From Anti-Colonial Thought to Decolonial Public Sociology

My talk is about a historical sociology of anti-colonial thought in the Black Atlantic during the phase of decolonisation (approx. 1950s-1970s). I would like to analyse this body of anti-colonial thought as a first wave of Marxist and combative, decolonial and public organic sociology, produced by freedom fighters and for political, economic and cultural liberation. Sociology was understood by authors such as Césaire, Fanon, Guevara, Cabral, Nkrumah, Manley, Nyere, Rodney as a weapon of liberation, as a means of self-understanding for the oppressed and for creating a world of equality and justice. With the neoliberal counter-revolution in the 1970s, anti-colonial thinking became increasingly academic and more concerned with the decolonisation of thought in the social and historical sciences themselves than with the decolonisation of global politics and economics. This is, of course, also an important endeavour, but the political struggle for liberation has been marginalised, if not entirely suppressed, as a sociological task and objective. In my talk, however, I am concerned with contributing to a global historical sociology of sociology that pursues two concerns. On the one hand, I am interested in understanding these anti-colonial thinkers as alternative classics of sociology. In doing so, I want to contribute to the decolonisation of disciplinary boundaries, the subject and self-understanding, canon and curriculum of sociology. On the other hand, I will conceive them as classics that can inspire a renewal of decolonial public sociology.