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Rethinking Modernity Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination Second Edition Gurminder K. Bhambra Rethinking Modernity Gurminder K. Bhambra Rethinking Modernity Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination 2nd ed. 2023 Gurminder K. Bhambra University of Sussex Falmer, UK ISBN 978-3-031-21536-0 ISBN 978-3-031-21537-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21537-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland for my parents, Lakhbir S. and Joginder K. Bhambra, and my brother, Amritpal S. Bhambra Preface: From Rethinking Modernity to Reparatory Sociology At the time of writing (summer 2022), it has been fifteen years since the publication of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination and over twenty years since I first started working on the issues as part of my DPhil at the University of Sussex. Then, there was no postcolonial sociology and there were only a few attempts, mostly in anthropology, to bring the insights of a largely humanities-focused postcolonial theory into the social sciences. Although issues of colonialism and postcolonialism had been fairly widely discussed within the humanities—especially, in the West, following the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978—there had been little systematic discussion in the social sciences, including in sociology. Today, the situation, ostensibly, is quite different. While there is greater recognition of the continuing legacies of colonialism and empire within contemporary societies, the significance of colonialism to the structure of the social sciences remains a relatively neglected topic. So, too, does thinking through how we account for these histories in the present as part of a renewed sociological imagination. I first set out the urgency of these tasks in Rethinking Modernity and I have developed them further in my subsequent work. The core of my argument through all my work is to show how sociology’s conceptual frame- work depends upon an idea of modernity that elides colonialism. Further, I call for a reconceptualization of the concepts and categories that vii viii Preface: From Rethinking Modernity to Reparatory Sociology constitute the discipline through a systematic consideration of colonialism and empire. This I argue to be a necessary first step in the renewal of sociology and its application to pressing problems in the present. In this preface to the second edition of Rethinking Modernity, I trace the development of my understanding of these issues from rethinking one of the central framing devices of the discipline—modernity—to examining how that rethinking could enable us to reconstruct sociology and social theory differently. In a further development of the argument, I have most recently come to call for a ‘reparatory sociology’; that is, a sociology committed both to the repair of the social sciences and to the address of the global inequalities (implicitly) legitimated within standard social science. I I begin with a discussion of what, as a shorthand, can be called the ‘standard’ view. It was the focus of this, my first book, and it continues to be the dominant understanding of contemporary social science. According to the standard view, modernity, or more simply, the modern world, is taken as the central object of analysis of politics, economics, and sociology, with traditional society represented as the focus of the complemen- tary discipline of anthropology. This organizing distinction within the social sciences is based on an assumption of a modern world coming into being through the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution and their associated ideas of economic freedom and political liberty. These are seen to have marked a break between ‘the West and the rest’ (Hall, 1992) in terms of both their geographical location and their world historical significance. What I sought to do in Rethinking Modernity was to challenge this understanding by drawing attention to the colonial histories central to modernity but effaced from social scientific accounts. Specifically, I drew attention to two key deficiencies within the historical narratives used by sociology. First, that what were claimed to be endogenous processes deemed significant in understanding the key events of modernity had broader conditions of emergence and development. That is, that the Preface: From Rethinking Modernity to Reparatory Sociology ix Renaissance, and the Industrial and French revolutions were not constituted solely by processes internal to Europe, but also through global ones. Second, that other global processes, usually not addressed by sociology, were also significant constitutive aspects of the shift to modernity. These include, for example, the histories of appropriation, dispossession, extrac- tion, colonialism, enslavement, and indenture, as well as histories of resis- tance such as the Haitian Revolution and the first war of Indian independence, more commonly known as the Indian Mutiny. It is important to understand that the ‘freedoms’ that have come to be associated with the modern world, and are said to define it, were accom- panied by forms of domination that were not simply contingent occur- rences. Those forms of domination were integral to how the modern world was made and how its accompanying inequalities were reproduced. As such, the modern world is more appropriately understood as the colonial modern world. By acknowledging the colonialism that is constitutive of the modern world, we come to understand its significance also in cre- ating what are understood as traditional societies. The differences attrib- uted to the modern and the traditional were rarely about processes internal to those societies but came about as a consequence of the prac- tices of colonialism between them. In this way, we see that the standard conceptual division of the social sciences—between modern societies and traditional ones—is located in a broader frame of connections once we take colonialism seriously. While the standard view is organized in terms of