Colonialism and Its Knowledges

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Colonialism and Its Knowledges
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_68-1
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Colonialism and Its Knowledges
Sujata Patel
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Part I: The Indigenous Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Part II: The Postcolonial and the Decolonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Postcolonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Coloniality/Decoloniality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Abstract
This chapter offers a comparative historical analysis of three trends – the indig-
enous, the postcolonial, and decolonial – which have confronted the nineteenth
century Western disciplinary field of sociology as a hegemonic field organized
through the colonial grid. It maps the ontological-epistemic stances that these
positions articulate to legitimize non-Western pathways to political modernity. It
argues that distinct political contexts have organized the scholarship and research
queries of these subaltern/non-hegemonic perspectives and analyzes these in
terms of the two forms of colonialism: settler vs. non-settler colonialism. While
highlighting some internal critiques that have informed these positions, it argues
that these circuits of knowledge-making have created cognitive geographies
which need to be taken into account to ensure non-hegemonic global social
theory.
The author acknowledges the contributions of the following: Fran Collyer for suggesting the title,
Joao Maia for long conversations on this theme and Raewyn Connell for detailed comments.
S. Patel (*)
Umea University, Umea, Sweden
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 1
D. McCallum ed., The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_68-1
2 S. Patel
Keywords
Indigenous sociologies · Postcolonialism · Decoloniality · Power/Knowledge
Introduction
The past as a mirror to the present is an oft repeated phrase that explores what
occurred earlier to grasp the contemporaneous. This statement is particularly appo-
site in examining the current sociological imagination which abounds with perspec-
tives like the postcolonial, the decolonial, Eurocentrism, colonial modernity,
Southern theory, and indigenous theories, together with concepts such as the captive
mind, coloniality, colonial difference, extraversion, and subalternity. The past, in this
case, is that of colonialism: a grid through which the politics of knowledge con-
struction has been and is being debated today. It argues that postcolonial/decolonial
is not one perspective – it includes many viewpoints and advocates differing
conceptual frameworks on the politics of knowledge production. These have
emerged to articulate divergent positions consequent to the impact of colonialism
on these regions and have generated a wide range of knowledge projects on which
noncolonial social sciences build. These conceptual frameworks can be broadly
divided between those that have emerged in context with non-settler colonialism
and settler colonialism (Patel 2021). This chapter limits its discussions to the
scholarship of select scholars whose works are available in English language, thus
linking this scholarship to their regions’ historical and intellectual locations.
This chapter argues that the postcolonial/decolonial (used here as a generic
concept) critically dissects dominant/hegemonic academic knowledge produced
since the late nineteenth century in Europe through its university system and
which have since defined the discipline of sociology (Heilbron 1995; Wallerstein
et al. 1996). It also contends that these perspectives contain two organically inter-
related parts: first, a methodology to study the “social” based on an ontological-
epistemic viewpoint and second, a theory to assess alternate pathways toward
modernities based on this ontology. While recognizing that the impact of the various
postcolonial/decolonial perspectives has impacted the world in various ways, this
chapter is limited to an assessment of three knowledge positions: the indigenous, the
postcolonial (knowledge positions in non-settler colonialism) and the decolonial
(knowledge position in settler colonialism). It makes an historical-comparative
assessment of these three positions, which have been unevenly consolidated in
cognitive geographical circuits and created territories and borders of debate and
deliberation. The chapter suggests that initially, knowledge circuits originated in the
early to mid-twentieth century within some Asian, African and Latin American
nation-states post-Bandung (Nash 2003), and traces its travel from there to North
America in the late twentieth century as postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. It
also argues that contemporary globalization has not completely broken these cogni-
tive circuits and hence the necessity of “learning from each other” (Connell 2010).
Colonialism and Its Knowledges 3
For each of the above-mentioned perspectives, this chapter traces existing schol-
arship on the following three questions: first, what theories in the field of sociology
of knowledge/epistemology have scholars utilized to critique Western colonial
assumptions? Second, what practices of knowledge-making – theories, methodolo-
gies, methods – have been extracted, utilized and re-designed to produce a socio-
logical/social scientific analysis of their regions? Third, what has been the nature of
the internal critiques subsequently generated?
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part explores how the decoloni-
zation process of the mid-twentieth century in some nation-states of Asia and Africa
charted out models to create alternate paths toward modernity. This section analyzes
the emergence of proto theories on the politics of knowledge production. It traces
how sociologists and anthropologists explored the ontological-epistemic by extra-
cting from the culturist/philosophical ideas within the region/nation state in order to
constitute the “social”. Known as the indigenous/indigeneity perspective, this offers
an analysis the scholarship of two of its exemplars, D.P. Mukerji (1894–1961) from
India and Akiwowo Akinsola (1922–2014) from Nigeria. It also examines the
scholarship of thinkers from these regions who extended and critiqued the indige-
nous above-mentioned positions and presented new concepts, such as the “captive
mind” (Alatas 1972, 2006), academic dependency (Alatas 2003), endogeneity and
extraversion (Hountondji 1995, 1997, 2009), and colonial modernity (Patel 2017,
2018, 2021).
Part Two shifts the discussion regarding colonialism and the social sciences to its
debates in the Americas. It initially discusses the postcolonial position inscribed in
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and that of the subaltern school on modern
systems of knowledge. These assess the way the representations of the “other” are
constituted in literature/language and the colonial archive. Next, it makes a critical
evaluation of the ontological principles governing Anibal Quijano’s (1928–2018)
theory of the coloniality of power and indicates its historical-intellectual location. It
elaborates the attributes of the decolonial position, its distinction from the post-
colonial perspective, and notes the criticisms made by social scientists of the
postcolonial and decolonial approaches while it affirms that the postcolonial/
decolonial has emerged today as a global perspective. Part Three the conclusion
maps the contributions made by the postcolonial/decolonial approaches in
reconstituting global social theory.
Part I: The Indigenous Approach
For most of the newly independent nation-states, decolonization was not only about
the transfer of political sovereignty to the “natives,” but designing new pathways to
free themselves from the economic and cultural dependencies generated by colo-
nialism. At the Bandung conference in 1955, 29 Asian and African countries met to
be constituted as a non-aligned political block that would design a new model of
development outside the political influence of the first and second world’s economic
models of capitalism and communism (Nash 2003). These newly independent
4 S. Patel
countries came together to develop and draw from new economic programs of
import substituting industrialization that these nation-states were developing from
earlier anti-colonial critiques. Critical to the project of economic autonomy was the
investment by individual nation-states in intellectual infrastructure-institutions of
teaching, research and publication which would support the growth of human
resources and aid the development of autonomous social sciences and humanities.
