Political Science in the Afterlife of Empire: New Reckonings with Racism and Racialization

ver the past couple of decades, political scientists have begun to take seriously the question of European imperial dominion and the racialized world order that such colonial projects of extraction, dispossession, and economic dependency produced.This is not to say that all political phenomena are racialized or that they are direct products of imperial formations.But from the postcolonial perspective, "colonization assumes the place and significance of a major, extended, and ruptural world-historical event," as Stuart Hall argues in his essay, "When Was the Postcolonial?"(republished in the 2021 Duke University Press volume, Selected Writings on Marxism, p. 302).The age of European empires marks an inflection point that has irrevocably shifted the political, economic, social, and ideological terrain upon which modern nation-states took shape and political actors of all kinds have since moved.Increasingly, political scientists, political theorists, and IR scholars today are exploring whether certain state and interstate institutions, social relations, modes of production and extraction, conflicts, ideas, and identities might be productively situated within the expanded horizon and transnational scope of the (post) colonial frame.Many of the books reviewed in this issue pursue this line of investigation or touch on contemporary political problems posed by racism, minoritarian rule, social inequality, and the differential power relations that European empire left in its wake.While much of this scholarly work focuses on the United States, conversations about the legacies of racial slavery and empire are, of course, inherently transnational, even as such discussions must take a different, "distantiated" form in former imperial metropoles, as Catherine Hall writes in this issue's symposium (see her review of Yale & Slavery).Reckoning with a racialized past and present remains an emergent problematic within political science, one that invites further inquiry, cross-disciplinary exchange, and critical reflection.