793982

research-article2018
SREXXX10.1177/2332649218793982Sociology of Race and EthnicityGo

Feature Review

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

Postcolonial Possibilities for

2018, Vol. 4(4) 439­–451
© American Sociological Association 2018
DOI: 10.1177/2332649218793982
https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218793982

the Sociology of Race sre.sagepub.com

Julian Go1

Abstract
The author considers what postcolonial theory has to contribute to the sociology of race. Although there
are overlaps, postcolonial theory and the sociology of race are not reducible to each other. Postcolonial
theory emphasizes the global, historical, and therefore colonial dimensions of race relations, including
how imperialism has generated racial thought and racial stratification. A postcolonial sociology of race,
therefore, would (1) analytically recover empire and colonialism and their legacies, (2) excavate colonial
racialization and trace its continuities into the present, (3) reveal the reciprocal constitution of racialized
identities that began under empire, and (4) critique the imperial standpoint and seek out the subjugated
epistemologies of racialized subjects. Although such a postcolonial sociology of race is a project that has
yet to be fully realized, there are a number of existing sociological works that begin the journey and point
us in the right direction.

Keywords
colonialism, empire, postcolonial, theory, knowledge

In recent years, “postcolonial theory” has attracted
more attention in sociology. Some have even called
for a “postcolonial sociology” (Bhambra 2007; Go
2006, 2009, 2016). But what might postcolonial
theory have to contribute to sociological research
and theory on race specifically? Might there be
such a thing as a distinct “postcolonial” approach
to the study of race?1
The answer depends partly upon what postcolo-
nial theory actually means. There are many miscon-
ceptions. To be clear, the “post” in postcolonial
theory does not denote a historical period or moment
after colonialism, as if postcolonial theory implies
that colonialism is over. Quite the opposite: one
premise of postcolonial theory is that colonialism
and its correlates persist in various guises today.
Nor does postcolonial theory refer only to socio-
logical examinations of societies that have under-
gone colonialism. If anything, postcolonial theory
is about the former colonial metropoles and impe-
rial centers in Europe or North America as much as
it is about former colonies. It is about the Global
North as much as it is about the Global South, about
the so-called West as much as it is about the
so-called rest. Indeed, a key strand of postcolonial
theory questions such binaries altogether.
So what is postcolonial theory? In the first part
of this essay I address this question. In the rest
of the essay I then probe the possible relevance of
postcolonial theory for the sociological study of
race. My claim is that postcolonial theory runs
adjacent to and converges at some points with
existing lines of research and theory in the sociol-
ogy of race, but it is also distinct for its emphasis
upon the imperial, colonial, and therefore global-
historical context and structuration of present race
relations, racial stratification, and racialized sys-
tems of knowledge and power. A postcolonial soci-
ology of race, therefore, would (1) analytically
recover empire and colonialism and their legacies,
(2) excavate colonial racialization (including
1
Department of Sociology, Boston University, Boston,
MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Julian Go, Boston University, Department of Sociology,
96 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Email: juliango@bu.edu
440 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(4)
racialized systems of knowledge and power) and
trace its continuities into the present, (3) reveal the
reciprocal constitution of racialized identities that
began under empire, and (4) critique the imperial
standpoint and seek out the subjugated epistemolo-
gies of racialized subjects. As I will show, although
such a postcolonial sociology of race is a project
that has yet to be fully realized, there are a number
of existing sociological works that begin the jour-
ney and point us in the right direction.
Understanding the “Post”
in Postcolonial Theory
The scholarly work in North America that goes
under the sign postcolonial theory (i.e., “postcolo-
nial studies” or “postcolonial thought”) today most
typically refers to work in the academic humani-
ties.2 Postcolonial theory has been a major intel-
lectual trend in English departments, adjacent
disciplines, and political philosophy and history,
led by writers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak,
Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (and the
associated subaltern studies school of Indian histo-
riography), among others. A related version is the
“decolonial” approach to knowledge that has come
from critical philosophy and Latin American stud-
ies. An English variant is seen in the work of Stuart
Hall and Paul Gilroy.3 But these strands of postco-
lonial theory have an earlier incarnation: the anti-
colonial thought of writers such as Frantz Fanon
(1925–1961), Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Amilcar
Cabral (1924–1973), C.L.R. James (1901–1989),
and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) among others.
This was the “first wave” of postcolonial thought,
which then set the basis for the later “second wave”
of postcolonial theory in the humanities that
emerged in the North American academy.
Despite multiple differences between these two
waves of postcolonial theory, there are indeed
shared premises and common themes. One shared
premise is that empire, and related processes of
colonialism and imperialism, have been central to
the making of modern societies. After all, nearly
every society in the world today is either a former
colony of another society or a former imperial
power. And modernity itself is the product of impe-
rial relations. It is not only that the industrial wealth
of Anglo-European societies was made possible
through imperial expansion and accumulation over-
seas; it is also the case that other crucial aspects of
modernity—techniques of value extraction, labor
control, discipline, policing and surveillance, mod-
ern systems of sanitation, health and imprisonment,
and the very idea of the “modern” itself—were ini-
tially deployed and developed (if not invented) in
overseas colonies or through imperial relations.