The Bandung initiative thus provided a prelude to, and a background from which to
develop alternate social science models for growth and development and break
knowledge circuits controlled by European and North American countries and create
new ones. Over the next two decades, a series of conferences made possible (for
example, in Cairo in 1957 that brought together communists from China and Russia
and Marxist intellectuals from Algeria) an exchange of ideas and models. In 1973 the
first Asian Conference on Teaching and Research in Social Sciences held in Shimla,
India, finalized the project of creating an indigenous social science (Atal 1981).
The Shimla conference argued that colonialism had created academic colonialism
and its tools, methods, and theories evoked intellectual servility, deference, and
dependency to the West and the Western social sciences. It called for “self-rule”
through the formation of indigenous social sciences. To “do” indigenous social
science, meant the establishment of an institutional infrastructure that would aid
the growth of conceptual and metatheoretical frameworks based on one’s “own”
culture and thereby evolve new scientific practices that could help social sciences to
realize the nation’s needs (Atal 1981). The conference defined four pathways to
realize this goal: the constitution of social science concepts in local regional lan-
guages with the use of local resources; research by insiders (“natives”/citizens)
rather than outsiders (non-citizens); determination of research priorities in terms of
“national” priorities; and lastly, the formulation of new perspectives and paradigms
for the social sciences in terms of local/national philosophical and cultural themes
and intellectual legacies (Atal 1981).
In this context, it would be productive to note that the first intervention made in
this emerging field of study was that of the Malay sociologist, Hussein Alatas, whose
elaboration provided a definition for academic colonialism – he called it the “captive
mind,” which he defined as an “uncritical and imitative mind dominated by an
external source, whose thinking is deflected from an independent perspective”
(Alatas 1972: 692). Later, it was elaborated by Farid Alatas (2003) as academic
dependency. Consequently, Hussein Alatas (2006) assessed how to conceive of an
independent position which he called autonomous knowledges. He argued that there
is no need to reject completely Western knowledges and fields of study. However,
there is a need to extract those Western concepts and theories that can be of use
within “native” societies. Some concepts and theories of Western knowledge,
Hussein Alatas argues, are relevant because of their methodologies-these reflect on
its own past and present and thus can be used for comparison across the world given
their validity as scientific truths. However, he also contends that such concepts and
theories can be extracted from the existing scholarship from other parts of the world-
an example being the works of Ibn Khaldun (Alatas 2014). This orientation to
indigenous studies – as the adaptation of Western thought to local contexts – can
be seen today within Chinese sociology (Chen 2021, Xie 2020) and in Iranian
sociology (Connell forthcoming). However, sociologists/anthropologists in some
countries have invested their intellectual resources to formulate new perspectives
for the social sciences drawn from their region’s cultural/philosophical principles.
Below, this chapter elaborates the indigenous perspectives of D.P. Mukerji from
India and of Akinsola Akiwowo from Nigeria where these experiments were most in
evidence.
D.P. Mukerji’s sociological queries followed those of European scholars in the
mid- to late-nineteenth century. He wanted to construct a sociology to comprehend
and examine the transition of India toward capitalism and modernity and thereby
outline the current issues and problems affecting India’s path toward modernity. His
sociology recognized India as overburdened with poverty and backwardness, and
that these processes were determined by colonial capitalist exploitation. He was
constantly troubled by the question: how does one understand India’s current
economic problems, and what social science language does one need to construct
to examine and evaluate them? Mukerji was focused on the problems of the
contemporary: the plight of agricultural laborers, reconstitution of forms of
non-free bondage and slavery, issues facing internal migrants and the contradictory
impact of the processes of urbanization and industrialization in the context of
colonialism. No wonder his sociology was perceived to be radical, a fact which he
acknowledged when he identified himself by the term Marxisant (Joshi 1986; Madan
2007; Patel 2013).
But Mukerji was caught in another dilemma, one with which many Indian
intellectuals of the day were fraught. He believed that the theories promulgated by
European sociologists did not provide an understanding of Indian conditions. He
was highly conscious of India’s long civilizational history. The British, he argued,
provided India with universal propositions based on their experience of the transition
to capitalism. This model made the market the unifying element for organizing the
country. Exporting this model to India, he contended, would be a disaster. Mukerji
believed that in India it was its culture and its symbiosis that characterized its
civilization over the long duree. This is best represented in terms of the following
principles: that of acceptance, adaptability, accommodation, and assimilation. These
cultural values were embodied in India’s long history and needed to be retrieved to
elaborate a sociological theory of, and for, modern India. They can be drawn from
Sanskrit concepts such as shantam (harmony – that which sustains the universe
amidst all its incessant changes), shivam (welfare – being the principle of coordina-
tion with the social environment), and adavaitam (“unity of unity” or synthesis)
(Madan 2007, 2013).
Unlike Mukerji, who searched Hindu/Sanskrit texts to organize his sociology,
Akiwowo’s project was built on an excavation of tales, myths, and proverbs of the
Yoruba – a group of about 47 million people inhabiting Nigeria, Benin, and Togo –
to suggest:
6 S. Patel
how ideas and notions contained in a type of African oral poetry can be extrapolated in the
form of propositions for testing in future sociological theories in Africa or other world
societies. (Akiwowo 1986:343)
Akiwowo argues that the concept of asuwada in Yoruba poems should be used as
a key philosophical principle to organize a theory of sociation (Akiwowo 1986,
1999). Asuwada implies that although the unit of all social life is the individual, an
individual as a “corporeal self needs fellowship of other individuals” (Makinde
1988: 62–3). Thus, community life based on common good is sui generis to the
existence of the individual.
Akiwowo’s and Makinde’s elaboration of the asuwada concept to build an
indigenous theory has led many to raise fundamental questions regarding the use
of folk culture to construct a sociological theory. The queries range from the
selection of the indigenous position to comprehend “colonial knowledges,” given
the variety of discussions within the African continent on this theme (Olaniyan
2000), to issues relating to the methodological. Questions have been asked why
Akiwowo choose the asuwada principle over other, similar, indigenous concepts to
define sociation. Additionally, scholars have queried the interpretations of the
Yoruba poems, particularly given the similarities of these interpretations to Durk-
heimian functionalism. Adesina (2006, p. 5) argues that there may be differences
among social scientists in the interpretation of these poems and thus they might
express competing meanings of Yoruba poetry. In this case, which interpretation
does one accept? What principles will allow us to debate and resolve these scientific
issues? In these circumstances, what legitimacy does Akiwowo’s asuwada
sociology have?
Adesina (2006) suggests that all sociologies base themselves on particularities
(including European and North American ones), and that the particularities elabo-
rated in the Akiwowo project of indigenous sociology must meet with traditions of
science. He asks: have we created methods to examine the truth of indigenous
concepts and theories? Have we explored the reasons for its effectiveness? Why is
it grounded in myth and magic? Can we dissociate it from these moorings and
construct an endogenous science? To construct endogenous knowledge, it is impor-
tant to move from “translation” to “formulation” (Adesina 2006: 9). This implies,
according to Adesina, an engagement with modern science.
This argument reflects the distinction between the indigenous and the endoge-
nous, as made by the philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997, 2009) from Benin.
Hountondji’s distinction between endogenous (scientific) and indigenous (ideolog-
ical) knowledge, gestures to the colonial constitution of the concept of indigenous.
According to Hountondji, the concept of indigenous has emerged within the binary
of West versus the East (Hountondji 1997). Western philosophy is perceived as
universal while African philosophy is perceived as ethnic. More generally,
Hountondji argues that the categorization of African philosophy as the “other” of
Western knowledge systems precludes the development in Africa of its cultures of
science in order to interrogate its own philosophical traditions and create thereby an
internal dialogue with these kinds of knowledges. Hountondji thus defines
indigenous as “epistemological sublimation from the socio-material experiences of

African lived life” (Hountondji 1997:35).
Hountondji accepts that some Western ideas, concepts, and/or theories may have
relevance to local contexts, others may not. Some kinds of knowledge may be
adapted and assimilated; others may not be. However, he asks readers to query
why African knowledges – local knowledges – did not develop new cultures of
scientific traditions that can be accepted as “truths” or as science. For Hountondji,
the answer lies in the concept of extraversion (externally produced knowledge).
African knowledges, he argued are steeped in extraversion, and lack the autonomy to
develop scientific practices to re-produce themselves. Hountondji identifies many
attributes that defines extraversion, including the autonomy to produce and publish
books and journals in independent publishing houses, to house these in libraries and
archives, to critically apply research specializations, topics and questions together
with an absence of philosophical location of concepts and its scientific understand-
ings. Such scientific cultures, Hountondji argues, fuels and promotes academic
tourist circuits with diasporic scholars circulating between the core and the periph-
ery. The only alternative is to break the binary of the colonial/indigenous.
Was this also the problem with Indian sociological traditions and particularly of
Mukerji’s oeuvre? Patel (2013, 2017, 2020) has argued that it is important to assess
how nationalism and colonialism were epistemically co-produced in order to com-
prehend the concept of the indigenous. Mukerji’s sociology, she has argued was
associated with traditional nationalist trends which searched for an alternate onto-
logical language in the Hindu past, a past which was ironically described, explained,
and conceptualized within the Orientalist project of the nineteenth century that used
scriptures and literary sources tom prehend Hinduism. This project consorted with
the interpretations given by Brahmin interlocutors to delineate the essentialist Hindu
and thus Indian principles of the social (Dalmia 1996). Oriental and later Indological
studies, the precursor of anthropology and sociology in India, legitimized the idea of
India as an ancient Hindu civilization and searched for these civilizing traits in
Hindu/Sanskrit texts. These were later translated by European Orientalists and then
re-translated in regional languages. Nationalist sociology/anthropology was consti-
tuted through this prism as Indian intellectuals retrieved these interpretations in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century from within nationalist thought. These
texts, Patel argues, carried not only a colonized gaze but also an Brahminic/upper
caste male gaze. With nationalist sociologists like Mukerji not seeking their catego-
ries from within modernity but in India’s Hindu past, the project of indigenous
sociology in India has paradoxically reproduced the language of colonialism and
arguably legitimized the notion of India as a traditional society (Patel 2006, 2013,
2017, 2021).
These criticisms apart, the search for the ontological through the indigenous/
indigeneity project faded away from the mid-1970s onward. This trend coincided
with the slow deterioration of the non-aligned movement and decline of government
spending in universities (Onwuzuruigbo 2018). If it has a semblance of presence, it
is in some contemporary social movements of Asian and African countries (Odora
Hoppers 2002), in the discussions relating to the cognitive circuits that it had
8 S. Patel
established on this theme. This drift has been reinforced due to the global develop-
ments in the 1980s and 1990s that has led not only to the dissolution of the Soviet
bloc and its political and economic influence but also of communism as an ideology
and practice and Marxism as a theoretical perspective. A unipolar world promoting
capitalist globalization led by the USA/Europe has now emerged. Consequently, the
world, which was divided a hundred years ago into the West-East axis has now
re-grouped within the bipolar axis of the North-South (UNESCO 2010). There is
once more a diffusion of ideas and scholarship, and a flow of human resources and
research aid from the Global North. It is in this context we see the growth of
scholarship within a South-South axis (Connell 2007; De Souza Santos 2014;
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018),
This chapter turns to map the discussion of similar ideas in the Americas and
assess the continuities and breaks between these and the past.
Part II: The Postcolonial and the Decolonial
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism grew as an academic project that deconstructed the hegemonic

orientation of teaching, research and writing of English literature within mainstream
American universities. Its key interlocutors were from the diasporic communities of
west and south Asia. They brought to bear, in their teaching and study of mainstream
English literature, the sensibilities and memories of the anti-colonial movements
with the experiences of discrimination and prejudice faced by these communities in
the USA, thereby querying the legitimacy given to the ideology of American
exceptionalism by contemporary American scholarship (Sharpe 2000; Schwarz
2000). The entry of this diasporic community into departments of English literature
in elite American universities was made feasible through changes introduced in
immigration rules subsequent to the passage of a new Immigration Act in 1965.
These changes abolished the quota system in favor of the Europeans and gave access
to jobs for Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans in the USA.
However, postcolonialism, as a perspective which grew around Edward Said’s
text titled Orientalism (1978), was also an assault on the hegemonic ideology of
American exceptionalism promoted then within American academia. These aca-
demics, dominated mainstream social science departments, included the political
sociologist, S.M. Lipset (Sharpe 2000; Schwarz 2000). Exceptionalism as a theme
was derived from the nineteenth century principle of “manifest destiny” promoted by
settler Puritan communities. The settlers argued that the United States was destined
to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North
American continent-this belief subsequently justified the annexation of huge
amounts of land in the Americas through military aggression or via legal means.
