This book is an attempt to make good on questions raised by my father, questions that others with my social and cultural background may recognize from their own diasporic experiences. My father was a man who, enjoying the freedoms that independence from colonial rule brought, journeyed across India by train reading newspapers, consuming literature, talking to the peoples he encountered and arguing with them. Arguing, always arguing, against those who lamented the departure of the British, against those who expressed forms of dependency, whether intellectual or other, against those who saw the British Empire as a force for good in the world. Instead, he spoke to them about exploitation, about appropriation, about dispossession, and about the profound injustices and injuries of over two centuries of colonization. Much later he would question my own bland assertions drawn from a standard British schooling that drew attention to the horrors of Stalinism, but had nothing to say about the genocides of native peoples in the lands that came to be known as the Americas, as New Zealand, as Australia and as South Africa. He questioned the assertion that there was no democracy in countries such as Cuba by asking what I knew of the problems that any democracy might face that challenged Western hegemony. What did I know of the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende, of the murder of Lumumba, of countless other instances by way of which the Third World project was undermined? In his refusal to accept as truth the stated truths of the colonizer, he was the first to teach me to question, to ask ‘is that really so?’
Writing this book has coincided with the systematic dismantling of public higher education in England where the very processes of knowledge production are also at stake. The mass, or public, university did not only open its doors to a more diverse demographic – that is, to women, the working-classes, black and minority ethnic people – but there was also an opening up of the curriculum and what (and whose) knowledge was validated. It is no accident that the government that is closing down the spaces for public higher education is also the government that wants the history curriculum for schools, for example, to be organized around a narrow interpretation of Our Island Story; a history book for children written by Henrietta Marshall in 1905 where British history was understood only in terms of the events that took place within the territorial bounds of the nation. What this misses, however, is that from its very inception as a nation, Britain has also been imperial and therefore its history has always been more extensive than the narrow parochialism now being promoted. How we represent the past is central to the politics of the present and it should be no surprise, then, that with the promotion of narrow and exclusive histories come narrow-minded policies in their wake – the ‘Go Home’ campaign in the summer of 2013 is one such example. Defending the public university is about defending the processes of democratization that have begun to open up knowledge production for all – knowledge is power, and if we don’t reverse these current changes, we are facing a future in which power will, more explicitly, be knowledge.
This book is written in the hope that a more adequate address of our past within sociological considerations of the present will enable the opening up of different, and better, futures.
My deepest thanks go to those with whom I share the intellectual and political project to which this book is a contribution. While we have different responses and arguments, the questions we are seeking to explore provide a common ground for intellectual engagement and scholarship. For being part of this conversation and for all that you contribute to the making possible of other worlds, I would like to thank Ipek Demir, Peo Hansen, John Holmwood, Stefan Jonsson, Vicky Margree, Lucy Mayblin, John Narayan and Robbie Shilliam. I would also like to thank Vicky Margree and Robbie Shilliam for providing constructive comments on various chapters and Alice Mah and John Holmwood who provided excellent feedback across the whole book. John, in particular, read this manuscript many more times than any individual should have to and it is far better as a consequence of his engagement than it otherwise would have been.
This book has been ‘in process’ for a number of years and I thank, in particular, my publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, for their patience. Emily Drewe initially approached me with a request to write a book and somehow I found myself having agreed not only to write a book, but also to edit a series. Caroline Wintersgill took over from Emily and has been consistently supportive and immensely helpful across both my roles, as editor and author – I thank them both for their professionalism and collegiality. The University of Warwick has provided an intellectual home during the process of writing and I thank my colleagues in Sociology, History, Politics and Classics for their interdisciplinary commitments and scholarly engagements that have enabled the space for the articulation of the arguments made here. I would like to acknowledge the interactions, conversations and debates with the many Warwick students who have taken my modules on Global Historical Sociology, Global Sociology, Sociology and Postcolonialism, and Global Modernities, where various arguments made within the book were first tried out.
I have also presented these arguments at a number of conferences and seminars and I thank the organizers for the invitations that enabled me to discuss these issues with diverse audiences: Engin Isin, Deorientalizing Citizenship? Oecumene: Citizenship After Orientalism, Open University; Sandra Ponzanesi, Postcolonial Europe Network, Utrecht University; Rainer Forst, Philosophy and Social Science conference, Prague; Alf Nilsen, Bergen University; Esperança Bielsa, Symposium on Cosmopolitan Connections, Faculty of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona; Stefan Jonsson, Austere Histories of Europe Symposium, Linköping University, Norrköping; Zdenek Kavan, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex; Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, Decolonial summer school, Roosevelt Academy and Utrecht University; Wiebke Keim, International Conference on Circulating Social Science Knowledge, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg; Rodrigo Cordero, Faculty of Social Sciences and History, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago; Mauro di Meglio, University L’Orientale, Naples; Neera Chandhoke, Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi. During 2013, I was a visiting academic, at the invitation of Gunlög Fur, at the Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Centre, Linnaeus University, Växjö and, at the invitation of Marcelo Rosa, at the Department of Sociology, University of Brasilia. I would like to thank them both for enabling me to spend time at their institutions and for the thoughtful and productive interactions with colleagues in both places.
Much as I see scholarship as a collective project and should like to share any responsibilities for errors and weaknesses the book might contain, they are, of course, my own.