This leads to the second underlying premise of
postcolonial theory: although most of the formal
empires had been dismantled by the 1960s and
1970s, the effects of colonialism and imperialism
persist. Global inequalities reflect the inequalities
first forged by colonialism: the countries that were
comparably the wealthiest 200 years ago are still at
the top, while those that were colonized remain at
the bottom. And within societies, inequalities
between different social groups often reflect, if not
originate in, the inequalities constructed in or exac-
erbated by colonial domination and neo-imperial
imposition; so too do political movements.
Indigenous peoples everywhere, for instance, still
struggle for rights. Finally, many modes of think-
ing and knowing that dominate contemporary
social life, including scientific knowledge, contain
the remnants of imperial and colonial thought.
Given these two premises, the word theory in
the phrase “postcolonial theory” can be mislead-
ing. Postcolonial theory, in fact, does not offer a
“theory” in the conventional sense. It is not a set of
ordered hypotheses about the social world or a
“singular logically integrated causal explanation”
(Calhoun 1995:5). Rather, to draw from Abend’s
(2008) definition of theory, it is more like a
“Weltanschauung, that is, an overall perspective
from which one sees and interprets the world.”
Specifically, postcolonial theory sees the world in
terms of empire, colonialism, and their legacies,
much in the same way that Marxist theory sees the
world in terms of capitalism, feminist theory in
terms of gender, or queer theory in terms of sexual-
ity. In sum, postcolonial theory is a way of looking
at the world that recognizes that social forms, rela-
tions, social knowledge, and culture generally are
embedded within and shaped by a history and
structure of global hierarchy and relations of power.
It is a way of thinking that recognizes that empire
and colonialism matter.4
Certain strands of Marxist thought, such as
world-systems theory (e.g., Wallerstein 2004) and
dependency theory (Frank 1967) have also empha-
sized the importance of geopolitical hierarchy and
empire, and postcolonial thinkers, from Du Bois to
C.L.R James to Césaire and Gayatri Spivak, were
heavily influenced by Marxist thought. Postcolonial
theory nonetheless stands apart, for its analyses of
colonialism are not solely about the economic
dimensions of colonialism. Postcolonial theory
rather illuminates the cultural and related
Go 441
dimensions of colonialism—from race, gender, or
sexuality to systems of knowledge and discursive
formations—that Marxist thought either occludes
or treats as epiphenomenal. Many of the innova-
tions of both the first and second waves emerge
from this interest. Although Fanon wrote of colo-
nialism’s economic exploitation, for example, he
also uniquely highlighted the role of colonial eth-
nographies and psychiatry in French colonialism,
the psychological impact of colonialism upon both
colonizer and colonized, and the racial hierarchies
that colonialism generated (Fanon [1952] 1967,
[1961] 1968). Edward Said (1993), in Culture and
Imperialism, argued that Marxist stories of imperi-
alism overlooked “the privileged role of culture in
the modern imperial experience” (p. 5). Said con-
tended that culture, in the form of epistemic struc-
tures representing the Orient and the Arab world
(as regressive, static, and singular), were not a
reflection of empire but its crucial underpinning.
Whereas Marxist thought dismissed colonial dis-
course and representations as irrelevant, postcolo-
nial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha (1994) probed
the “ambivalent” dimensions of colonial represen-
tations and how “hybridity” unsettled colonialist
discourse. As distinct from Marxist or other eco-
nomic approaches to empire, therefore, postcolo-
nial theory uniquely examines the discursive,
ideological, and broadly cultural processes of
empire; it examines how empire and colonialism
entailed meaning-making, identity formation, and
significatory work as well as logics of primitive
accumulation or direct political domination.
The crucial point is that postcolonial theory
takes aim at the entire culture of empire. This cul-
ture includes official colonial discourses as well as
novels or art forms wherein the imperial uncon-
scious is inscribed almost imperceptibly (Said
1993:xii). It also includes “knowledge” itself,
including social scientific knowledge. For related
to postcolonial theory’s premise that empire is con-
stitutive of modernity is its recognition that empire
is also constitutive of the ways we perceive and
understand the world. Postcolonial theory tells us
that the culture of empire penetrates deep, encom-
passing even seemingly objective forms of knowl-
edge. First-wave postcolonial writers such as Du
Bois and Amilcar Cabral were the first to pinpoint
this, long before Edward Said (or Foucault before
him) (Cabral 1974:58–59; Du Bois 1944). In
short, one of the colonial legacies that postcolonial
theory renders visible and critiques—and which it
takes as its object, distinct from the economic
sphere under scrutiny in Marxist analysis—is the
entire “episteme of empire”: the vast array of
knowledges, schemas, and meanings by which
empire was sustained and which in turn constitute
the associated viewpoint of imperial actors and
agents (Go 2016).
What exactly characterizes this imperial epis-
teme? As just noted, “Orientalist” modes of thought
or representations that aided imperial domination
are a part of it. But besides Orientalism and racial
stereotypes are other related epistemic practices
and operations. One is what Said called the “law of
division,” a form of binary thought that effaces the
role of the margins in constituting the core (i.e.,
overlooks the relationality of social objects, identi-
ties, and social processes). This is part of Orientalist
discourse, but its more specific effect is to con-
struct “an ‘us’ and a ‘them’” whereby each side is
presumably “settled, clear, unassailably self-
evident” (Said 1979:xxviii). The law of division,
Said (1993) lamented, “has become the hallmark of
imperialist cultures” and, more disturbingly, has
even penetrated the colonized’s consciousness too
(pp. xxviii, 36). When American Indian move-
ments lay claim to an essential “indigenous cul-
ture,” for instance, or when African nationalists
mobilize on the basis of a claimed indigenous or
racial identity, this is not a critique of imperialism’s
law of division but its very manifestation.