No wonder, American exceptionalism as an academic project searched for unique
features that determined America’s rise as a global power. It found it in arguments
within history: that the American nation did not carry its antecedents in feudalism,
nor had a class of aristocracy, nor left and communist movements, and thus was an
original nation. Exceptionalism argued that USA was the bearer of values such as
freedom and liberty, individual responsibility, republicanism, representative democ-
racy, and laissez-faire economics. The citizens of the USA, it was argued, were equal
before the law and this made the USA morally superior to Europe (Shafer 1999).
Said’s (1978) study, and that of others who established the postcolonial stand-
point, questioned this rhetoric to show how the West has created and consumed an
imaginary Orient to perpetuate its discursive power through literature and language.
Said’s description of Oriental studies/ Middle East studies portrayed it as a Western
style of thought and an institution of power for exercising control over the Arabs and
Islam. Said’s work built on earlier perspectives that had argued that Oriental thought
controls the consciousness of the “natives”. This perspective built on the anti-
imperialist Marxist and Communist approaches popular in the 1960s and the
1970s in the Arab world and had emerged subsequent to the war of independence
in Algeria (Halliday 1993). These discussions had also found space in the various
conferences held post Bandung in the Arab region, such as the first Afro Asian
Solidarity conference in 1957 at Cairo, mentioned above. However, while borrowing
from this idea, Said made a clean break from its Marxist genealogy, integrating
Michel Foucault’s structuralist/poststructuralist critique of disciplinary knowledge
with an assessment of Orientalism. Using Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge
and discourse, Said and his colleagues made a critique of images and representations
as they related these with institutions that produced Orientalist knowledge.
This approach flowed through the book, Orientalism, and Said argued that
Orientalism was not only a field of knowledge or a discipline (the first Chair in
Arabic at Cambridge was established in 1643), or a set of institutions (by the
mid-nineteenth century, Oriental Studies was a well-established academic discipline
in most European countries), nor was it only a corporate institution which primarily
studied oriental societies and their cultures within Western universities. Rather, he
contended, Orientalism was a mode of thought based on a particular epistemology
and ontology which established a division between the Orient and the Occident. Said
used Foucault’s concept of discourse to argue that it combined power with knowl-
edge and thereby produced its objects for a discourse of power which is resistant to
change and transformation because of its linguistic constitution. In Said’s conceptual
framework, there was no phenomena outside of language; for language is self-
referential. Language/literature defines the character of Orientalism; it not only
produces the Orient as an object of knowledge but also establishes its outcome in
terms of the relations of power. Postcolonial studies, in this sense, is a radical
methodology that questions both the past and the ongoing legacies of European
colonialism in order to undo them by interrogating its epistemic authority with
institutional power.
By the 1990s, postcolonialism was no longer restricted to the field of English
literature; with the association of the subaltern studies scholars with this perspective,
its ambit moved further to the discipline of history. The subaltern studies school
emerged in the 1980s to provide an ontological-epistemic critique of nationalist elite
Indian historiography (Guha 1983; Chatterjee, 1986; 1997). Introduced by Gayatri
10 S. Patel
Spivak to the American academy in the late 1980s/early 90s, this scholarship
reinvented itself as postcolonialist and created for itself a new avatar within the
North American area studies departments and within mainstream academia. Hence-
forth its work was seen as being the “interrogation of the relationship between power
and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge)”
(Chakraborty 2000:15). It led to a shift of discussions from the search for the
subaltern and a critique of elite nationalist historiography in colonial, nationalist
and Marxist historiography to the discourses and texts that represent “the fabric of
dominant structures and manifest. . . itself as power” (Prakash 1994:1482). If Said
used literary texts to analyze the West’s project of domination of the Orient, the
subaltern scholars argued that the recovery of the subaltern subject was possible only
by deconstructing the historical documents in the archive. In following this path,
they made a break from their earlier concerns and this led to some Marxist historians
disassociating themselves from the field of study (Sarkar 1997, 2002). Though these
scholars assert that their search for the subaltern has not been abandoned, they also
contend the subaltern and subalternity are organically connected and both can be
extracted from the historical archive (Chakrabarty 2000).
Their position now fits with the postcolonialists, who have argued that “doing”
post coloniality is “doing” politics against colonialism/imperialism. The oriental
archive, they contend, lays bare the West’s framing of the “other” and its politics.
This perspective has led Said, his colleagues, and the subalterns, to confront their
own fields of knowledge; in Said’s case it is Oriental Studies/Middle Eastern Studies,
and in the case of the subalterns, the discipline of history whose procedures they
argue are enmeshed in the authority of the West. Thus, postcolonialism becomes not
only a theory of knowledge but a “theoretical practice,” a methodology that can
transform knowledge from static disciplinary competence to activist intervention. It
gives this privilege to scholars who can use it to expose unequal power, make it
visible and be involved in its winding-up. Given that the politics of this scholarship
is to end colonial knowledge, it can be argued that this idea is shared with the politics
that has organized the mid-twentieth century project of the indigenous/indigeneity,
mentioned above. In this sense, there is a continuity between the two projects. But
many would disagree with this contention, and rather would assert that there is a
definite break between the two. Contra postcolonialism, they would suggest, the
indigenous perspective in both its variants – as an adaption of Western theories to
local contexts and as a search for the ontological-epistemological – was about
decentering the colonial/imperial cultures of learning and knowledge-making in
order to constitute new political modernities. Additionally, the indigenous perspec-
tive promoted the quest for the ontological through an interrogation of the local
cultural/philosophical traditions of the new nation-states; thus, built-in into this work
is a sociological perspective that explores the cultural in relation to its geographies.
The postcolonialist project is not about constituting and legitimizing new political
modernities. Rather, its ontological position is to reject Western knowledge through
its deconstruction of the literature/languages and documents in the archives. There is
little to no engagement here with the relationship of processes and structures with
literature, or with the way events, processes and systems engaged with the docu-
ments in the archive.
No wonder the postcolonial perspective has found moorings within North Amer-
ica and Europe academic circuits. However, in the last four decades, it has also faced
stringent criticisms. It has also evoked enormous moral and political outrage – some
have perceived it as a personal attack on Europe and on Europeans and on American
literature. Critics have been candid of postcolonialism’s dismissal of the many
assumptions of social science knowledge production. This criticism has been three-
fold: First, postcolonial analysis has been considered too simplistic; it is argued that
it naturalizes the various geographies constituting the Orient in a universal argument
while generalizing the work of scholars, scholarship and their institutions as being
marked completely by West’s power-knowledge project. Consequently, it has had an
impact on scholarship: every text is now perceived as a narrative of power rather than
being one of the many constituting a corpus that has structured the history of ideas
within its geographies of circulation. Secondly, postcolonialism’s theoretical archi-
tecture is based on the affirmation of the epistemic difference between West vs the
East and the use of the binary, we/they or I/other. This has led many to argue the West
has created all the ills that organize the contemporary Orient(s). Given that colo-
nialism accentuated the differences and inequalities already in place, critics suggest a
need to fine tune theoretical interventions instead of naturalizing the binaries as
universal axioms to comprehend knowledge politics. Third, following the above, the
most important criticism relates to postcolonialism’s anti-foundationalist position. If
the “true” descriptions of the “real world” are rejected, how can we study it? This has
led some sociologists to contend that the postcolonial approach is limited, prejudicial
and too shallow to be of any value to contemporary social sciences grounded in
evidence and empirical details (Turner 1989).
