Southern Theory

Résumé du livre

Raewyn Connell has served as an advisor on UN initiatives and was a founding professor of sociology at Macquarie University, Australia. Currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney, she is a renowned scholar in Southern theory, as well as in gender and masculinity studies. The Australian Sociological Association named the biennial Raewyn Connell Prize after her in 2010.

Sociology's emergence as an academic discipline is inseparable from its colonial roots, shaped by the imperial expansion of European nations and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Initially used as a tool to study and manage colonized populations, the field developed within a narrow framework dominated by the works of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, which excluded diverse perspectives and masked its exploitative origins. Resistance movements like the African Renaissance and the Subaltern Studies Group in India sought to reclaim marginalized histories and cultures, challenging the dominance of Northern theories by emphasizing indigenous knowledge and experiences. Similarly, critiques of cultural imperialism, such as Dorfman and Mattelart's analysis of Disney comics, highlighted the subtle perpetuation of global hierarchies. Despite these efforts, sociology continues to privilege theories from former imperial centers, often overlooking the complexities of colonized societies while asserting universality. The global divide between the North and South, rooted in colonial legacies, persists in modern globalization narratives, which frequently impose Northern ideals of progress on the South, disregarding the harm inflicted on marginalized communities. The next sections will explore significant sociological theories emerging from the South that challenge these entrenched inequalities.

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