There are many other components of the impe-
rial episteme that postcolonial theory has exca-
vated (Go 2013a, 2016). Still, the point of critiquing
the imperial episteme is not to just denounce past
wrongs. Postcolonial theory examines colonial-
ism’s multifaceted character—its epistemic bases,
discursive operations, and cultural effects—“only
to the extent that [colonial] history has determined
the configurations and power structures of the pres-
ent” (Young 2001:4). Thus emerges postcolonial
theory’s overriding goal: to seek out if not produce
new and different sorts of knowledge to help decol-
onize consciousness. Postcolonial theory grapples
with colonialism’s legacies and seeks alternative
representations or knowledge that do not fall prey
to colonialist knowledge’s misrepresentations and
epistemic violence. Again, this is why it is labeled
postcolonial theory. It seeks to elaborate “theoreti-
cal structures that contest the previous dominant
western ways of seeing things” (Young 2003:4). It
seeks theories (knowledge), ways of representing
the world, and histories that critique rather than
authorize or sustain imperialistic ways of knowing.
Postcolonial theory thus seeks out, and offers up,
new kinds of knowledge that recognizes the cen-
trality of colonialism, that critiques Orientalism
442 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(4)
and other components of the imperial episteme,
and that challenges, unsettles, and even upends
entirely the imperial standpoint.
For a Postcolonial
Sociology of Race
What, then, does postcolonial theory mean for soci-
ological analyses and theories of race? In the big
picture, the implication is the same as it is for social
science generally: postcolonial theory invites soci-
ologists of race to produce a social science that
escapes the limitations of the imperial episteme and
helps advance the project of decolonizing conscious-
ness. But to be more specific, here I chart some of
the key coordinates of what a postcolonial sociology
of race would involve. To do so, I draw from first-
and second-wave postcolonial thinkers. I also refer
to more recent work in the sociology of race. This
recent work does not necessarily self-identify as
“postcolonial.” But it either implicitly adopts the
postcolonial approach or contingently converges
with the concerns of postcolonial thought.
Recovering Colonialism
One implication of postcolonial thought for the soci-
ology of race is that to better understand our racial-
ized present, we need to more clearly understand the
history of empire and colonialism. This is what many
postcolonial writers of both the first and second
waves did. They analyzed colonialism to see how
colonialism was central for, rather than an outcome
of, modernity. The problem is that much of main-
stream sociology fails to analyze colonialism and
barely acknowledges its existence, to the effect of
extricating colonialism from its accounts and theo-
ries entirely (Boatcâ and Costa 2010; Go 2016:78–
94). A postcolonial sociology of race would try to
remedy this by recognizing the importance of colo-
nial history in shaping present-day racialized sys-
tems. If standard sociological theory and research
occludes colonialism from its lenses, a postcolonial
sociology of race would put it front and center.
Some recent works by sociologists of race have
already begun to meet this analytic imperative.
Crystal Fleming’s (2017) exploration of commem-
orations of slavery in France is a fine example.
Fleming not only explores the history of slavery
within the French empire—which encompassed
Haiti, Martinique, and beyond—she also examines
how different groups within France make sense of
that history. She is particularly keen to uncover
“racial temporality”: the “historicization of race”
and “racializing history.” The former means situat-
ing present-day racial dynamics “within a histori-
cal framework.” The latter means “uncovering and
recovering the history of race within societies
shaped by the institutionalization of racial catego-
ries and the oppression of racialized others” (p. 42).
Racial temporality is thus a way of recognizing and
acknowledging the often overlooked history of
French empire and colonialism, a recognition,
Fleming avers, that is crucial for challenging racial
systems in the present (p. 182). “Suppressing—or
misrepresenting—racial and colonial history and
hiding behind color-blind ideology,” notes
Fleming, “help maintain the status quo” (p. 212).
Fleming thus urges us to “shed light on structural
racism in the past and the present” through an anal-
ysis of French colonial history (p. 212).
This emphasis upon colonialism and its legacies
align well with postcolonial theory’s emphasis
upon the multifarious logics and effects of colo-
nialism. In postcolonial theory, colonialism is seen
as central but it is not reduced to its economic
effects. Processes involving culture and, in this
case, racialization take center stage. At the same
time, Although a postcolonial approach to race
would not reduce colonialism to its economic
effects, neither would it reduce colonialism to indi-
viduals’ racism or racist attitudes. At stake are not
prejudicial views held by individuals but rather
larger systems of racial stratification constructed
through colonial relations. This was exactly
Fanon’s point about race relations under French
colonialism: colonialism inaugurated a system of
domination (Fanon [1961] 1968). A postcolonial
approach to race here finds resonance in Bonilla-
Silva’s (1997, 2015) “structural theory” of racism
that examines “racialized social systems” rather
than individual race prejudice. But it adds to this
structural theory an historical sensibility that ana-
lyzes the colonial production of present-day racial-
ized social systems. Such a sensibility, directly
informed by postcolonial theory, helps us more
clearly see how racial stratification today is not the
product of contemporary individual racist attitudes
but also of deeper historical structures wrought by
empire.
