Toward a Sociology of Colonial Subjectivity: Political Agency in Haiti and Liberia

What is it about?

The authors seek to connect global historical sociology with racial formation theory to examine how antislavery movements fostered novel forms of self-government and justifications for state formation. The cases of Haiti and Liberia demonstrate how enslaved and formerly enslaved actors rethought modern politics at the time, producing novel political subjects in the process. Prior to the existence of these nations, self-determination by black subjects in colonial spaces was impossible, and each sought to carve out that possibility in the face of a transatlantic structure of slavery. This work demonstrates how Haitian and Liberian American founders responded to colonial structures, though in Liberia reproducing them albeit for their own ends. The authors demonstrate the importance of colonial subjectivities to the discernment of racial structures and counter-racist action. They highlight how anticolonial actors challenged global antiblack oppression and how they legitimated their self-governance and freedom on the world stage. Theorizing from colonized subjectivities allows sociology to begin to understand the politics around global racial formations and starts to incorporate histories of black agency into the sociological canon.

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Why is it important?

We highlight the ways in which the drive for self-determination challenged global antiblack oppression and was legitimated on the world stage. In opposition to the legacy of Western modern politics, which systematically excluded racialized subjects from freedom, we turn to these cases to see how they made their claims. We demonstrate the understanding on the part of Haitian and Liberian American actors of how modern politics was shaped in opposition to black subjects, and we suggest that to study race, racisms, and the legacies of slavery, it is necessary to study how colonized and enslaved subjects responded to colonial structures and sought avenues to escape them. It is hardly surprising that ideas of abolition were trafficked globally among the enslaved, the formerly enslaved, or the people of Africa before it was ever made a reality in the eyes of Europe. Nevertheless, more historical sociological work needs to take up the mantle of examining these networks of revolutionary thought and practice, as they will likely highlight unrecognized forms of anticolonial action that have not yet been theorized in existing scholarship. Finally, the ways in which black protest and dissent are made legible to power is especially pertinent in our current historical moment. As movements struggle to demonstrate exhaustively through myriad strategies that black lives do or should matter in the face of overwhelming violence, scholarship must turn its attention to such pressing questions. The critical importance of colonial subjectivities in the production of the modern world deserves critical and deep sociological inquiry.