Rethinking Modernity Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

The second edition of this influential book addresses how the experiences and claims of non-European ‘others’ have been rendered invisible to the standard narratives and analytical frameworks of sociological understandings of modernity.

The second edition of this influential book addresses how the experiences and claims of non-European ‘others’ have been rendered invisible to the standard narratives and analytical frameworks of sociological understandings of modernity. In challenging the dominant, Euro-centred accounts of the emergence and development of modernity, Bhambra puts forward an argument for ‘connected histories’ in the reconstruction of historical sociology at a global level. This updated version of the original, published in 2007, adds a new preface which explores key themes that Bhambra has further developed over the intervening years: specifically, how the rethinking of modernity enables us to reconstruct sociology and a call for a 'reparatory sociology' committed to the repair of the social sciences ​and the securing of global justice.

Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK.