Situating Sociological Thought in Sites of Struggle

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting

Thank you Dr. Ali Meghji for inviting me to form part of this panel. I’m truly humbled to present alongside scholars I deeply admire. The working title of my paper is Situating Sociological Thought in Sites of Struggle.

I want to begin my talk by reading an excerpt of a text written by Camilo Torres Restrepo, a sociologist and priest who died as a guerilla fighter in Colombia. As some of you may know, Camilo and Orlando Fals Borda also founded the department of sociology. In 1961, Camilo presented a paper at one of the first sociology conferences in Latin America. He stated the following: Sociology has not been an exception within the mosaic of our cultural [and intellectual] colonialism, which persists across political and economic forms of colonialism.

This statement reveals that before postcolonial and decolonial studies emerged and before sociology in the Global North started to engage in dialogue with radical thought from other geographies (not referring to W.E.B. Du Bois), the founding of sociology departments in the Global South paradoxically didn’t always fulfill the neocolonial curricular designs linked to the founding of social science departments that should have otherwise mimicked rather than questioned the social sciences in the Global North. From the very beginning, critiques against material and symbolic forms of colonialism were already present in sociology. This had much to do with the sociopolitical context in which sociology departments were founded, a context in which decolonization and liberation movements unfolded throughout the world—the context serving as the condition of possibility for radical discourses to emerge within and beyond academia.

As someone who’s not a sociologist but someone whose thinking is informed by sociological thought from Latin America and the Caribbean, I want to argue that radical sociological thought is far greater than the disciplinary knowledge of sociology. This argument is not unique, of course, but for pedagogical purposes, it’s worth repeating.

Radical sociological thought is therefore not a mode of thinking that is property of sociology. Rather, every community, region, or continent that has a shared history of modern/colonial domination has expressed sociological interpretations of the world in literature, poetry, music, and oral history.

For example, Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude theorizes the heterogeneous social existence of Latin America and the Caribbean and paints a new image of the social world of the region—where histories of colonialism and imperialism, as well as sociocultural universes coexist with one another and more often than not enter into contradictions and conflicts.

Literature, understood in its widest sense, offers sociological insights often ignored by disciplinary knowledge. Perhaps there’s a reason why Mariátegui dedicated over 40 percent of his book to examining the heterogeneous character of literature, particularly the intimate links it has with the heterogeneous social existence of colonial contexts. Anibal Quijano builds upon Mariátegui’s work to advance the notion of historical-structural heterogeneity, which helped shift the understanding of the “social” toward a heterogeneously structured planetary totality.

The reconceptualization of social heterogeneity offers analytical value when interrogating social reality and its discontinuous, conflicting, and relational structures and processes within a planetary frame of reference.

Sociological thought must therefore be situated for it to interrogate social reality from vantage points often excluded from the canon—that is, from the semantic hegemony of disciplinary discourses. It must be capable of learning from excluded texts and contexts to be able to reconceptualize the notion of social totality beyond the narrow understanding of “society.” Broad in scope, sociological thought must draw on a wide range of geographies to amplify other interpretations of the world. It must uncover what modernity has excluded, which implies theorizing the world from places of understanding that to this day are systematically silenced. By thinking from excluded geographies not only are new images, concepts, and interpretations of the world made more visible but so are silenced histories—histories of struggle.

Anticolonial and abolitionist sociologies, therefore, cannot do without a radical understanding of the Haitian Revolution, since it is here that we see anticolonial and abolitionist thought obtain its most revolutionary expression—where a people defeated one of the most powerful empires in the world. It is where the unthinkable happens—where a people break not from the weakest but the strongest link of domination and exploitation. Tracing the struggles of the past uncovers the systematic silences that distort our understanding of the present and limit our future political horizon—for without an understanding of the past, how is the present unsettled to create the conditions of possibility for an alternative future to emerge? As Robin DG Kelley states in the forward to Cedric Robinson’s book, we need to recover a “radical understanding of the past in order to chart the way forward.” The past helps us radically interrogate social reality to collectively act and realize the unthinkable. To those who deny the relevance of the past in the present, Du Bois once wrote: “Don’t you understand that the past is the present; that without what was, nothing is? That….of the infinite dead…the living are but unimportant bits.” Or As James Baldwin expressed, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

Thinking from silenced histories intends to recover the alternative future horizons past struggles fought for under material conditions not of their own choosing. Keeping utopia alive is not naïve, nor is it ahistorical or lacking sociological implications. It’s the utopic horizon we keep alive that makes it possible to articulate a politics that may work toward reaching said horizon—albeit without any guarantees. Utopias are intense collective desires and projections of a world we would like to live in. As Robinson observed: The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.

