Knowledge with power

This commentary responds to Andrew Smith's ‘What post-colonial sociology forgets: Recovering the materialist tradition of anti-colonial critique’. It argues that, rather than being forgotten, the key figures that populate this tradition have become hegemonic in ways that have made them vulnerable to capture by antagonistic ideological tendencies. The argument is illustrated with reference to contemporary invocations of the work of Ngũgı˜ wa Thiong’o in neoliberal and fascist appropriations of ‘decolonisation’. It then suggests that while Smith frames the key tension between materialist and post/decolonial sociology in terms of a temporal sequencing of knowledge and power, his dichotomous framing neglects a third possibility in which knowledge neither anticipates nor follows power but is imbricated with it in a relationship that is better thought of as dialectical.