Existing sociological analyses of the U.S.
empire are other examples of this approach. Glenn
(2015), for example, suggests that by understand-
ing U.S. history in terms of “settler colonialism”
and by theorizing “settler colonialism as a struc-
ture,” we can more clearly see the different modes
of power that settler colonialism unleashed and that
the unequal relations generated through settler
Go 443
colonialism persist into the present. Such a study
“reveals the underlying systems of beliefs, prac-
tices, and institutional systems that undergird and
link the racialization and management of Native
Americans, blacks, Mexicans and other Latinos,
and Chinese and other Asian Americans” (Glenn
2016:69). Related work expands the frame to
remind us that the United States also had an over-
seas colonial empire, one that encompassed not just
Native Americans, blacks, Mexicans, Latinos, “and
Chinese and other Asian Americans” (Glenn
2016:69) but also colonial subjects in the
Philippines, Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico,
and elsewhere (Go 2008, 2011). Jung’s (2015)
insightful work on the U.S. “empire-state” is espe-
cially illustrative. Through an analysis of various
juridical codes managing slaves, immigrants, and
colonial subjects, Jung shows how Native
Americans, African Americans, Filipinos, Puerto
Ricans, Chamorros, Samoans, and others were
slotted into the lower rungs of America’s imperial
hierarchy. Notably, Jung’s recognition that empire
encompassed a diversity of racialized subjects was
something that the first wave of postcolonial think-
ers, not least Du Bois, shared. In discussing the
“color line,” Du Bois pointed out how Puerto
Ricans and Filipinos were also subjected to
America’s system of racialized domination along-
side African Americans (Du Bois 1908:835; Du
Bois and Fracchia 2006:282–83).5 Jung’s analysis
can thus be seen as a friendly advance upon
Blauner’s (1969) seminal conceptualization of
“internal colonialism,” which connected African
American subjugation in the United States with
colonialism overseas (though Blauner himself did
not go much deeper than noting the homology
between “internal” and “external” colonialism).
Colonial Racialization
Historicizing current race relations through a stron-
ger appreciation of colonial history not only helps
us transcend “race prejudice” reductionism and
racism’s presentism. It also helps us map the signi-
fying systems that give meaning to race by recover-
ing the colonial histories that generated those
systems in the first place. To take one example, it is
typically assumed that the racialization of Muslims
began in the United States in the wake of 9/11. But
as Cainkar and Selod (2018) pointed out, and as
Kumar (2012) among others show, such presentism
overlooks the long history of Orientalist discourse
that goes back centuries to the heyday of European
imperialism. One of Said’s (1979) interventions,
recall, was to show exactly how imperialism
depended upon such Orientalist images.
Postcolonial theory thus adopts a distinct
approach to race, one that is different than even
some other strands of thought in the sociology of
race that make “race” a central agent or causal force
rather than a constructed object and colonial effect.
Winant’s (2001) magisterial historical sociology of
race in modernity, The World Is a Ghetto, is an
example of the former. Winant claims that race has
been central to modernity, and he fruitfully explores
its articulation with social structures and economic
interests from early days of European imperialism.
This resonates with postcolonial theory’s approach
to colonialism. The difference is that, for postcolo-
nial theory, it is not race that has been central his-
torically; rather it is imperialism and colonial
domination that have been central. If anything,
colonial power made race central. Without recog-
nizing this, and instead treating race as the main
causal agent, we would be obliged to think of race
as preexisting the modern colonial relations initi-
ated by Europe’s conquest of the so-called new
world. Postcolonial theorists approach the matter
differently: it was only through the imperial encoun-
ter and systems of colonial power that race was
invented, constructed, and deployed as a tool of
power in the first place.6
That “race” was invented by and through colo-
nialism remains a key insight of the first wave of
postcolonial thinkers. Fanon ([1952] 1967), for
instance, notoriously rebuked the “biologistic”
assumptions of French racism—or as Fanon put it,
“epidermal” thinking—that dominated European
metropoles at the time by claiming that race and
racial hierarchy were constructed through “socio-
genesis.” The colonial relationship itself constructs
race: the colonized exist only in relation to colo-
nizer, and so blackness is constructed only in rela-
tion to whiteness (pp. 93, 110). Postcolonial
sociologies of race would thus pick up this theme
to further explore colonialism’s racial construc-
tions and their persistence into the present. Weiner
(2016), for example, shows how Dutch primary
school textbooks are similar to European primary
school textbooks generally: they represent Africa
and Africans in ways that originate in colonial dis-
courses. They portray Africans as primitive, sav-
age, or as passive objects of European benevolence
and Africa “as a site of absence, poverty, or eco-
nomic extraction,” images that “replicate the con-
tradictory message that justified centuries of
colonialism” (Weiner 2016:456). Similarly, White
(2018a, 2018b) shows how colonial stereotypes of
444 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(4)
colonized peoples shape health policies. Images of
black and other colonized bodies as carriers of
threatening diseases determined the British colo-
nial states’ policies meant to contain epidemics in
its overseas colonies, and these same images per-
sist implicitly in current approaches to epidemics
by the World Health Organization (White 2018a,
2018b). Meanwhile, Wolfe (2016) shows how set-
tler colonialism in North America, South Africa,
and Palestine entailed the image of the native as
uncivilized and unproductive and the white settler
as civilized and productive. This was a Lockean
notion of labor, land, and agency that justified
white conquest and dispossession: white settlers,
through their valiant labor and effort, cultivate,
civilize, and develop the land while natives leave it
dormant. A similar notion of white agency per-
tained to modern colonial expansion overseas in
Africa and Asia as well: white colonizers “civilize”
and “develop,” while the “lazy” natives passively
receive the benefits (Alatas 1977).
