Racism, Empire and Sociology

‘[T]he entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.’ So wrote Mary Louise Pratt, at the start of Imperial Eyes (1992: 6), her insightful account of colonial travelogue. Pratt’s point provides a pithy summary of one of the central claims of what was, at the time, the still emerging field of postcolonial studies (in which context, of course, Imperial Eyes was a path-breaking text). This is the claim that the practices and the relations of empire need to be acknowledged as constitutive of European self-understanding. Far from empire being something which lay beyond, outside or apart from Europe it was, to a considerable extent, in and through imperial practices and relations that Europe came to recognize and define itself. That recognition has led to a wide-ranging critical re-evaluation within a range of disciplines. English literature, for example, has seen important accounts of its disciplinary emergence from within the pedagogical contexts of empire (e.g. Azim, 1993; Viswanathan, 1987), and of the ways in which conventional literary studies have reflected and reproduced the forms of knowledge and the self-identities on which empire depended. Yet, as Gurminder Bhambra argues, in the first volume of the new Bloomsbury monograph series, ‘Theory for a Global Age’, sociology has been remarkably reluctant to engage in any correspondingly critical reflection on its own relationship to the history and conceptual legacies of