the difference between the modern world and the rest, I argue for the need to rethink the social sciences on the basis of considering the processes—the connections— that brought about those differences. This has implications also for the concepts and categories associated with social science disciplines. For example, the standard division locates issues of class and gender as internal to modern societies, albeit only coming to be recognized as being of significance within subsequent iterations of disciplinary development such as in the 1960s and after (Bhambra, 2007). They are understood within a dynamic of modernity and are assigned to the novel structures internal to modern society, whether those associated with the employment contract or with the family-household and its relation to the public sphere of employment and politics. While race is also seen as internal to x Preface: From Rethinking Modernity to Reparatory Sociology modern societies during this period, it is understood as ‘newly’ internal. That is, it is primarily associated with the phenomenon of migration to European societies in relation to labour shortages in the aftermath of the second world war. As such, race comes to be associated with people iden- tified as being from ‘traditional’ societies who migrate to participate in the economic achievements of modern, ‘developed’ societies. In this way, race is not understood to be an integral part of the social structures of modernity, but rather as a later impingement upon them. Such an understanding can only hold, however, to the extent that the colonialism that is the wider frame for the division between modern and traditional societies is effaced. Let me give an example. Within scholar- ship on citizenship within France, it is commonly accepted that the idea of group identities—specifically, racialized identities—emerges in the context of post-war migration from the colonies to the metropole. This is deemed to be problematic in relation to the universal understandings of citizenship that are otherwise said to be the bedrock of French society, and which are now deemed to be under threat from an alleged separatism posed by such group identities (Rosanvallon, 2013). The idea of race as a cultural threat to the integrity of the nation relies on an understanding of the nation as constituted historically solely in terms of its white citizens. This, however, fails to acknowledge the long-standing debates from the time of the French Revolution about whether Black men could be understood as French citizens (see Bhambra, 2016). The failure to transcend racial categories (or their own group identity as white) that had white French citizens ultimately deny the claim for participation and representation being made by Black appellants in the French revolutionary period suggests that the idea of citizenship, in its dominant French articulation, was, and is, structured by race (see Geggus, 1989). The presentation of race as a later disruption into modern society belies the extent to which that modern society was constituted through the structural exclusions of others on the basis of such characteristics. The representation of race as ‘external’ to modern societies, then, means that it comes to be regarded differently from the categories of class and gender which are seen as inherently internal. Race is presented more as a matter of ‘culture’ than ‘structure’ and, as ‘culture’, it carries ‘difference’ as a threat. That is, it is associated with non-rational sentiments and Preface: From Rethinking Modernity to Reparatory Sociology xi solidarities that are seen to be at odds with the Enlightenment values that are otherwise believed to organize the social structures of modernity through processes of reflexive criticism. If we were to recognize the role of colonialism in the structuring of modern societies, then we would come to understand the ways in which race is also integral to its structures albeit elided in standard representations. It would also transform the ways in which we understand the categories of class and gender that are associated with modern societies and form the modern jurisdiction of sociology as a discipline. As such, colonialism cannot simply be added as a topic to the discipline of sociology. If, thus far, sociology has been estab- lished on the basis of an understanding of the world as modern that has not considered colonialism as part of the transformations associated with the modern, then taking this into account would require us to reconsider the very structure of the discipline and the adequacy of the current con- figuration of its concepts and categories. This is why calls to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum can never be straightforward. Decolonization primarily refers to the social, political, and economic processes that sought, systematically across the twentieth century, to dis- mantle the dominant modes of European colonial rule. Decolonizing has also been used, more recently, to challenge forms of knowledge produc- tion that have been associated with European colonialism and to think of futures beyond those shaped by colonial legacies. As such, calls to decolonize the curriculum are not simply about adding in other authors or top- ics. They suggest the need for attention to how colonialism has structured our knowledge claims and our very ability to know. The development of these arguments has contributed to broader debates around questions of decolonization within higher education more generally (see Bhambra et al., 2017). Here, I focus on issues of research and the curriculum specifically. Given that, as I suggest in Rethinking Modernity, colonialism is absent from the mainstream repertoire of sociological concepts that make up its central research programmes and its curricula, then the first thing that is needed is to put colonial histories in. This is because issues of inclusion and exclusion are not a matter of intersubjective relations, but of the nature of colonial modernity itself and its modes of representing itself and others. Arguments for a simple pluralization, or diversity of voices,