Postcolonialism, Modernity and Politics

Course description

The foundations and legitimacy of European social theory has been shaken. Thinkers from different backgrounds have questioned the alleged universalism of social theory’s central philosophical orientations and categories — such as civil society, the state, modernity, right, citizenship, secularism, or even capitalism. It is claimed that the philosophical foundation of social theory in Enlightenment universalism is only European hegemony in disguise, the bedrock over which capitalist modernity in its different manifestations rests. This marks both an epistemological and political critique of social theory’s capacity of being genuinely global, inclusive and transformative.

In this course, we read different engagements with this central problematic, with a particular interest in interventions by non-European or Arab thinkers. We start by conceptually mapping the postcolonial challenge and its relation to social theory, attempting to identify both its insights and limitations. We will explore the different ways those problems have been posed and evaluate different strategic attempts at overcoming them — for example, by suggesting alternative, global, cosmopolitan, subaltern or connected modernities. This reading, however, will be both historical and political, animated by a concern for thinking through and beyond the postcolonial challenge in order to address contemporary political questions emerging from the Arab world and beyond.