And yet, without the introduction of this approach, mainstream American acade-
mia embedded in various degrees of American exceptionalism, sometimes called
ethnocentric provincialism, or European scholarship embedded in varieties of Occi-
dentalism (Coronil 1996), would not have engaged with colonialism and reflected on
how it has affected both American and European history and the history of its social
science disciplines. Indeed, the study of Occidentalist assumptions in literature,
literary criticism, historiography, and now sociology and social science theories,
have led to the recovery of the work of scholars such as the sociologist W.E.B. du
Bois (1868–1963) (Morris 2017), and an assessment of the way silences regarding
racism, ethnicity, and indigeneity have organized the disciplines of sociology/social
sciences in North America. Postcolonialism has made it possible to question the
implied assumptions of the dominant discourses in the social sciences. Post-
colonialism has also helped to interrogate categories and classifications systems,
used by sociologists to reflect on their own discipline and comprehend how these are
related to Eurocentric assumptions. This can be seen in the pioneering work of
Connell (1997,2019), who queried the definition and meaning of “classical sociol-
ogy,” or that of Alatas and Sinha (2017), on how to redefine the sociological cannon
in the context of its global practices which stretch beyond and before Europe’s
constitution of these. In addition, the publication of path breaking texts, such as those
12 S. Patel
by Gurminder Bhambra (2013, 2014) and Julian Go (2016), have laid bare the
practices of the discipline, deconstructing its power, and authority in defining what
it is and should be. Consequently, contemporary scholars have found it easier to
debate concepts such as internal colonialism, race and racism, ethnicity and minor-
ities in their various regions. Lastly, postcolonialism, this author contends, is an
important link in understanding decoloniality, which is discussed below.
Coloniality/Decoloniality
This chapter argues that with the enunciation by Anibal Quijano (2000) of the
concept of coloniality, we have come a full circle in debates on colonialism and its
knowledge. The concept of the coloniality/coloniality of power combines, in new
and radical ways, the mid-twentieth century project of conceiving an ontological-
epistemology and as well to establish the theoretical scaffolding for an alternate
political modernity: this time to describe the frames of settler colonialism. Quijano
integrates arguments of the world system approach drawn from Immanuel
Wallerstein, with those from Latin American scholars such as Sergio Bagu and
Gonzalez Casanova. He Quijano incorporates the above perspectives on settler
colonialism and capitalism while simultaneously reusing Samir Amin’s
(1932–2018) concept of and theory elaborated in Eurocentrism (1989) in a new
way. Amin, who extended Martin Bernal’s argument on Eurocentrism elaborated in
Black Athena (1987), defined it as a theory of world history, fine-tuned during the
Renaissance, to assert Europe’s uniqueness and superiority (Moghadam 1989).
Amin states that it is not Greece and later Rome that were the cradle of European
civilization, rather the civilizational roots of Europe are in the Orient – in Ancient
Egypt and with the Phoenicians (the Levant). Amin thus challenged the contempo-
rary economistic-oriented practices in Marxist historiography with his historical,
sociological and philosophical analysis of the cultural and intellectual assumptions
of European epistemologies.
Quijano follows a similar methodology to query Eurocentric assumptions regard-
ing modernity, but his canvass is much larger than that of Amin. Following Bagu’s
contention that in Latin America “there was no servitude on a large scale, but slavery
with multiple shades” (Biegal 2010:193); Quijano in his text Coloniality of power,
Eurocentrism and Latin America (2000) maps the growth of the capitalist/colonial
system and analyses the implications of the Iberian invasion of Latin America. His
article argues that the slow consolidation of a trade circuit that linked Iberian
countries with the Americas from the fifteenth century later integrated Africa into
its trade routes with the beginning of slavery in the sixteenth century. The chapter
shows how, over the next 250 years, a strong trade nexus developed between the
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and connected Asia and Europe around the colonial
territory of “New Spain”: a geographic space comprising not only the Americas,
parts of Africa but also the Philippines. In this circuit, the agents of colonialism
outside “America” had a limited and almost negligible role (Quijano 2000; Mignolo
2001). This analysis brings Quijano to contend that Latin America had been part of
the world system since the late fifteenth century, and since that time was a settler
colonized territory. Thus, the scaffolding that structured the theory of capitalism
through Eurocentrism took place in this period, in the first phase, from the beginning
of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.
For Quijano, Eurocentrism is the elaboration of a perspective on knowledge
associated with colonial ethnocentrism and universal racial classification. It consists
of two attributes: the constitution of the binary and a theory of linear history: “a
peculiar dualist/evolutionist historical perspective” (Quijano 2000: 556). It helped to
form the basis of the European scientific-technological development during the 18th/
19th centuries, but was also imbricated in many other theories of universal history
and culture. These premises also influenced the formation of the social sciences in
the late nineteenth century, as Wallerstein et al. (1996; Wallerstein, 1997) have
argued. Gradually, this Eurocentrism formed the contours of an ideology and of a
rather diffuse common sense; it seduced the population it encountered and, in some
periods, did its job through covert rather than overt oppression.
Quijano intertwines four main trends of coloniality as a system, all of which he
delineates from the Latin American experience of settler colonialism – an economic
process that extracted and transferred value through the control and subordination of
forms of labor to capital – this in turn legitimized a social classification system
around the category of “race,” thereby creating a “racial division of labor.” This
system found justification through the institutions of the nation state and notions of
democracy, and was thus presented and articulated through a Eurocentric theory of
modernity, permeating individual and collective identities and constituting sociabil-
ities (Quijano 2000: 544–545). In the above-mentioned chapter, we see Quijano
mobilizing an historical-sociological approach to analyze a sociology of epistemol-
ogy. More particularly, while assessing the interconnected processes of global and
regional political economies and combining these with an analysis of social and
political institutions, Quijano provides a sociological framework to examine colonial
society while simultaneously offering an epistemological critique of contemporary
sociological theories and an ontology with which to reconstitute it.