More work needs to be done in this regard, as
racialized constructions of difference that were first
forged under colonialism can still be found today.
For instance, the discourse of white agency persists
in contemporary claims that only white Anglo-
Saxons or Europeans are the ones responsible for
“developing” or “building” society. For this, immi-
grants, colonized peoples, and African Americans
should be grateful. In England, Labour MP David
Lammy received hate mail after criticizing the gov-
ernment for failing to protect Caribbean citizens in
the United Kingdom. “Be grateful that we have
taken you in as a black man and given you a life
here, as we have done for all those black people
who came to live here,” one piece of hate mail said.
“Be grateful man for the country that gave you a life
and stop knocking it” (Ferguson 2018). It is not sur-
prising that white nationalists in the United States
express the very same colonial views, arguing that
“they” (i.e., whites) are the ones who built and
developed America, so it is “their” country, not that
of Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, or
immigrants (Dentice 2011). These are among the
many instances of colonialism’s racial construc-
tions persisting into the present.
The Mutual Constitution of Colonizer-
colonized
Yet it is not only colonized peoples whose identi-
ties were constructed in and through colonial rela-
tions. Crucial to postcolonial theory is the notion
that the identity of the colonizers, and of
the imperial metropoles as well, are products of
colonialism and empire too. This idea of the colo-
nial constructedness of dominant racial and ethnic
identities is adjacent to, but distinct from, existing
historical studies on the formulation of white iden-
tity among the white working class in the United
States in the nineteenth century (Roediger 1992).
The postcolonial approach expands the scope of
such analyses to include the role of colonialism and
imperialism in constructing racial identities. Fanon,
for example, argued that the idea of whiteness itself
was constructed through the colonial relationship.
If blackness is the product of the colonizers’ own
fantasy, then so is whiteness (Fanon [1952]
1967:110). Said (1979) argued similarly that
Orientalism did not only produce the idea of “the
East” and “the Orient” and rather that notions of
“Europe” and the “West” were generated thereby
as well (p. 2–5).
Recent work in the sociology of race registers
similar claims (although more implicitly). Let us
return to Glenn’s (2015) “settler colonialism”
framework. Glenn argues that settler colonialism
not only created lasting systems of domination in
the United States; it also served to generate the
ideal of the patriarchal white man that remain with
us today. “What emerged out of the settler colonial
project,” Glenn contends, “was a racialized and
gendered national identity that normalized male
whiteness” (p. 58). Other scholars have pointed out
how ethnic-oriented national identities are also
generated through imperial and colonial relations.
Although some theorists of nationalism insist that
nations reflect primordial ethnic identities, Kumar
(2006) intimates that English ethnic nationalism
was constructed through its overseas imperial rela-
tions. If there is a core imperial ethnic group, “it is
from the empire that they get their sense of them-
selves, their identity” (p. 4). Tinsley (forthcoming)
takes the matter even further, arguing that the
founding idea of “civil” nationalism itself is a prod-
uct of colonial relations.
Still, a postcolonial approach to race would
look at more than just how the identity of the colo-
nizer is constituted. Postcolonial theorists reveal
how nearly all aspects of metropolitan culture have
been shaped through the colonial encounter.
Césaire ([1955] 2000) identified this as “the boo-
merang effect.” Colonization, he declared,
impacted the metropolitan countries as much as the
colonized countries: “colonial enterprise [and]
colonial conquest . . . inevitably tends to change him
who undertakes it” (p. 41). More recently,
Magubane (2004) shows how British colonialism
Go 445
generated racialized images of blackness in Africa
that in turn came back to England to shape various
aspects of English culture and thought. Images of
African blackness informed English middle-class
conceptions of the urban poor, social movements
for citizenship, and even the very conceptual dis-
tinction between the “economic” and the “politi-
cal” spheres that was emerging in British
intellectual circles at the time (Magubane 2004).
This sort of analysis thus offers a transcendence of
the imperial episteme’s “law of division” identified
by Said (1979) or “analytic bifurcation,” as I have
elsewhere called it (Go 2016). It reveals rather than
suppresses the mutual constitution of metropole
and colony, colonizer and colonized, or white and
brown/black/red that empire generated. In turn, this
is necessary for challenging dominant discourses
and ideologies associated with white supremacy
that insist that whites built metropolitan societies
alone and that the so-called inferior races need to
be grateful for what valiant colonizers have given
them. Revealing the co-constitution of colonizer
and colonized inscribes a type of agency on the part
of subaltern groups, showing how white coloniz-
ers’ identity, just as their wealth, has been depen-
dent upon racialized others. The former colonizers
need the formerly colonized as much as, if not
more than, the colonized need the colonizers.
