What's in a name? Postcolonialism and decoloniality as difference within sameness

The decolonial perspective’s gradual departure from subaltern studies and the „postcolonial studies“ label can be traced back to both formal as well as more substantial reasons. While some of the substantial ones, such as postcolonial studies’ neglect of Iberian colonialism, speak to the very geopolitics of knowledge central to the decolonial approach, some important decolonial concepts, such as Occidentalism and coloniality itself, directly complement and refine notions already present in postcolonial studies. The paper argues that, as far as the most promising approaches within each of the two "camps" are concerned, there are more similarities than there are differences and that both approaches can make crucial contributions to an overcoming of sociology's Occidentalist premises. To this end, it focuses on the continuities between decoloniality and dependency theory as well as world-systems analysis in order to show how the decolonial perspective can be made fruitful for different strands of sociology.

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