Books by Gurminder K Bhambra
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https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/conne... more You can read the book for free via the link.
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This book outlines what theory for a global age might look like, positing an agenda for consideration, contestation and discussion, and a framework for the research-led volumes that follow in the series.
Gurminder K. Bhambra takes up the classical concerns of sociology and social theory and shows how they can be rethought through an engagement with postcolonial studies and decoloniality, two of the most distinctive critical approaches of the past decades.
Rethinking Modernity presents a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of modernity in contempora... more Rethinking Modernity presents a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of modernity in contemporary sociology and social theory. It criticizes the abstraction of European modernity from its colonial context as well as the way in which the experiences of non-Western 'others' are regarded as having no contribution to make to such understandings. In challenging the dominant, Eurocentred accounts of the emergence and development of modernity,Gurminder Bhambra presents an argument for the recognition of 'connected histories' in the reconstruction of historical sociology at a global level. She addresses three supposedly 'founding moments' in the narrative of modernity - the Renaissance, the French and Industrial Revolutions - in order to identify myths of origin which remain embedded in dominant accounts of modernity whether that be modernization theory or multiple modernities.
The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in... more The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history.
The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production.
African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.
Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.
What is the meaning of 1968, a year which figures large in the social imaginary? This volume brin... more What is the meaning of 1968, a year which figures large in the social imaginary? This volume brings together leading social theorists as well as promising younger scholars to examine the phenomenon of '1968' from a number of innovative perspectives, including situating 1968 in global context. The first section includes chapters by leading scholars who were witness to the events, reflecting on untold narratives of race, gender and sexuality as well as weaving their own personal stories into the analysis. The second section critically addresses the standard theoretical concepts and assumptions of 1968. The final section examines 'other voices', examining the struggles of African students, immigrants in France, transgender peoples, and provides a critique of the notion of 'other voices'. The volume also explores if and when 1968 'ended'.
Silences are not simply absences, but are a constitutive feature of discourse and practice. Silen... more Silences are not simply absences, but are a constitutive feature of discourse and practice. Silences inform issues of voice, representation, and responsibility along with associated problems of inclusion, exclusion, and participation. This volume frames the contested nature of the human rights project within these concerns arguing that there exists an intimate relationship between the descriptor 'silence' and the political effect of human rights. This volume suggests that it is not possible to speak descriptively of 'the silencing of human rights' without also confronting the culpability of the human rights project within these silences. Where canonical discourses of human rights fail to acknowledge the silencing of rights claims, associated with various social meanings and identities in their founding episodes, they are condemned to perpetuate them, albeit in new forms. Rather than judging the human rights project as either emancipatory or as domination this volume focuses upon its essentially contested nature.
Papers by Gurminder K Bhambra
The nation-state is the primary political unit of analysis across the social sciences. It is unde... more The nation-state is the primary political unit of analysis across the social sciences. It is understood to organize the formal international division of the world as well as social relations domestically. Its emergence is associated with processes that are said to bring into being the modern world, alongside the accompanying displacement of a system of empires, associated with earlier historical periods. Such understandings present nations and empires as distinct political entities and fail to recognize the conjunction of the emergence of the nation-state with European colonial expansion and an ongoing expansion of new overseas European empires. In this article, I set out an alternative account of how we might understand the varieties of empire and varieties of colonialism that characterize the modern period. I shall argue that colonialism is a distinctively modern phenomenon which, in turn, gives European overseas empire a character different from other empires contemporaneous with them. This difference rests, in large part, in the specificity of a political economy of colonialism that is often misidentified as a separate capitalist modernity.
Emancipations: Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 2022
The role of colonialism in the development of modern society is by now well acknowledged. Gurmind... more The role of colonialism in the development of modern society is by now well acknowledged. Gurminder Bhambra, however, has argued not only that the injustices of the past need to be repaired, as many thinkers within the decolonial and post-colonial movement have urged, but that this reparative work must also be extended to the social sciences themselves. In a discussion with Albena Azmanova, she addresses this project of radical decolonization of the Western mind.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2020
The inaugural section of "Praxiography: practices and institutions" of Matter: Journal of New Mat... more The inaugural section of "Praxiography: practices and institutions" of Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research features a roundtable discussion between five scholars who address matters pertaining to practices, legacies, and affects that comprise today's academia. Preceded by editors' introduction, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Andrea Pető, Jessie Loyer, Mariya Ivancheva, and Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir offer their reflections on ways of organising, living, and imagining various research and academic praxes by means of thinking with the concepts of resistance, collaboration, solidarity, care, and kinship and consider them from feminist, de-colonial, Indigenous, and other anti-oppressive perspectives.