Colonial Epistemes and Subjugated
Knowledge
A final theme for a postcolonial sociology of race is
sociological knowledge itself. Postcolonial writers
of the first and second waves critiqued all kinds of
knowledge, from psychiatry to social science to the
humanities, for supporting imperialism, justifying
racial difference, and embodying the imperial
standpoint. One strand of this critique targeted the
European Enlightenment, disclosing how philo-
sophical humanism lent imperialism an ideological
basis (Gandhi 1998:29; Go 2016:29–30). Another
strand highlighted how scientific knowledge,
including social science, was a tool of imperialists.
Edward Said’s (1979) Orientalism is the prime
example but not the only one. Du Bois’s critiques
of sociology and Amilcar Cabral’s charges against
anthropology and adjacent fields are similar. “The
practice of imperialist rule,” declared Cabral
(1974), “demanded (and still demands) a more or
less accurate knowledge of the society it rules. . . . In
fact, man has never shown as much interest in
knowing other men and other societies as during
this century of imperialist domination.” The core
“concepts of race, caste, ethnicity, tribe, nation,
culture, identity, dignity,” and so on, Cabral
(1974:58–59) contended, were all invented and
used by imperialists.
One underlying point of this postcolonial
approach is to show how even the seemingly most
“objective” forms of thought were tainted by the
imperial standpoint.
More recent work by sociologists inspired by
postcolonial thought have done the same. This
work shows how early sociology expressed the
imperial episteme’s view of global difference and
reproduced its “imperial gaze” (Connell 1997; Go
2013b). Related work shows how early social theo-
rists such as Weber, Marx, and Durkheim repro-
duced the assumptions and categories of empire
(Boatcâ 2013; Seidman 2013; Zimmerman 2006).
Some studies on the history of the sociology of race
can be seen as related to this work, revealing an
area of convergence between a postcolonial approach
to race and critical sociologies of race. The classic
work by Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1974)
on early American sociology and its racist elements
is an important example. Zuberi’s analysis of the
history of statistics is a more recent one, exposing
social statistics as a colonial project to explain and
justify racial stratification (Zuberi and Bonilla-
Silva 2008). Morris (2015) shows how the Chicago
School created racialized knowledge that reflected
colonial discourse. Jung (2009) unearths the ori-
gins and logic of “assimilation theory,” disclosing
how it reflected the imperial standpoint and thus
exhibits a palpable “racial unconscious” (Jung
2015). Other work on this sordid history of sociol-
ogy and race includes Steinberg (2007), Winant
(2007), and Hund and Lentin (2014).
Besides revealing the imperial unconscious of
social scientific knowledge, a postcolonial
approach to race also picks up three other related
themes. First, it more closely examines the various
connections between social science and colonial-
racial knowledge (Go 2013b; Guhin and Wyrtzen
2013; Magubane 2013; Steinmetz 2009). The con-
nections can be complex and multileveled and not
as simple a matter as the racial state employing
sociologists. It might also involve homologous
relations between social scientific knowledge and
the imperial episteme (Go 2016). Second, postco-
lonial approaches to race and knowledge trace out
the processes by which alternative knowledges
have been, and continue to be, occluded, marginal-
ized, or repressed. Morris’s (2015) landmark exam-
ination of Du Bois’s relationship to mainstream
sociology is the gold standard for other work that
446 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(4)
should continue this line of inquiry. Vitalis (2015)
offers another model, providing us with an original
analysis of how African American political scien-
tists of the “Howard School” were sidelined by
mainstream international relations theory (he also
explores how international relations itself origi-
nated as an imperial racial project) (see also
Magubane 2013).
Finally, a postcolonial approach to race
explores the actual alternative knowledge created
by racialized subjects whose ideas remain obscure
to most of us. This scholarly work uncovers sub-
jugated or repressed concepts, theories, and meth-
ods that we might use now to do sociology
differently, and better. Patricia Hill Collins’s
(2000) seminal work shows how black feminist
thought is exactly such a subjugated knowledge
that could be fruitfully recovered. Other scholar-
ship shows how “indigenous” knowledge of
Native Americans can be better appreciated
(Smith 2012). Meanwhile, new explorations of
Du Bois have discovered and elaborated upon
concepts, theories, and methods that his corpus
offers. Du Bois’s repertoire is deeper and wider
than we have hitherto imagined (Itzigsohn and
Brown 2015; Magubane 2016).
Still, a postcolonial approach to race and knowl-
edge would also look beyond the confines of North
America and head toward the Global South, where
local alternative knowledges have long been buried
underneath the weight of colonial domination.
Many of the early postcolonial thinkers—such as
Fanon, C.L.R. James, Césaire, and Cabral—were
themselves from colonized societies. But there are
other thinkers worth considering. This is what
Connell (2007) calls “southern theory”—social sci-
entific concepts, theories and approaches that
embed the experiences and concerns of subaltern
peoples around the world—rather than “northern
theory,” which embeds the experiences and con-
cerns of white metropoles. Such theory from the
Global South thus deserves pride of place along-
side black feminist thought or Native American
thought. It includes the diversity of work from
actual sociologists or scholars in the Global South.
