The stakes of postcolonial sociology in an age of racial capitalism

Abstract

This article interrogates the theoretical tensions between postcolonial sociology and analyses of racial capitalism, engaging critically with Andrew Smith's materialist critique of postcolonial thought. While sympathetic to efforts to resituate colonial epistemologies in material contexts, the paper argues that collapsing postcoloniality into racialized capitalism risks erasing the specificity of postcolonial development trajectories. It highlights how an overemphasis on ‘racialized structures of exploitation’ underplays the role of violence, dispossession, and diverse forms of colonial extraction. Similarly, the article questions the dissolution of postcoloniality into racial capitalism more broadly, a move that obscures distinctions between core and peripheral contexts. In response, it calls for a more relational materialism attentive to the interplay among state forms, political economy, and subaltern politics in postcolonial settings. By foregrounding empirical variation and historical specificity, the paper advances a framework for postcolonial sociology that avoids both descriptive idealism and overly abstract political economy.