Modernity and Postcolonial Critique

While the social relations of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery are coextensive with the emergence of the modern world, most social theoretical accounts of modernity render them peripheral to understandings of its development. In this presentation I discuss the limitations of standard approaches and argue for a ‘connected historical sociologies’ approach that addresses the postcolonial present of sociology, and its concepts, through recognition, historically, of the ‘colonial global’ and the figure of the subaltern.