These thinkers can be found everywhere, from
Latin America and the Caribbean to South Africa,
India, and the Philippines (Alatas 2006; Beigel
2013; Connell 2007; Goswami 2013; Hammer
2017; Keim et al. 2014; Kozlarek 2013). In this
way, the postcolonial sociology of race can rapidly
advance the larger postcolonial project of seeking
alternative knowledges that escape the debilitating
confines of the imperial episteme.
Conclusion: Looking
Ahead
The foregoing discussion has mapped just some of
the coordinates for a postcolonial sociology of
race. But how is such a postcolonial approach to
race any different from the sociology of race more
generally? Some might argue that sociologists of
race have long addressed the same themes that
postcolonial theorists have. The fact that Du Bois
was one of the founders of the postcolonial tradi-
tion is indicative of the possibility that postcolonial
theory and the sociology of race are just the same
project but under different names. So what is the
difference exactly, if there is one at all?
On the one hand, there is some truth to the claim
that postcolonial theory and some strands of socio-
logical studies of race are very similar. One similar-
ity lies in the fact that both bodies of thinking
critique biologistic approaches to racial difference
(or what Fanon referred to as “epidermal thinking”)
and instead point to the constructedness of “race”
itself. Another similarity, and relatedly, is that both
postcolonial theory and critical sociologies of race
examine the institutional and structural dimensions
of racial stratification. Neither of them reduce
racialized social systems to products of individual
race prejudice. Finally, both postcolonial theory and
some strands of sociological studies of race exam-
ine subjugated knowledges and the tragic and perni-
cious marginalization of ideas and individuals
identified as racially different and inferior.
On the other hand, one key difference is the
more global and historical approach of postcolo-
nial theory. Unlike many critical sociologies of
race, postcolonial theory places most of its weight
upon empire and colonialism as constitutive of
racialized systems and dynamics. Postcolonial the-
ory thus analytically embeds racialized structures
within a global-historical context. Although it rec-
ognizes and acknowledges the social constructed-
ness of race, postcolonial theory pays close
attention to the historical bases of those processes
within systems of colonial and neocolonial domi-
nation. Although it sees social relations, social
structures and institutions as determinant, it
expands the analytic scope to see those relations,
structures and institutions as imperial and hence
global, thereby overcoming the methodological
nationalism and U.S.-centric (or metropolitan-
centric) tendencies in some currents of existing
sociologies of race. And although it examines sub-
jugated knowledges and it takes seriously the fact
that those subjugated knowledges are global in
Go 447
scope, evident not just in the streets of Chicago or
Brixton but also in cities or marginalized areas of
the Global South, where racialized populations
have been long subjected to imperial and neo-
imperial formations.
It follows that postcolonial theory’s emphasis
upon empire and colonialism is necessary rather
than simply supplemental for a proper sociology of
race. First, we cannot understand present racialized
modalities of power and racial stratification with-
out understanding the social formations of empire
and colonialism that birthed them. The history of
racialized domination in the world is in no small
part the history of empire—and it is a history that is
about racialized knowledges as much as it is about
the formation of stratified systems. Recognizing
this history thus emphasizes, as noted earlier, that
“race” and racial stratification are products of colo-
nialism rather than just producers of it.
Second, acknowledging the importance of
empire and colonialism is crucial for overcoming
the tendency toward parochialism and methodolog-
ical nationalism in some sectors of race theory and
research. I am not speaking here of the lack of
cross-national comparisons of race relations. There
are plenty of those. The issue, rather, is about trans-
national and global systems of power and concom-
itant racialized hierarchies: systems and hierarchies
that traverse national boundaries and which con-
join the experiences of subordinated racialized
groups across those boundaries.7 Empire was
always a transnational and global process. It sent
slaves across colonial and national borders; it gen-
erated movements of migrant labor from India to
Fiji and down to South Africa; it racialized entire
continents of peoples and discursively thrust them
all into the same biological and dubious categories;
it deployed mechanisms of power that went from
colony to metropole and back again; and it invented
concepts such as “ethnicities” and “race” that colo-
nizers and formerly colonized actors alike continue
to deploy.8 Postcolonial theory emphasizes the
importance of empire and colonialism in shaping
modern race relations; and as the dynamics and
relations of empire always transcended the con-
fines of parochial national boundaries, so too
should our sociological analyses.
Future scholarship on race along postcolonial
lines should take these global-historical dimensions
of race relations more seriously. Specifically, follow-
ing from postcolonial theory’s emphasis upon empire
and colonialism, two interrelated projects could be
further advanced. One is to more clearly track the
transnational connectedness of and homologies
between systems of power and technologies of domi-
nation, many of which were first forged through
colonialism and persist, or which are today deployed
against minorities “at home” and neo-imperial sub-
jects “abroad.” For example, the militarization of
policing in the United States that was so evident at
the Ferguson protests and Standing Rock has always
had colonial and imperial dimensions. Militarized
policing in the United States began in the early twen-
tieth century as police forces remodeled themselves
around America’s colonial counterinsurgency regime
in the Philippines (Go 2017). The operations and tac-
tics of SWAT teams that developed in response to the
Watts riots in the 1960s were modeled after the same
operations and tactics used overseas in the Vietnam
War. Or consider, to take another example, systems
of power based on financial debt. Today in the United
States, financial debt has been used as a mechanism
to discipline and dispossess poor African Americans.