There has been an intensification of student protests around the world addressing issues of racia... more There has been an intensification of student protests around the world addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialised hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices. These movements point to urgent concerns about what and how we teach and research, and how the resources of universities might be used to support the amelioration of injustice rather than its reproduction. This short piece focuses on the curriculum and points to actions that we can take to build resources for a more dynamic and adequate curriculum within our universities. In particular, it discusses one collaborative initiative that all the authors have been involved in, the website Global Social Theory. This site provides resources for the diversification and expansion of the curriculum for those teaching and studying social theory.
Journal of Historical …, Jan 1, 2011
US sociology has been historically segregated in that, at least until the 1960s, there were two d... more US sociology has been historically segregated in that, at least until the 1960s, there were two distinct institutionally organised traditions of sociological thought – one black and one white. For the most part, however, dominant historiographies have been silent on that segregation and, at best, reproduce it when addressing the US sociological tradition. This is evident in the rarity with which scholars such as W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’, as Saint-Arnaud (2009) calls them, are presented as core sociological voices within histories of the discipline. In this article, I address the absence of African American sociologists from the US sociological canon and, further, discuss the implications of this absence for our understanding of core sociological concepts. With regard to the latter, I focus in particular on the debates around equality and emancipation and discuss the ways in which our understanding of these concepts could be extended by taking into account the work of African American sociologists and their different interpretations of core themes.
This article addresses the way in which perceptions about the globalized nature of the world in w... more This article addresses the way in which perceptions about the globalized nature of the world in which we live are beginning to have an impact within sociology such that sociology has to engage not just with the changing conceptual architecture of globalization, but also with recognition of the epistemological value and agency of the world beyond the West. I address three main developments within sociology that focus on these concerns: first, the shift to a multiple modernities paradigm; second, a call for a multicultural global sociology; and third, an argument in favor of a global cosmopolitan approach. While the three approaches under discussion are based on a consideration of the ''rest of the world,'' their terms, I suggest, are not adequate to the avowed intentions. None of these responses is sufficient in their address of earlier omissions and each falls back into the problems of the mainstream position that is otherwise being criticized. In contrast, I argue that it is only by acknowledging the significance of the ''colonial global'' in the constitution of sociology that it is possible to understand and address the necessarily postcolonial (and decolonial) present of ''global sociology.''
South Atlantic Quarterly, Jan 1, 2012
The UK government proposes to put students at the heart of higher education. In truth, they put t... more The UK government proposes to put students at the heart of higher education. In truth, they put the market at its heart. The reforms remove all
direct public funding of undergraduate degrees in arts, humanities, and
social sciences and replace it with a system of fees supported by student
loans. The upper fee limit is currently capped at £9,000 per year, but the
government hopes that many universities will charge less and is encouraging
the entry of new providers of undergraduate degree programs, including
for-profit providers such as BPP (part of Apollo Group), Kaplan, and
Pearson International. In due course, it is likely that the fee cap will be
removed, and a small group of universities will be able to charge significantly
higher fees, with other universities charging significantly less in the
face of competition.
Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and... more Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and the public sphere. This paper recognises the problems in identity politics as arising from an apparent difficulty in conceptualising identity separately from notions of fixity and exclusion. It argues that politicised identities could, instead, be premised upon an explicit affirmation of the provisionality of political identity that is oriented to a “tomorrow “ in which the identity will no longer be required.
Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is fr... more Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is frequently understood as sociology's special object with sociology itself a distinctively modern form of explanation. The period of sociology's disciplinary formation was also the heyday of European colonialism, yet the colonial relationship did not figure in the development of sociological understandings. While the recent emergence of postcolonialism appears to have initiated a reconsideration of understandings of modernity, with the development of theories of multiple modernities, I suggest that this engagement is more an attempt at recuperating the transformative aspect of postcolonialism than engaging with its critiques. In setting out the challenge of postcolonialism to dominant sociological accounts, I also address `missing feminist/queer revolutions', suggesting that by engaging with postcolonialism there is the potential to transform sociological understandings by opening up a dialogue beyond the simple pluralism of identity claims.
