Movement texts as anti-colonial theory

Ahmad, Mahvish ORCID: 0000-0003-1807-8028 (2023) Movement texts as anti-colonial theory. Sociology, 57 (1). 54 - 71. ISSN 0038-0385

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Abstract

Despite the decolonial turn among sociologists, we have yet to engage a vast amount of thought produced by anti-colonial movements. The circumvention of much of this thought indexes overly restrictive understandings of what constitutes social theory, and I diagnose three ways in which this plays out. Anti-colonial movement texts provide striking demonstrations of this limitation, and of what is lost as a result. Through a close study of a banned 1970s pamphlet from Pakistan, I show that critically deepening the decolonial project through an engagement with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy’s relationship to political struggle and demands new methodologies of archival retrieval that recognise the scattered, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence. If addressed, southern movement texts reveal counter-infrastructures of knowledge production replete with counter-political vocabularies that challenge homogenising academic definitions of the Global South and enrich our theories of decolonial praxis.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/soc
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Author
Divisions:	Sociology
Subjects:	J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2022 10:09
Last Modified:	15 Apr 2024 16:24
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114950

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