New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xii, 248 pp. US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-062514-6.
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the
ends of the earth!
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”
Social theory emerged in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, at a time when “the great nations” of the West were colonizing and “civilizing” territories around the world. Although the prevailing forms of colonialism have changed, the legacy of modern empire continues to haunt the theoretical frameworks and ways of thinking among researchers in the twenty-first century. Kipling’s claim that East and West will never meet still rings true, despite the presumption among many prominent scholars—including those studying Asia and the Pacific—that they are strong enough to transcend global divisions and adopt a universal perspective.
Postcolonial theorists have convincingly addressed colonial blind spots in social theory for several decades, while heterodox sociologists like Raewyn Connell and Gurminder Bhambra have recently brought postcolonial insights into the mainstream of their field. Julian Go’s Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory follows in their footsteps and breaks new ground by providing a clear, coherent, and convincing argument for decolonizing social theory and initiating a third wave of sociological postcolonial thought. The book starts by posing the question: Is social theory beyond empire possible? Go suggests that although social theory has served empire whereas postcolonial thought has contested empire, the two fields have much to offer each other. To support this key point, chapter 1 examines the first wave of postcolonial thought that arose from anticolonial struggle and the second wave that originated in academia. First-wave authors such as Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois recover the subjective experiences of the colonized, fight Western imperialism and racism, and challenge Enlightenment modes of knowledge. Second-wave authors like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak stress that Western discourses on colonial territories construct colonized people and societies as objects to be ruled, while closing off spaces for the subaltern to represent themselves. Chapter 2 confronts the imperial standpoint and metrocentrism in social theory, which lead influential scholars ranging from Karl Marx to Anthony Giddens to adopt the “colonizer’s model of the world,” normalize the “law of division” separating the West from the rest, and repress the history-making potential of colonized people.
After identifying the postcolonial challenge and describing metrocentric social theory, Go discusses two kinds of relational sociology for analyzing connections among colonizers and colonized in chapter 3. Relational social theories oppose substantialism by treating interactions and networks as constitutive of actors and social systems. Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, for example, highlights overlapping arenas of struggle in which actors compete for valued resources. And Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory prioritizes local, trans-local, and transnational relations among humans, non-human objects, and natural environments (rather than individuals, nation-states, and the world-system) as key units of action and analysis. Go calls for postcolonialrelationalism in studies of overlapping territories and intertwined histories, urging scholars to pay special attention to how events in colonies around the world are integral to the formation of European modernity. In the fourth and most important chapter, Go draws on feminists to propose a subaltern standpoint theory. Contrary to the imperial standpoint shaping conventional research, the subaltern standpoint refers to the experiences, positions, and perspectives of social groups at the bottom of the imperial global hierarchy. Go relies on what he labels “perspectival realism,” accepting that a real world with knowable characteristics exists while insisting that how we perceive and represent that world partially depends on the particular observer. He suggests that subaltern standpoint theory offers an innovative (yet incomplete) map of the world that allows sociologists to see what was invisible, hear what was inaudible, and learn from subjugated knowledges. It encourages researchers to avoid false universalisms, focus on concrete problems and contexts, consider subjective orientations in analyzing action, and produce new theories and concepts for studying humanity. Finally, the conclusion reviews how postcolonial relationalism and subaltern standpoint theory enable a third wave of sociological postcolonial thought that not only confronts colonizing forms of social theory, but also opens the social and political sciences to new ways of thinking and acting in the contemporary world.
My brief summary cannot adequately capture the clarity of Go’s writing, quality of his synthesis, and significance of his theoretical manifesto. Nevertheless, I hope that the wider relevance of Go’s book is obvious to readers of Pacific Affairs. In my view, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory is a key text for scholars seeking to critique the mainstream paradigms of their particular fields and create alternative approaches. It allows me to recognize the imperial standpoint and lack of attention to subaltern subjectivities in my field of social movement studies, for instance, while motivating me to develop new ways of doing research that prioritize the stories, positions, and perspectives of subaltern activists. It also encourages specialists on Asia and the Pacific to ground their observations and arguments in the complex colonial history of the region, and to be sensitive to how the legacies of imperialism continue to shape the conditions of Asian or Pacific people and cultures in the twenty-first century. Even Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory has its limitations, however. By taking for granted that direct forms of colonialism are in the past, for example, it tends to overlook how indigenous peoples around the world, Palestinian refugees, and aboriginals in Australia—among many others—still confront territorial rule today. And it almost completely neglects the crucial role of Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and India as a first-wave postcolonial thinker and revolutionary. But these gaps in the book should only inspire us to add our own contributions to “the rising third wave of critical post-colonial knowledge” (202).
Sean Chabot
Eastern Washington University, Cheney, USA
pp. 550-552