What postcolonial sociology forgets: recovering the materialist tradition of anti-colonial critique

In this essay I call for the re-engagement of a tradition of black radical and anticolonial writing which sought to develop a specifically materialist account of colonial ideologies. For the writers in that tradition, such as C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon and the early Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the crucial de-reifying move was to show that particular forms of knowledge, particular ways of making sense of the world, were a determinate consequence of the racialised structures of exploitation which capitalist imperialism established and sustained. In doing so those writers moved in a direction that was radically different from that which has tended to characterize post- and decolonial approaches as these have been taken up in sociology. In those more recent approaches our ways of knowing, naming and describing the social world have tended to be framed as centrally constitutive features of that world, and capitalism has been accorded at most a heavily caveated, at worst a non-existent, analytical significance. Through a contrapuntal reading of representative voices from these intellectual traditions I seek to demonstrate why that earlier approach remains salient and why, in many cases, it is more persuasive than that commonly adopted in post- and decolonial sociologies.