Abstract
American Sociology has historically canonized the work of old White men even as Black people and White women have contributed overlooked interventions to the field’s White masculinist origins. Recently, scholars have (re)introduced us to underappreciated Black sociologists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Joyce Ladner (Mitchum & Joseph 2023), numerous Black feminist sociologists (Luna & Pirtle 2022), and Cite Black Women. Korey Tillman, David R. Dickens, and C. C. Herbison’s Neglected Social Theorists of Color: Deconstructing the Margins continues this political project of excavating the overlooked work beyond the Black/White binary with Indian, Mexican American, Native American, Japanese American, Black American, and Black French intellectuals. The contributors to this edited volume consider the structural forces that deeply influence who we canonize, cite, and place into the curriculum we teach our students.
Neglected Social Theorists of Color encourages us to reckon with how and with whom we “do” sociology, “aim[ing] to deconstruct the boundaries of the theory canon in American sociology by incorporating, in the broadest possible way, the work of a variety of neglected theorists of color” (p. 1). Of these 10 intellectuals, four were born outside of the United States, three of whom are women. Even so, the reader may recognize names from different academic disciplines—e.g., Cherríe Moraga and Vijay Prashad—or sociologists whose work may “have fallen victim to a cultural and political climate not receptive to their work” (p. 1), including Oliver Cromwell Cox and Tamotsu Shibutani. Contributors provide the surrounding sociopolitical context for each thinker through the generous three-part structure of intellectual life, theoretical work, and contemporary significance. We learn how their biography shaped their work regarding French colonialism, racial capitalism, Indigenous critiques of Western thinking, Black public sociology, the afterlives of slavery, Chicana/o/x sociology, sexuality, caste, rumors, and more.
Contributors Rianka Roy and Manisha Desai’s Chapter 8 centers nineteenth-century Indian woman Krantijyoti Gyanjyoti Savitribai. While scholars describe Savitribai as a reformer, Roy and Desai add the label theorist to recognize how she challenged colonialism and caste through her work for women and Dalit people. Relying on Savitribai’s experience building multiple schools and shelters, the contributors compare Savitribai’s work to Jane Addam’s co-founding of Hull-House. Although Savitribai’s two volumes of poetry do not equate to Addam’s formal academic writing, the contributors center Savitribai’s praxis as theory. Considering contemporary significance, the contributors link Savitriba’s work to the shared structural vulnerability of marginalized populations due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Indian Brahminical oppression, and U.S. anti-Black racism.
Contributor Daniel R. Wildcat’s Chapter 3 centers prolific Indigenous philosopher Vine Deloria Jr., author of numerous books who also held “a general suspicion of those who undertook their work under the aegis of social theory” (p. 30). Curiously, Wildcat includes that note while arguing for recognizing Deloria as a social theorist due to his consistent critiques of Western epistemologies and ontologies. Wildcat summarizes Deloria’s “3P axiom” of Indian metaphysics: power plus place equals personality. In other words, life force in relationship with metaphysical land and location shape the uniqueness of individuals and how we learn about ourselves. For contemporary significance, Wildcat then applies Deloria’s metaphysical analysis to conceptualize the Land Back movement “as the restoration of a place by the persons living there in a respectful and responsible fashion,” recognizing the power structures preventing Indigenous sovereignty through land reparations (p. 45).
Reading Neglected Social Theorists of Color led me to consider how the average sociology professor might apply the thinkers in this volume. Sitting with this question activated my pedagogical mind. We can use Maya Singhal’s Chapter 1 on Black Caribbean thinker Suzanne Césaire as a case study in creative pedagogy. With few exceptions, scholarly work on Césaire is written in French, in different academic disciplines, and/or in relation to her husband, Aimeé Césaire. Relying on Singhal’s own translations of Suzanne Césaire’s work from French to English, they argue that Césaire’s work considered “the Caribbean as a central site for understanding the production of modernity” prior to that of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Édouard Glissant (p. 15). Yet, as a Francophone Black woman writing under French censorship, U.S. scholars largely overlooked her work. Those same structural forces of colonialism and misogynoir informed the revolutionary theory she wrote across seven essays and poems published from 1941 to 1945 in Tropiques, a surrealist journal she co-founded. Senghal highlights Césaire’s theory of cannibalism, or eating one’s colonial self, and camouflage, or mimicking and satirizing controlling images to write under the nose of racism and fascism. Returning to pedagogy, how might we incorporate these poems or essays into our own work or teaching?
For example, we can create a lesson on colonialism using Singhal’s Césaire chapter alongside additional sources: Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence” (2004) and an accompanying Black feminist perspective of Fanon (Sharpley-Whiting 1997). Born 1915 and 1925 in the French colony of Martinique, Suzanne Césaire and Frantz Fanon theorized about colonialism from the belly of the beast. After a brief historical overview on the political conditions of Martinique, Algeria, and France, Fanon provides the base for this lesson, prompting students to question if responding to colonial violence with revolutionary violence can truly cleanse colonized people. Next, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1997, p. 80) shows how to use Fanon’s decolonial work for “feminist resistance politics” despite feminist critiques. Singhal’s analysis and translation of “Césaire’s critical approach . . . characterized by a method of appropriating problematic tropes to highlight the importance of marginalized classes in society,” (p. 11) then rounds the lesson out by emphasizing various responses to colonialism.
As demonstrated with Singhal’s work on Césaire, Neglected Social Theorists of Color’s analysis of scholarly work, literature, and scholar-activism works well alongside existing or burgeoning canonical texts to widen our own intellectual horizons. These chapters remind us that grand theory need not be the only theory and that scholars benefit from reading across disciplines and texts. Educators—from lecturers and adjuncts to professors—and undergraduates seeking to reconsider their theoretical scope would benefit from this work.
