Sociology after Postcolonialism: Provincialized Cosmopolitanism and Connected

Recent debates on ‘public sociology’, sparked off by Michael Burawoy’s (2005a) ASA Presidential Address on the subject, have addressed sociology in a global world with a view to reconnect sociological accounts with normative claims.1 The first of these concerns has also been influenced by the emergence of postcolonial critiques, as well as earlier arguments from the field of development studies, which, as Leela Gandhi argues, ‘attempt to reassert the epistemological value and agency of the non-European world ’ (1998: 44). Increasing recognition of the global context of sociology is similarly evident in recent arguments against the supposed methodological nationalism of the past (Beck 2000). These arguments attempt to unify explanatory and normative concerns in a cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century. For Beck and Sznaider, for example, ‘what cosmopolitanism is cannot ultimately be separated from what cosmopolitanism should be ’ (2006: 4). This conjunction of arguments about global sociology and normative claims about cosmopolitanism, and the problematic relation of each with postcolonial critiques, is the topic of this chapter. Briefly, postcolonialism is perceived to involve a form of particularism, which is i