In Quijano’s oeuvre, coloniality becomes an ontology: “what is, is the conse-
quence of that which has been” (Gandarilla Salgado 2021:202), something that can
be unraveled from the values and norms institutionalized in everyday life, within the
family system and marriage alliances, within sexualities, in education, its peda-
gogies, and its philosophies. Contrary to contemporary Marxist orthodoxies,
Quijano’s theory of colonial capitalism argues that material changes and cognitive
interventions occur concurrently. Thus, capitalism in its colonial form emerges when
the control and subordination of slavery, servitude, and wage labor occur alongside
one other. For Quijano, this model of work, related to land appropriation, resource
extraction, and in-migration, was first institutionalized in the Americas and over time
has become a global model. Thus, Quijano’s methodology brings his observations
and interpretations of the archival documentation with empirical evidence and actual
events, and sieves these with objects and things that have organized experiences,
while integrating these with the mechanisms, causes, power, and structures that have
in turn produced these events. Obviously, a scientific practice is organizing
14 S. Patel
Quijano’s oeuvre. And yet it is important to mention, that here too, Quijano provides
a note of caution. He argues that no methodology/method is autonomous from the
ideologies of “the consequence of that which has been.” Thus, methods and meth-
odologies need to be deconstructed and located in the knowledge systems of its
structuration, in order to comprehend “its purpose of inquiry into reality and for the
production of its knowledge” (quoted in García-Bravo 2021:205). This implies that a
reflexive assessment of the methodologies, its histories of use, and its philosophical
origins need to be explored before these are re-used again.
In what way are Quijano’s sociological practices linked with decoloniality? Led
by Walter Mignolo, who argued that coloniality was the “dark side of modernity,”
the decoloniality group, who now have a formidable repertoire of publications,
consider Quijano’s theory of coloniality as a critical point of departure for outlining
their position (Escobar 2007). Initiated in the early 1990s by Latin American
scholars in the USA who initially came to be known as the postcolonial Latin
American Studies Programme, the group argued that Eurocentrism emerged to
clothe the organic linkages between coloniality/modernity (Castro-Gomez 1998;
Coronil 2008). However, by 1998, the group realized it had little in common with
the postcolonialists. The collective’s understanding of Eurocentrism, Mignolo
contended, was based on the Iberian colonization of the Americas (the first phase
of modernity), while that of postcolonialism was formed through the British colo-
nialism of the eighteenth or nineteenth century: which he argued, borrowing from
Quijano, was the second phase of modernity (Mignolo 2007). Mignolo contends that
because the postcolonialists focus on deconstructing the power/knowledge matrix
within language/literature, and the archive through the methodology of post-
structuralism, it cannot “de-link” from Eurocentrism. Postcolonialism, he argues,
does not have the language to critique the colonizer from the episteme of the
colonized, that is from an exterior position (Dussel 2000); it merely critiques
modernity and thus remains internal to Eurocentrism. In addition, Grosfoguel
(2007) contends that unlike the postcolonialists, the decolonial does not make a
cultural argument. Decoloniality is an attempt to find an epistemic voice outside
modernity with which to formulate new universals that have not inherited such
totalitarian orientations (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009: 131).
Drawing from Quijano, the decolonialists suggest that the world came to be
interconnected in the circle of colonial/capitalist modernity in the sixteenth-century
when the twin processes, that of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and
the elevation of Western Christianity to religious dominance, led to an early racial
classification. The American continent became the first contact zone and battle-
ground for the deployment of ideas of civilization, evangelization, empire, and racial
difference, together with the subalternation of the knowledges of the colonized
(Mignolo 2001). Mignolo proposes that Eurocentrism was born at this juncture,
and thereby becomes the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality – an hegemonic
representation and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself, and that relies
on “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony
derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel 2000: 471; Quijano 2000: 549).
Thus, decoloniality is in need of a new episteme that comprehends the historical
processes necessary for the creation of an original set of concepts, and Mignolo
(2017) has argued that it is among the indigenous groups (original inhabitants)
within the regions of the Caribbean, Mesoameria, and the Andes one would find
subaltern knowledge. In addition, the decolonialists draws on a variety of thinkers
who have critiqued settler colonialism to create this new epistemology. These range
from some in Latin America, such as Enrique Dussel, and others in Africa and the
Caribbean, such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cèsaire, and C.L.R. James whose concepts
have been integrated with perspectives such as dependency theories, liberation
theology, and ideas popularized by Latin America social movements (e.g., that of
Zapatistas). Recently, some of the decolonialists have traced the legacy of
decoloniality to the Bandung conference of 1955 (Maldonado-Torres et al. 2019).
The decolonial approach has developed a repertoire of concepts to present a
distinctive position. These include Occidentalism-the formation of specific forms of
racialized and gendered Western selves as the effect of Orientalist representations of
the non-Western Other (see Rodríguez et al. 2010, on the way it organized European
sociology); colonial difference (the epistemic division of modernity from coloniality
and its use to create further divisions and differences in knowledge, which is
different from the way it is used by Chatterjee 1986 see Patel, 2018); and imperial
difference (the downgrading and hierarchization of European others, for example,
the Ottomans, the Chinese or the Russians). Border epistemology, de-linking and
pluriversality, as defined by Mignolo (2007), implies separating one’s way of
thinking from all forms of Enlightenment, its political and economic theories,
including from Marxist theory where the alternatives of socialism and communism
were promoted. De-linking, originally conceived by Amin (1987 and borrowed from
Quijano) (Davis and Walsh 2020:11), implies both an epistemological and a political
practice. It is presented as a radical project, which in Escobar’s (2007) words is an
“inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought” and which make possible “non-
Eurocentric modes of thinking” (Escobar 2007: 180). For Mignolo, the “de-” of
decoloniality helps to conceptualize it as “re-epistemic reconstitution, re-emergence,
and resurgence” (Mignolo 2017).
I have argued that Quijano’s methods differ from those used by the decolonial
theorists. Quijano’s gaze remained on the Latin American historical experience when
elaborating a sociology of epistemology, while the decolonialists have increasingly
used the methodologies of postmodernism, poststructuralism and deconstruction in
their search for an alternative epistemic “voice” and in understanding of difference in
narratives about indigeneity/racism/ethnicity. Rarely has there been an attempt to
engage with the social science methods and methodologies used either by main-
stream social sciences, new historical and sociological work based on quantitative
methods or those used by subaltern/feminist works. (Although there are exceptions
to this, see Coronil 2008). Also, in their work, there is a complete absence of political
economy and discussion of economic development. Critics argue that though there
are “gestures to the subregional and to the indigenous” there is very little “critical
work that is supposed to undo or challenge the homogenizing work of colonialism
and nation-building” (Salvatore 2010:344). Consequently, the decolonialists retain
many of the criticisms that postcolonialists have faced as elaborated above,
16 S. Patel
particularly its anti-foundationalism – a commitment to study the “real” world but

not having the methods to do so.
