
been able to avoid direct reflection on the geopolitical circumstances of
colonialism and empire that made other societies objects of enquiry for
Europeans.2 Sociology, on the other hand, and the social sciences more generally,
have been able to develop their own disciplinary self-understandings separate
from any consideration of colonial and imperial entanglements. The historical
understanding of modernity which is seen to be the context for the emergence and

2014 Gurminder K Bhambra

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.963926
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development of the social sciences is generally articulated with little consideration

of colonialism and empirean omission that the contributions to Sociology and
Empire seek to address.
The historical dominance of Europe has, in large part, contributed to the
invisibility of the rest of the world within the social sciences. Europe and
modernity were seen to be one and the same thing, as modernity was understood
to be endogenous to Europe and as emerging out of processes seen to be internal
to it. The sociological understanding of modernity typically rests on ideas of the
modern emerging from the processes of economic and political revolution located
in Europe and constituting a capitalist industrial system, with the national society
as the boundary of the social community. Such an understanding conflates Europe
with modernity and renders the process of becoming modern, at least in the first
instance, one of endogenous European development. Alongside this argument is
the idea that the rest of the world was external to these world-historical processes
and that colonial connections and processes were insignificant to their develop-
ment. Colonized others, for example, were rendered invisible as part of the
system and were excluded from any claim on the social community seen to be
constituted by Western nation-states. This frame, or grand narrative, is Euro-
centric in character and it is this which often remains in place even when the
particular histories within it are contested. Not only have others not been
recognized as constitutive of the canonical twin revolutionsthe industrial and
the Frenchbut the potential contribution of other events (and the experiences of
non-Western others) to this paradigm has rarely been considered within the
discipline.3
Of course, the empirical reality of colonialism has not been denied outright in
sociology; instead, it is represented as something that is resolved over time
through processes of normal development. The societies that were addressed via
modernization theory, for example, were societies subject to colonial domination,
even if that domination and resistance to it was not a major feature of these
accounts. It was not until the global order created by colonialism visibly fractured
in the mid-twentieth century that these other societies came into (European
and north American) view in their own right. The beginnings of a decline of
Western European hegemony and the shift in the landscape of the global, from
being organized in colonial terms to being organized around (the desire for)
nation-states, necessitated developments within sociology in order to address the
limitations of post-classical accounts of modernity.4
Many of these developments sought to address the posited deficiencies through
pluralizing and multiplying narratives of modernity. Instead of there being only
one route to modernity, it was now accepted that there could be multiple routes
and a variety of manifestations of modernity. Nonetheless, European modernity
was still to be the originary form of modernity and the one model against which
all others were to be assessed. This kept in place the hierarchy of a specifically
European modernity against which others were to be judged. It did not, however,
question how sociology itself might need to be rethought to take into consideration
the posited challenges to its initial frameworks and paradigms. This work was
done more systematically by scholars directly involved in anticolonial struggles

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such as Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney.5 It was then taken up by those who
sought to use such perspectives to interrogate their disciplines more thoroughly;
such as theorists of dependency and underdevelopment, of indigenous and
autonomous sociology, to be followed by postcolonial and decolonial theorists
and a more recent shift to global sociology.6
Postcolonial critique, which emerged from the humanities and is only slowly
making its way into the social sciences, is not, I would suggest, following
Bhabha,7 about the establishment of separatist trajectories or parallel interpreta-
tions, but rather should be understood as a process of interruption and
reconfiguration of our shared stories and histories. In this way, postcolonial
and decolonial scholarship can be seen to be integral to the opening out and
questioning of the assumptions of dominant discourses and disciplines that are
also in question in Sociology and Empire. If, however, we now understand
dominant approaches as Eurocentric and in need of revision, it is primarily
because of new voices emerging in wider political arenas and in the academy
itself. The end of colonialism and empire as explicit political formations has given
rise to understandings of postcoloniality and, perhaps ironically, an increased
recognition of the role that colonialism and empire played in the formation of
modernity and the associated processes of knowledge production in the social
sciences. As such, the debate, as far as I am concerned, should be less about the
merits of either sociology or anthropology, and rather, more about how each needs
to be reconsidered in light of the connected histories that are the mutual
conditions of emergence of both.
While Sociology and Empire brings together a remarkable array of analyses and
arguments concerning a variety of historical periods and episodes, it needs to be
complemented with a generalized rethinking of the discipline (and disciplines).
Such a rethinking is necessary if we are to take seriously the claims made within
the various chapters. What, for example, are the consequences of thinking
colonialism and empire as entangled within the discipline? It cannot be for the
discipline to continue as usual with a few new case studies at its disposal. It must
be to radically reconfigure the discipline, to account for the narratives that were
missing in dominant ones, and to rewrite them on the basis of acknowledging our
shared histories and the inequalities with which they are associated.

Notes
1
Jurgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. For discussion, see
John Holmwood, Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory, Harlow:
Longman, 1996.
2
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformation: Anthropology and the Modern World, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
3
See Gurminder K Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007; Walter D Mignolo, Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of
Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality, Cultural Studies 21(2), 2007, pp 449514.
4
See Gurminder K Bhambra, Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014; Sujata Patel (ed),
The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions, London: Sage Publications, 2010.
5
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington (trans), New York: Grove Press, 1963; Walter
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-LOuverture Publication and Dar-es-Salaam:
Tanzania Publishing House, 1972.

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6
For discussion, see Bhambra, Connected Sociologies; Patel, The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological
Traditions.
7
Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Post-structuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value, in Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (eds),
Literary Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990; Anbal Quijano, Coloniality and Modernity/
Rationality, Cultural Studies 21(2), 2007, pp 168178.

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