I. Authors for Global Social Thought Course
I. Authors for Global Social Thought Course: This section includes a suggested list of thinkers along with topics of their work that would fit well in a Global Social Thought course curriculum. Click the title below to access a downloadable PDF of this resource. Click on the author names to access their Wikipedia page.
Authors for Global Social Thought Course
As Saleem highlights in her chapter, in order for to create an decolonized course on global social thought, it is important to include « non-Western perspectives and knowledges by peripheral thinkers ». This allows for the representation of a plurarility of meanings and ideas on society and development.
Thus, this section includes a suggested list of thinkers from non-Western contexts, organized by world region of origin
Authors Organized by Themes: Click this title to download a PDF file with the authors organized by themes.
Africa:
Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (gender in an African context): In her work, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses[https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816624416/invention-of-women/], she provides a postcolonial feminist critique of Western dominance in African studies. She notes that Yoruba gender stratification is a Western colonial construct, and she provides an alternate method of understanding modern Western and Yoruba culture.
Aimé Césaire (anti-colonialism): In his essay, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire argues that colonists’ economically exploited and de-civilized the colonized by killing, raping and destroying their land.
Franz Fanon (internalized racism): In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that they live in, and studies how they navigate the world through a performance of whiteness.
Mahmood Mamdani (identity and conflict in postcolonial Africa): He examines the convergence of politics and culture, colonialism, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge
Asia:
Fei Xiatong (relationships of reciprocal obligation in China): In Xiang-tu Zhong-guo (From the Soil), Fei Xiao-Tong proposes a theory contrasting the relation-based associations of rural China with group-based associations of urban society and the West.
M.N. Srinivas (caste and social stratification in India): His work examines caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of ‘ dominant caste ‘.
Syed Hussein Alatas (imperialism and intellectual captivity): His work focused on corruption, imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism, and he developed the concept of the ‘captive mind’. His most famous work, ‘The Myth of the Lazy Native’, analyzed the western colonial stereotype about the laziness of native Malaysians.
Vandana Shiva (capitalist production and the environment): An Indian physicist and social activist, Shiva founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy (RFSTN), an organization devoted to developing sustainable methods of agriculture.
Middle East:
Ibn Khaldun (rise and fall of civilizations): He argued that civilizations rise and fall in cycles, noting that hard work and collaboration create a productive and wealthy civilization, but that civilization declines as people because lazy, selfish and dishonest. He argued that every cycle has 5 stages: invasion, summit, tolerance, tyranny, and decline.
Ali Shariati (Islamic Marxism): He used Marxist concepts such as historical determinism and class struggle to “re-interpret” Islam. This “theological Marxism” or “theologized Marxism” he notes that a retooled version of Islam is needed to succeed where Marxism has failed.
Fatima Mernissi (women’s rights in Muslim societies): She studied women’s roles and Islam, examining the historical development of Islamic thought and its modern manifestations. Through a detailed investigation of the nature of the succession to Muhammad, she cast doubt on some of Muhammad’s saying and traditions, noting that they teach a subordination of women in Islam that is not in the Qur’an.
Saba Mahmood (women in religious social movements): Her work centers around debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. She wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Europe:
Simone de Beauvoir (feminism): In The Second Sex, she challenged the notion of the ‘eternal feminine’ and advocated for women’s liberation. She was a leader in the feminist movement and supported the legalization of contraception and abortion in France.
Karl Marx (capitalism): His work examines the historical effects of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development, and argues that a worker revolution is needed to replace capitalism with a communist system.
Max Weber (religion and economics): He believed that religious ideas, beliefs, and values play a major role in shaping the economy of any society and that 17th-century Protestant values contributed to the emergence of capitalism in Europe
Emile Durkheim (social group solidarity): She examined the social cohesiveness of small, undifferentiated societies (mechanical) and of societies differentiated by a relatively complex division of labour (organic).
Michel Foucault (governmentality): His theory combines the terms “government” and “rationality” and refers to shaping, guiding, or affecting people’s conduct. He argued that governmentality goes beyond state politics and includes a wide range of control techniques.
South America:
Rudolfo Kusch (indigenous thought): He developed a philosophy situated in the Latin American experience by engaging indigenous thought in Andean native peoples to develop Latin American philosophy that is distinct from the Western tradition.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (dependency and development): He developed Dependency Theory, which challenged traditional modernization theory that argued that all countries follow the same path of development as Western nations. Instead, he argued that the economic development of Latin America is tied to their historical relationship with more powerful nations, such as the US and in Europe, since they are dependent on a global capitalist system that perpetuates their subordinate position.
Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power): He developed the concepts of coloniality of power and coloniality of knowledge, which identifies colonialism as a form of social discrimination that became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
Maria Lugones (coloniality of gender): She advanced Latino philosophy by theorizing various forms of resistance against multiple oppressions in Latin America, the US and elsewhere. She was known for her theory of multiple selves, her work on decolonial feminism, and for developing the concept of the coloniality of gender, which argues that gender is a colonial imposition.
North America:
Edward Said (Orientalism): He is best known for his book Orientalism (1978), in which the establishes the term Orientalism as a critical concept to describe the West’s commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of The East. He argues that Orientalism is linked to the imperialist societies that produced it and that much Orientalist work is inherently political.
Sandra Harding (feminism and standpoint theory): She coined the term standpoint theory to categorize epistemologies that emphasize women’s knowledge. Standpoint theory notes that the perspectives of marginalized and/or oppressed individuals can help to create more objective accounts of the world and that, in societies stratified by gender and other categories, such as race and class, one’s social positions shapes what they know.
bell hooks (intersectional feminism): She examined the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination.
W.E.B. Du Bois (racism): As a social sympathizer, he believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism. He popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life.