Latin American historians and social scientists have been critical both of
Quijano’s concept of coloniality and the decolonial school in different ways
(Bortoluci and Jansen 2013; Coronil 2008; Domingues 2009; Salvatore 2010).
Some historians, while appreciative of Quijano’s extensive canvass outlining the
500-year history of Latin America, have raised two queries. The first relates to the
persistence of coloniality today: about whether it even has an ontological relevance
given the sweep of capitalist modernity (Domingues 2009), and the genocide
against, and the decimation of, the original inhabitants, the indigenous groups and
it is important to note that indigenous has a different meaning in settler colonialism.
Secondly, they have asked whether coloniality has had differential spatial impact in
the Latin American continent. The ideology to rebuild after the destruction of the old
settler colonialism has encouraged various legal interventions for land appropriation
and new forms of incorporation, such as miscegenation. Historians have contended
that empirical studies have affirmed that conquest/genocide of the “indigenous”
groups (the original inhabitants of the land) and their displacement together with
modernity, neo-colonial domination and backwardness have walked hand in hand in
Latin America, creating sometimes mixed and sometimes uneven spatial processes
(Salvatore 2010:339).
In addition, scholars who have accepted the idea that the fifteenth and sixteenth
century encounters of the Spanish and the Portuguese should be considered colonial,
have argued there is a very specific Latin American historical process consequent to
the Iberian invasion into the region. While agreeing that Latin America is an
important site for examining the representational and discursive practices that were
developed for, and through, the operation of early European colonialism; they
nevertheless argue for the need to make an assessment of the implications of
Catholicism, the contrasting effects of a centralizing State juxtaposed by local
bureaucracies, and an analysis of its peculiar racial ideologies across the region,
before accepting the coloniality thesis (Bortoluci and Jansen 2013). In particular,
social scientists in Latin America have raised fundamental questions regarding some
aspects of the coloniality thesis. One of the major problems seems to be the lack of
engagement with the various ways race and racialization have been organized across
the Americas (Benzi 2021; Bortoluci and Jansen 2013). This begs the question of
whether all forms of difference emerging from the Iberian colonial experience since
the sixteenth century be categorized as racial and theorized as part of coloniality.
More generally, scholars query whether the Iberian invasion of the Americas be
assessed as a colonial encounter. Are the knowledge implications of the processes of
settler colonialism, such as experienced by North, Central and Latin America and the
Antipodes, similar to that of non-settled colonialism, such as experienced in coun-
tries of Africa, West and South Asia or those of Southeast Asia? (Veracini 2011).
Given that the decolonial perspective is now used to examine forms of genocide in
Rawanda, Armenia, Cambodia and the Palestine, this begs the question of whether
settler colonialism has now emerged in a new avatar? (Wolfe 2006).
Today, Latin American scholarship (in Latin America) marks itself out against the
decolonial position while emphasizing its genealogy within the specific processes
that articulated dependency theory. It thereby has set itself in a distinct new cognitive
circuit. Most Latin Americanists perceive their scholarship as being moored in the
developments that took place in the region in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which
they call the “Latin American” regional social science perspective when there was an
attempt to chalk an alternate political modernity theory through the theories around
dependency (Sorá and Blanco 2018). Thus, the ontological-epistemological position
in this case is located in terms of the region. The geopolitical context for this
intellectual development is similar to that experienced by the ex-colonial countries
of Asia and Africa in the 50s, when the project of Nonalignment and Third-
Worldism promoted alternate ways to perceive modernity. However, even if the
context was similar, the content and implications of the Latin American intervention
was, and is, distinct. The Latin American regional perspective makes a break from
the earlier notion that Latin American unity is based on its shared history in the
Iberian colonization and their identity within the common languages of Spanish and
Portuguese. Instead, scholars argue that by the mid-twentieth century, a new way of
thinking found expression in Latin America “in the face of the political and cultural
domination of the United States and Western Europe” (Sorá and Blanco 2018:127).
Four attributes defined this regional perspective and continue to define it: a concern
with the present; an analysis of the contemporary processes based on an adaption of
contemporary global sociological theories to Latin American contexts; an interdis-
ciplinary perspective combining economy, sociology and political theory; and the
use of existing social scientific methodologies and methods to assess these
processes.
This Latin American regional perspective was conceptualized in the context of
political developments in Cuba in the late 1950s and involved Latin American
scholars from radical and left positions who developed a perspective that abandoned
the “points of view of the great centres of world economy.” It found support within
the region from the first generation of scholars of all persuasions as they were
liberated intellectually from the military regimes and involved themselves in the
research and teaching of the social sciences in universities and research centers
funded by the UN (e.g., the Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (CEPAL) established at Santiago de Chile in 1948), and private USA
foundations and their own governments. Latin American governments set up a
teaching institute, FLASCO (the Latin American School of Social Sciences) and a
research institute CLAPCS (the Latin American Centre for Research in the Social
Sciences). In addition, the establishment of the Latin American School of Sociology
(ELAS), and the Latin American School of Political Science and Public Adminis-
tration (ELACP), played important roles in creating a Latin American perspective.
Since that time, a key role has been played by CLASCO (the Latin American Social
Sciences Council), which has sourced funds from across the world to fund Latin
American research (Sorá and Blanco 2018).
These developments were aided and supported by the setting up of professional
associations such as ALAS (the Latin American Association of Sociology) together
18 S. Patel
with publishing houses and journals. A critical moment emerged when from the late
1960s onward, for a decade or more, Santiago de Chile became the site for intellec-
tual conversations across disciplines, perspectives, and institutions. It provided the
intellectual infrastructure to frame the dependency school, which argued that devel-
opment and underdevelopment were mutually reconstituted in the center (the USA)
and periphery (Latin America) (Biegal 2010). The institutionalization of the depen-
dency theories led to the further consolidation of regional intellectual circuits across
Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, organizing interdisciplinary knowledge
between the first and second generations and soon the third generation of intellec-
tuals to further its spread across sub-regions. The recent growth of private universi-
ties, increased student enrolments and neoliberal initiatives (at the expense of radical
politics), have led to a fragmentation in the above project (Sorá and Blanco 2018)
with different national research groups emphasizing distinct research and theoretical
foci and a significant number aligning with contemporary European theories
(Bortoluci and Jansen 2013). And yet, most Latin American social scientists (and
this includes some who advocate decoloniality, such as Coronil 2008), would agree
that the ideas organized around dependency have influenced the subsequent growth
and development of Latin American social sciences and retains its flavor even today.
