Decolonizing Sociology: An Introduction

Abstract

Decolonizing Sociology is a welcome contribution to ongoing efforts to rethink the discipline and to develop new practices that incorporate voices that have been silenced and experiences that have been occluded by mainstream sociology. As the subtitle mentions, it is an introductory book to the decolonizing perspective. Its main audience are those sociologists unfamiliar with the perspective—in other words, the majority of sociologists. Those readers will find in this book a well-written and comprehensive picture of what this perspective entails. The book’s introduction explains in an accessible way how sociology as a discipline originated in and reproduces a colonial episteme. The minority of scholars in the discipline that know this perspective will find familiar arguments—arguments that were made by scholars such as Raewyn Connell, Julian Go, or Gurminder Bhambra. Yet, the way in which Ali Meghji threads together the different decolonial arguments and elaborates on his own decolonial sociology program makes this more than just an introductory book. It is also a contribution to further the decolonial conversation. At the center of the decolonial challenge to sociology is a critique of the Eurocentric standpoint. Meghji clarifies that this does not mean a wholesale critique of European thinkers but of the standpoint that their analyses take. The Eurocentric approach bifurcates the experiences of European countries and regions from the experiences of their colonial peripheries. This move occludes the fact that the histories of Europe—and the United States—are intrinsically linked to the histories of former colonial regions by relations of power (whether we look at economic, political, or cultural institutions). In occluding these historical relations, the Eurocentric perspective universalizes the European and North American histories and experiences and makes them both the normative lens through which the world is measured and the source of the criteria defining what is worth studying and knowing. In the first chapter, the book makes two important clarifications. First is that decolonial sociology is not just global, transnational, or comparative sociology. The challenge that decolonial sociology poses is not that of studying other places beyond the United States or Northern Europe, or doing international comparative work, or just adding authors from the global south to our syllabi. Decolonial sociology is about changing the perspective and the standpoint from which we look at the social world. The second clarification is that decolonial sociology is not a sociology of race or critical race theory. The decolonial perspective is different from critical race theory because it emphasizes the link of race and racism in the United States and the world to the global history of colonialism. Decolonial sociology centers colonialism, empire, and settler colonialism in its explanation of modernity, its structures, and institutions. The critique of racism and the analysis of racialized social orders are approached from the perspective of their embeddedness in colonial modernity. Decolonial sociology emphasizes the pervasiveness of coloniality—the social relations and forms of knowledge created by colonialism— beyond the historical duration of colonial empires. Meghji describes the decolonial perspective as a 1020210 SREXXX10.1177/23326492211020210Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review research-article2021