Sociology against Empire. Pierre Bourdieu's thought on colonialism and revolution


Amin Perez, Université du Québec à Montréal

How can we think from the Empire’s entrails in a counter-imperial direction? How can sociology play a progressive role in the context of colonization and a war of liberation? This presentation focuses on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological studies on colonialism, forged mainly amid the Algerian liberation war against the French Empire. Drawing on Bourdieu’s personal papers and his published and unpublished work, I propose to restore the unorthodox scientific practices (in collaboration with native writers, indigenous schoolteachers, and anticolonial activists) that brought him to outline an alternative sociology of colonialism. More importantly, I’m interested in showing the components of the sociology of domination and emancipation he forged during the anticolonial struggle. First, the historical sociology developed by Bourdieu in the Algerian form of settlement colonization was as interested in analyzing the military, legal, political, and economic mechanism that made this domination happen as in studying the Imperial reason that grounded it. Second, Bourdieu also sought to understand the means of liberation and social emancipation. During the Algerian decolonization struggle, other anticolonial thinkers and activists from other colonies and the metropole took that particular moment of extreme domination to think about social change and a postcolonial society. I replace how Bourdieu put these theories to work in the sociological field. As distanced from colonial mythologies without falling into anti-colonial mysticism, Bourdieu’s sociology offers the means to develop a social revolution. This presentation proposes a reflection on an unknown Bourdieu as a sociologist of colonialism, race, revolution, and emancipation. By historicizing Bourdieu’s work developed from the bowels of Empire, my goal is to provide a new analytical perspective on the historical past of colonization and decolonization and contemporary debates.

This paper will be presented at the following session: