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This paper responds to Julian Go's Lecture "Thinking against Empire. Anti‐colonial Thought and Social Theory." It proceeds in two parts: I first follow Go's invitation to read and reread Mabel Dove Danquah and Frantz Fanon and explore what their work contributes to our understanding of state‐forms. I then examine the terms of Go's invitation more closely. I contrast Go's juxtaposition of imperial sociology on the one hand and anti‐colonial sociology on the other hand, with the broader range of theoretical traditions and methods, which a practice‐oriented sociology of sociology and an international history of sociology would highlight. I raise the question what "standpoint" adds to the authors Go discusses and the broader range of scholars who have engaged with post‐colonial contexts in their research at this point in time. Calling for consideration of the anti‐colonial standpoint is a particular choice, which has a distinctive heritage in Hegelian‐Marxian projections of the social whole and is in tension with either deep exploration of particular thinkers or the middle‐range theorizing that Go also seems to endorse. Defined at a level of abstraction that is "above" (or underneath) actual conversations in a range of fields and subfields, it can appear as a "test" for scholars who have long engaged with post‐colonial contexts, which can have unintended consequences when coupled with the institutional power and asymmetric insularity of Anglo‐American academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contemporary politics of heritage tourism in India and focuses upon contested representations of The First War of Indian Independence/The Indian Mutiny of 1857. The severity of this conflict has been written about extensively from both British and Indian perspectives. One site in particular—the ‘British’ Residency at Lucknow—was and still is remembered as an important memorial to both the British and the Indians who died in this conflict. However, the representations of the conflict are and have been contested. This paper thus examines this heritage dissonance by examining both official and lay representations of the residency. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The colonial administration in Africa aimed to institutionalise racial peripheries in the continent in an effort to perpetuate separation. This meant eternising racial boundaries in African societies to underpin segregation. In the pre‐colonial times, African kingdoms were enshrined in equality, peace and unity, which the advent of colonialists moulded. The colonial assignment of division demonised African natives and still does in the post‐colonial age. Despite the colonial monarch being defenestrated by African movements of independence, its brainchild, racial discrimination continues to wreak havoc in the post‐colonial period. Therefore, this qualitative article sought to explore the height of racial tension in African societies from a literary perspective. It employs post‐colonial theory to underpin the exploration of Doris Lessing's No Witchcraft for Sale. Lessing's post‐colonial narration reflects on the painful experiences engendered by the deteriorating racial division in the post‐colonial African societies. It points out the impacts of racial spells upon the social development of the continent. For instance, the story does not only unearth hatred amongst diversified races in African societies but also the stereotypes against Afrocentric identities and talents. Thus, the researcher has sampled the above narration as a neat fit for the post‐colonial reflection of racial disparities in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Bakhtin's historical poetics as a particularly enthusiastic representative of the European evolutionary paradigm with a series of disquieting (post-)colonial implications. It starts with a genealogy of several basic modernist categories like the self, the novel, history and historical poetics. In order to lay bare the underlying novelistic pattern of the modernist conception of history, it continues with a comparison between the philosophical and sociological theories of the novel of Bakhtin and Luhmann respectively. Both of them connect the advancement of the self with a devaluation of the other, which is a typically colonial pattern according to the argument in the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]