For countries in the Global South and colonized peo-
ples everywhere, however, such a mechanism of
power would look eerily familiar. Debt bondage was
used across the empires to secure the much needed
labor for colonial extraction in the postslavery con-
text. More recently, financial debt has been the mech-
anism of neo-imperial power by with the Global
North could coerce newly independent nations in the
wake of formal decolonization. Today, in colonies
such as Puerto Rico, it continues to be a mechanism
of discipline and dispossession, not just upon indi-
viduals but upon the entire society. The mechanisms,
modalities, tactics, and technologies of racialized
power not only originate in empire, they persist in
various forms today, affecting subaltern groups
around the world, not in just the American ghetto.
The second agenda is related: as we track trans-
national systems of power, we should also render
legible the possibilities and forms of transnational
alliances among the racialized groups subjected to
those systems. As empire subjected groups around
the world to racialized domination, and as it contin-
ues to do so today, it nonetheless creates the condi-
tions for new alliances, cross-colonial formations
of resistance, and politically cosmopolitan identi-
ties. In the early twentieth century, Du Bois was
keen to point out how the “color line” of American
empire aligned African Americans with Filipinos
and Puerto Ricans while himself forging cross-
colonial alliances (Du Bois 2005). Fanon, Césaire,
Cabral—all of these first-wave postcolonial think-
ers were looking to forge global connections in
their struggles. And their anticolonial allies, meet-
ing at the first pan-African congresses or Bandung,
did often join hands. In the United States in the
448 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(4)
1960s, the civil rights movement and the Black
Power movement were not only national move-
ments. They were part of a burgeoning global anti-
imperial movement, drawing inspiration from and
forging alliances with decolonization movements
in Asia and Africa.9 And today, Black Lives Matter
and other movements are increasingly willing to
look beyond their immediate environments, trace
the colonial legacies of their contemporary condi-
tion, and reach out to forge transnational connec-
tions with First Nations peoples, Palestinians, and
dominated groups everywhere. Perhaps a postco-
lonial sociology of race can contribute to our
understanding of these movements. And perhaps,
just perhaps, its critical global-historical analyses
might help inform and inspire these movements
further.
Acknowledgments
I thank the editors of SRE, Jose Itzigsohn, Moon-Kie
Jung, and Zine Magubane for helpful comments on ear-
lier versions of this essay. Sole responsibility lies with the
author.
Notes
1. In the United Kingdom, “postcolonial” sociology
is sometimes conflated with what North American
sociologists would simply call “the sociology of
race.” See Meer (2018).
2. For postcolonial sociology in the European context,
see Rodríguez, Boatcâ, and Costa (2010).
3. For the decolonial school see Quijano (2000),
Mignolo (2000), and de Sousa Santos (2014); for
a related review, see Bortoluci and Jansen (2013).
The work of Stuart Hall in the United Kingdom is
important, but I cannot address it sufficiently here.
Because of space constraints, therefore, in this arti-
cle I focus upon “postcolonial theory” as it is has
become known in North America, which means that
I will be referring to the body of writing and thought
that emerged in the academic humanities in North
America, beginning with Edward Said (1979), but
whose earlier incarnation was the “first wave” of
anticolonial thought.
4. I define empire, colonial, and related terms else-
where (Go 2011:5–12).
5. Other scholarship that takes colonial histories seri-
ously for studying race includes Baldoz (2006),
Small (2018), Fenelon (2016), Go (2004), Goh
(2008), and Steinman (2016). For an analysis of the
legacies of colonialism upon migration to Europe,
see Riley and Emigh (2002). This should be differ-
entiated from the historical sociology of colonial-
ism that does not always address race head-on (Go
2004; Steinmetz 2007, 2014).
6. Winant acknowledges that race is “both a cause and
effect” (p. 20). But the difference remains that post-
colonial theory would prioritize colonialism’s role
in generating race and racism, while Winant seems
to prioritize “race” (e.g., he insists that “race,” not
colonialism, has been central to modernity). Bates
(2018), among others, helps us challenge such reifi-
cations of race and elisions of empire.
7. Winant’s (2001) masterwork is among the few to
tackle racial issues on a global scale, but it often
slips into a more international and comparative
mode (comparing racialization between) different
nations rather than transnational and global (exam-
ining connections, forms, and relations across and
through nations). Other promising discussions
of race from a global perspective include Weiner
(2012) and Bonnett (2018). For a recent review of
related work, see Suzuki (2017).
8. In this sense, a postcolonial approach to race that
retains this global-historical focus might offer a
better understanding of the debate over whether
“race” or “ethnicity” is the proper analytic cat-
egory by historicizing both of those concepts and
revealing how they were constructed and deployed
by colonial states and imperial powers. For some
recent examples of this debate, see the articles by
and responses to Dunaway and Clelland (2017) and
Wimmer (2015).
9. The literature from historians is emergent on these
various cross-racial, cross-colonial movements. For
a recent discussion on American civil rights and
decolonization from the perspective of social move-
ment sociology, see Fleming and Morris (2015).
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Author Biography
Julian Go is a professor of sociology at Boston
University. His recent books include Postcolonial
Thought and Social Theory (Oxford) and Global
Historical Sociology (Cambridge), coedited with George
Lawson, and Fielding Transnationalism (John Wiley),
co-edited with Monika Krause.