feminism, identity, modernity, multiple modernities, postcolonialism, sociological theory
The American Historical Review, Jan 1, 2011
Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and d... more Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and difference: a temporal rupture between an agrarian, pre-modern past and an industrial, modern present, and a cultural difference between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’. While sociology’s long-standing linear accounts of modernization, based on notions of societal convergence, have been tempered by a recent emphasis on ‘multiple modernities’, the wider postcolonial critique has not been sufficiently answered. One of the most significant charges of this critique has been that the universality ascribed to sociological concepts such as modernity has been based on a parochial reading of the histories of Europe and the US as internally homogenous and qualitatively distinct from histories elsewhere. In other words, the world historical character of such concepts rests on a partial understanding of what happened in the West with little consideration of events in other places – more specifically, of the necessarily global conditions of these events. In this article, I assess the contributions of four developments in sociology and history which seek to take into account the world beyond the West in our understandings of modernity: namely, third wave cultural historical sociology, multiple modernities, micro-histories and global history. These different endeavours provide promising avenues of redress to earlier Eurocentred narratives, but to be effective they must not only provide us with ‘new data’ but also participate in the dialogue of how these new considerations may prompt us to think differently about the concepts in question.
Interventions, Jan 1, 2006
Edward W. Said has advocated the crossing of boundaries whilst at the same time abjuring the exis... more Edward W. Said has advocated the crossing of boundaries whilst at the same time abjuring the existence of those very boundaries. In practice, this has been played out in his opposition to nationalism existing alongside his support for the Palestinian people – a relationship that many have regarded as paradoxical if not contradictory. His regard for nationalist movements as having progressive and liberatory potential stands alongside his recognition of the uncomfortable relationship between nationalism and liberation. The tension arises, for him, as a consequence of the processes of differentiation that are associated with the emergence, and existence, of nations sitting uneasily with the narratives of emancipation which, in their strongest form, he argues, are ‘narratives of integration not separation’ (1993: xxx). In his commitment to truth and justice, Said recognised the positing of boundaries and barriers as giving rise ‘to polarisations that absolve and forgive ignorance and demagogy more than they enable knowledge’ (1993: 35). In particular, he was opposed to the idea that ‘only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience’ (Said 1993: 35). Identity, for him, be that national, cultural, or other, was best understood as a starting point for a more interesting journey; and not all that human life was about. This issue of Interventions explores possible journeys in more depth through three articles which take up very different themes in addressing them. A central concern that resonates through all the articles, however, is Said’s commitment to truth, justice, equality, and the possibility of a better world – always provisional, always open to further negotiation and reconstruction.
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Books by Gurminder K Bhambra
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/connected-sociologies/
This book outlines what theory for a global age might look like, positing an agenda for consideration, contestation and discussion, and a framework for the research-led volumes that follow in the series.
Gurminder K. Bhambra takes up the classical concerns of sociology and social theory and shows how they can be rethought through an engagement with postcolonial studies and decoloniality, two of the most distinctive critical approaches of the past decades.
The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production.
African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.
Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.
Papers by Gurminder K Bhambra
direct public funding of undergraduate degrees in arts, humanities, and
social sciences and replace it with a system of fees supported by student
loans. The upper fee limit is currently capped at £9,000 per year, but the
government hopes that many universities will charge less and is encouraging
the entry of new providers of undergraduate degree programs, including
for-profit providers such as BPP (part of Apollo Group), Kaplan, and
Pearson International. In due course, it is likely that the fee cap will be
removed, and a small group of universities will be able to charge significantly
higher fees, with other universities charging significantly less in the
face of competition.
feminism, identity, modernity, multiple modernities, postcolonialism, sociological theory
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/connected-sociologies/
This book outlines what theory for a global age might look like, positing an agenda for consideration, contestation and discussion, and a framework for the research-led volumes that follow in the series.
Gurminder K. Bhambra takes up the classical concerns of sociology and social theory and shows how they can be rethought through an engagement with postcolonial studies and decoloniality, two of the most distinctive critical approaches of the past decades.
The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production.
African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.
Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.
direct public funding of undergraduate degrees in arts, humanities, and
social sciences and replace it with a system of fees supported by student
loans. The upper fee limit is currently capped at £9,000 per year, but the
government hopes that many universities will charge less and is encouraging
the entry of new providers of undergraduate degree programs, including
for-profit providers such as BPP (part of Apollo Group), Kaplan, and
Pearson International. In due course, it is likely that the fee cap will be
removed, and a small group of universities will be able to charge significantly
higher fees, with other universities charging significantly less in the
face of competition.
feminism, identity, modernity, multiple modernities, postcolonialism, sociological theory