Abstract
This paper addresses the question of what a sociology of colonial critique as emanating from the Arab world would encompass. It also attempts to bring this critique to bear on a contemporary sociology of the Arab world and the Global South more broadly. Its starting point is that Europe and the US are the main political, social and cultural referents of Arab societies. This is in contrast to the importance placed on south-south solidarity by regional states and activists during the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which Arab movements and thinkers looked to, and were part of, third-worldist solidarity movements and different forms of cultural exchange. This paper revisits this era and constructs a south-south genealogy of Arab anti-colonial critique. Here, the questions to be asked are no longer solely about the postcolonial world’s vertical imaginary vis-à-vis the colonial world, but about its horizontal cultural configuration in relation to other postcolonial societies, thinkers, movements and ideas. Thus, by examining these historical transnational processes, structures and cultural flows within, across and beyond the territorial and imaginative postcolonial spaces of Asia and Africa, I contend, the postcolonial world becomes a site for the theorization of the social world more broadly. Such an approach, I argue, could contribute to a colonial-critique centered contemporary Arab sociology. Although inspired by the social theory that emanated from the decolonization era, such an approach must contend with a very different conceptual problematic given the changed realities of the region today.
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