Epistemic strides: from decolonizing politics and sociology to non-colonial politics and sociology

Abstract

Over the past years, decolonization has attracted growing attention across academic fields and divides. Ali Meghji’s Decolonizing Sociology and Robbie Shilliam’s Decolonizing Politics are two significant, timely and accessible interventions into this developing conversation. In this sense, they are best read as parts of the larger accumulating scholarship working towards the decolonization of contemporary education and academic disciplines, including José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown’s The Sociology of W. E. B. DuBois (2020), Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied (2017), Gurminder Bhambra’s Rethinking Modernity (2007), and Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha’s Sociological Theory beyond the Canon (2017), among others. Throughout Decolonizing Sociology, Ali Meghji examines sociology’s deep entwinement with colonialism and imperialism, and its birth within the confines of European empires, often at their service. This examination shows through ample argumentation and examples how the ‘sociological canon’ offers provincial Eurocentric knowledge, and claims it to be universal. Meghji argues that this colonial sociology has been ‘exported’ to the global South, transformed into the only mode of legitimate ‘social science’ within a global colonial political economy of knowledge. Conceptualizing the canon itself as ‘colonial sociology’, Meghji consequently introduces a ‘decolonial challenge’ through, specifically, a serious engagement with southern ‘indigenous’ sociologies that resist, critique and counter the work of colonial sociology. In this respect, Meghji draws on key figures in anti-, postand decolonial scholarship, including W. E. B. DuBois, Ali Shariati and Frantz Fanon, to argue that decolonial social thinking has long engaged with the canon by offering valuable contributions to its decolonization while at the Patterns of Prejudice, 2021 Vol. 55, No. 4, 391–398, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2022.2071277