By imagining alternative horizons—or other possible worlds—sociological thought can play an important role in advancing a planetary sociological imagination that can interrogate the geopolitics of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism from multiple standpoints, while also making more visible how resistance/re-existence endures despite the incredible odds to so. A planetary sociological imagination would underscore how Indigenous, Black, and campesino communities and other communities in resistance, such as the Palestinian struggle, serve as pedagogical gestures that teach us radical epistemologies and world-making practices. Their voices and struggles unfortunately don’t travel as easily to dominant academic spaces that tend to welcome more diluted understandings of coloniality and decoloniality. Theorizing the world from a specific place is about making visible the radical interpretations of the world from vantage points that for far too long have been violently kept silent.

Theorizing the world from a particular vantage point contributes to what I am referring to as a planetary sociological imagination, which helps articulate struggles across intimately entangled geographies and histories linked to colonial domination, as well as abolitionist, anticolonial, and liberation movements. Current discussions on climate catastrophes are pointing to the shared history and ongoing colonial dispossession in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well as in other Indigenous communities. A planetary sociological imagination takes these discussions seriously since they shift our attention to the form anti-colonial struggles take within the context of climate change, where the defense of forests, mountains, rivers, and water is central to territorial struggles throughout the world.

A planetary sociological imagination also resonates with the work of the late Charles Mills who wrote in The Racial Contract that we cannot interrogate the world without an image, concept, or horizon of said world. How we view the world reveals the frame of reference or paradigm we depend on to interpret and position ourselves existentially, ethically, and politically. Our “worldview” is a vantage point for comprehending the hierarchically configured social reality of which we are a part, and within which we are positioned differentially.

The concepts we use to comprehend the world reveal how our thinking is socially, historically, and politically connected. They also have the potential to disrupt the naturalized understanding of the world and make evident that alongside domination and exploitation, there has always been resistance. And where there is resistance, there is re-existence, which is the affirmation of life despite the modern/colonial project of death and its incalculable violence. Black decolonial feminist activist intellectuals, such as Betty Ruth Lozano, Mara Vigoya, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Lia Pinheiro Barbosa, and many others, have made invaluable contributions to the understanding of how collective ways of being and alternative ways of knowing are constructed through struggle.

Articulating new images, concepts, and interpretations of the world thus fosters a planetary sociological imagination that aims to unsettle a world anchored in and structured by colonialism, capitalism, Indigenous dispossession, and heteropatriarchy. A planetary sociological imagination will help articulate struggles by making visible how struggles in one region have broader planetary implications—how one’s struggle can find points of convergence with other struggles without flattening geopolitical differences; how anticolonial struggles reconfigure what Dr. Julian Go refers to as the global field of imperialism. Perhaps it’s necessary to think about the conceptual and indeed political affordances of a planetary field since it lends itself to horizontal and grounded interpretations that enable rather than foreclose inter-epistemic dialogues or theoretical synergies, as Dr. Ali Meghji also advances. Sociological thought will hopefully continue to move toward building this planetary sociological imagination, which is urgently needed today when considering climate catastrophes, inter-imperial conflicts, and a multiplicity of emerging struggles.

To do so, sociology has to reclaim the ability to create alternative concepts. As Fanon (1963) invited us at the end of The Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts”. Concepts are windows through which we can view and interrogate social reality. The value of concepts is based on their ability to seriously interrogate the problems generated in the social world. Concepts enable the search for solutions, although they aren’t solutions in and of themselves, which tends to be the case in neoliberal academies where concepts are co-opted, commodified, and emptied of their political content. Concepts nonetheless open up alternatives to the present and enable the imagining of possibilities. This resonates with Stuart Hall’s situated approach to theorizing political conjunctures whereby political moments create the conditions of possibility for theoretical movements to emerge, Decolonization and liberation movements have therefore radically changed the type of knowledge we have access to today. Ethnic studies, Black Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, and Decolonial Studies would not exist if it weren’t for concrete movements. The Zapatistas, Landless Workers Movement, Via Campesina, the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonial dispossession, student and feminist movements, and a multiplicity of Indigenous territorial struggles have also created the conditions of possibility to think and do otherwise.

To conclude, these movements remind us that radical sociological theories are always derivative rather than the result of the genius of an individual or a “Star Professor” since radical sociological thought derives from the “true genius” that emerges from sites of struggle where, as Robinson noted, struggles are much “more than words or ideas but life itself.”

Thank you.