Conclusion
This chapter has mapped the continuities and breaks that have occurred in the long
history of ideas on the theme of “colonialism and its knowledges.” The goal firstly,
was to understand this history, to assess how this academic project, entangled in anti-
colonial political movements, has been constituted to interrogate hegemonic knowl-
edges and thereby develop new research agendas and conceptualize new ways of
thinking, recast the old and create new methodologies and present new paradigms.
The chapter also argues secondly, that to justify and legitimize these interventions,
scholars have mapped out ontological-epistemic standpoints, three of which have
been explored here: that of D.P. Mukerji, Akiwowo Akinsola and Anibal Quijano.
The chapter has narrated the various twists and turns of the project as it progressed
from its inception in the 1940s and 1950s as an indigenous/indigeneity perspective
in Asia and Africa and as a dependency perspective in Latin America, to the
subaltern/postcolonial, and on to the decolonial across Asia-Africa-Latin America
to North America. In these journeys, this academic work found new legitimacy
through the reconstitution of conventional methodologies, such as that of historical
sociology and the constitution of versions of poststructuralist and deconstructive
perspectives. Though the focus of this chapter has remained on this history and its
distinct expressions across its articulation in various geographies, it also highlights
the following themes that have organized these travels.
Substantively, this project has unraveled the need to distinguish between two
kinds of colonialism – the first, that of non-settler colonialism and the second that of
settler colonialism. Successful settler colonies “tame” “a variety of wildernesses, end
up establishing independent nations,” and repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous
peoples and their alterities, and through this process manage ethnic diversity.
Racialization is the key to this process. On the other hand, in non-settler colonial
systems, a determination to exploit sustains a drive for the subordination of the
colonized (Veracini 2011). It should be noted that the indigenous in the context of
settler colonialism has a different genealogy than in the context of non-settler
colonialism. While agreeing with Walter Mignolo’s argument that contemporary
social sciences have focused on the British colonialism that was experienced in the
eighteenth/nineteenth century the chapter asserts that these two forms of colonialism
have generated distinct knowledge systems and that the postcolonial and decolonial
perspectives are separate and distinctive positions. This acknowledgement allows us
to comprehend the way Eurocentrism was institutionalized in its two phases of
modernity: from the sixteenth to eighteenth century and from the eighteenth or
nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Colonialism was thus not an experience of one
part of the world, rather it was an experience that engulfed the world and included
the Americas, the African continent together with the Antipodes. This distinction
presents us with a new way to understand colonialism and stretches its history
backwards to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This new definition of colonialism
reframes ways to understand the world capitalist system and its cultures of modernity
since the fifteenth/sixteenth century.
Additionally, the chapter has charted the processes that have institutionalized
subaltern circuits of knowledge production to form alternate/non-hegemonic forms
of thinking. These have been sustained because of their intimate connections with
anticolonial/ antiimperialist perspectives together with ideas related to nationalism,
left and radical viewpoints, political commitments of individuals and collectives of
scholars; the politics of the newly independent nation-states; but also because of the
growth of educational infrastructure that has organized the production and circula-
tion of this knowledge: universities, research institutes, journals and books, publi-
cation houses, and professional associations. The chapter has mapped the political
contexts that have helped to define new research queries and provide original
perspectives; these becoming incubators for the growth of emerging scholarship. It
has affirmed the thesis that new paradigms can emerge when subaltern perspectives
encounter those formalized by normal social science. The chapter has elaborated
how funding has been critical to sustain these knowledge systems and that without
the support of governments, public and private social science research foundations
and alternate intellectual networks, these would not have continued to operate.
Despite these support structures, it is argued that this scholarship has remained in
the margins, and is likely to do so until the mainstream itself changes.
We have also highlighted the tensions that these positions have generated with the
demands of evidence and analysis, and more generally with the protocols of social
science scholarship. Today, mainstream social science accepts that the social world is
complex and heterogenous, contingent, and plastic, and thus cannot be interrogated
through the principles formatted by the natural sciences. Given this, in recent times,
there has been a more liberal understanding of the protocols demanded from the
social sciences. However, there remains a schism in this literature between the post
colonialists/decolonialists who promote an anti-foundational epistemology and
20 S. Patel
scholars who insist that “real” evidence is necessary to make relevant and significant
analytical arguments. This remains a critical tension in this project.
Consequent to the growth, in the last 80 to 100 years of these above-mentioned
distinct and varied perspectives, we have seen a slow dismantling of the epistemo-
logical assumptions which have governed the Eurocentric epistemology of the
discipline. No longer is modernity equated with the West – with the West being
the center of modernity’s geography. If this chapter has highlighted differences
within the ex-colonial worlds and the global South regarding how colonialism
should be perceived, we now recognize similar trends within Europe which have
hegemonized the European others. This has raised the query of whether all forms of
domination have been touched by colonialism. Consequently, a universal theory, a
“one fits all” position, has become dysfunctional. No wonder most scholars now
agree that it is important to write histories and to do sociologies in terms of differing
scales and from epistemes that organize colonial/national margins. No wonder they
also assert the necessity of interrogating the methods and methodologies of science:
given the embeddedness of ways of seeing and knowing in power/knowledge
dynamics which in turn are defined by dominant-subaltern circuits of colonial
knowledge.
We live in an interconnected global world. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth
and from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century, colonialism established circuits of
material and cognitive connections. Since that time, in the twenty-first century, we
are integrated by many complex cognitive circuits within the overall divisions
created by its colonial and nationalist histories, its geographies, and the unequal
distribution of income, privilege, status, and power. These circuits have created
differences and variations within the global world system consequent to the way
events and processes have been organized and sociabilities constituted. Subse-
quently, it is imperative to understand these cognitive geographies and the system
that reproduces them and to do research through these varying scales, bringing back
local and regional scholarship as it connects the scholarship of organic intellectuals
with formal knowledges. A decade back I argued for a need for diversity in
knowledge traditions (Patel 2010). Today, more than ever, this is needed.
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Part I: The Indigenous Approach

indigenous as “epistemological sublimation from the socio-material experiences of

Part II: The Postcolonial and the Decolonial

Postcolonialism grew as an academic project that deconstructed the hegemonic

particularly its anti-foundationalism – a commitment to study the “real” world but

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