Abstract
This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole.
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Notes
The only other sociology department in the British Empire that had a sizable number of “coloured colonial” members was the University College of the Gold Coast. In addition to Kofi Busia, members of the sociology department at Accra during the first 15 years (1950–1965) included Ghanaians Kwan Esiboa de Graft Johnson, Alice Ioné Acquah (Crabtree), Cyril Edwin Fiscian, and P. Austin Tetteh. Several African American sociologists were also recruited to teach in Ghana, including St. Clair Drake, Hylan Lewis, and Chancellor Williams, and Frank Cherry was a Research Sociologist for the National Research Council of the Ghanaian Government starting in 1958 (Darkwah et al. 2014; Steinmetz 2019). Other notable sociologists who worked in Ghana during the department’s first fifteen years were David Brokensha, David Butcher, Nobert Elias, and the Jamaican Raymond T. Smith (Steinmetz 2017a).
The University College gained university status in 1967. Currently the University of the West Indies has campuses on Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, and an Open University serving 17 nations, in addition to the original Mona campus (Sherlock and Nettleford 1990).
Colonial Social Science Research Council [CSSRC], document (60)44: West Indies Institute of Social and Economic Research—Estimates 1960/64.” This lists Sociology teaching staff as Dr. M. G. Smith, Mr. .W. Roberts, and Mr. L. Braithwaite as three members of teaching staff. All CSSRC documents consulted are from the London School of Economics archive, Colonial Research Papers (CRP); identical copies are in the British National Archives. Interview by the author with Orlando Patterson, Cambridge, MA, November 21st, 2014.
According to Patterson he was “very close to” to Smith. Interview with Patterson and author (November 21st, 2014).
Also like Patterson, Smith was recruited to advise the government of Michael Manley (Hall 1997, pp. 91–121).
Nerys Thomas Patterson was a Welsh scholar of Celtic literature. According to Lambert (2014), “the couple divorced many years ago and Thomas has since died.” She is the author of Cattle-Lords and Clansmen: The Social Structure of Early Ireland (N. T. Patterson 1994), inter alia.
Email communication by Patterson with the author, May 21, 2019.
Email communication by Patterson with the author, May 21, 2019.
I discuss the efforts of major American foundations to shape European social science after 1945 in Steinmetz (2017) and in my forthcoming book, Overseas: The Colonial Origins of Postwar European Sociology.
Interview with Patterson by the author (November 21st, 2014).
Gellner would later shift his appointment at LSE into Anthropology, and finally directed the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at Central European University.
Email communication with the author, May 21, 2019.
Interview of Patterson with the author (November 21st, 2014).
Michael Manley’s brother Douglas wrote a PhD thesis in sociology at Liverpool on “the Liverpool Negro community” (D. Manley 1959) and taught sociology and education at UCWI.
In Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy mentions Patterson’s concept of “social death” but does not situate Patterson’s work within what he calls the “counterculture of modernity” (1993, p. 63).
Almost all of the American sociologists who discussed colonialism and slavery in their work between 1918 and the 1960s were African Americans (Steinmetz forthcoming).
As Kumkum Sangari points out, this modernism of “Third World” artists was also a form of reappropriation, since they were borrowing modernist forms that were “already deeply implicated in their own history, being based partly on a random appropriation and remodeling of the ʻliberatingʼ and energizing possibilities of their own indigenous ʻtraditionsʼ” (Sangari 1987, p. 182). Or as Gikandi writes, modernism was “one of the first cultural moments in European history to appropriate the other as one of its conditions of being” (Sangari 2005, p. 44).
One of the many deleterious effects of the decades-long dominance of American sociology by positivism is that students are not trained in textual interpretation. The contents of literary and narrative forms are reified and art is transformed into meaningless numbers.
It is noteworthy that Patterson aligns himself with the Camus of Sisyphus rather than the postwar Rebel, where for Camus “absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessed as an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. The philosophy of revolt became Cold-War ideology” (Aronson 2017, pp. 28–29). Such Cold War ideas were remote from the concerns of Patterson, CAM, and even Michael Manley, whose understanding of Non-Alignment led him to include anyone who claimed to be “a communist or socialist, or humanist or simply progressive,” as long as they were anti-imperialist.
Hegel uses the word Knecht (servant) rather than Sklave (slave). Knecht referred mainly to agricultural workers by the late eighteenth century, although it was sometimes used as a synonym for Sklave (Hegel 1807).
The Brother Solomon character is based on the Reverend Claudius Henry, who led his Rastafari followers to believe that they would be miraculously repatriated to Africa on Oct. 5, 1959. As the Daily Gleaner (Kingston) reported on Oct. 6, 1959 (p. 1), “Hundreds of Rastafarians gathered at Headquarters of the African Refomed Church, 78 Rosalie Avenue, following the report that members of the cult wishing to join the Back-to-Africa movement would leave the island by ship yesterday. No ships or plane had come for them, no passport arranged, nor passages booked but they were going to Africa. The cultists who came from all parts of the Island, started arriving at Rosalie Avenue from Sunday afternoon and up to yesterday afternoon were still trickling in taxicabs, trucks, and afoot. Some with their belongings said that they were ready to leave for the trip. It was learned that many of them especially from the country parts, had sold out their belongings and were planning to leave for Africa.”
Diop presented a first doctoral dissertation to the Sorbonne in 1951 on the idea of ancient Egypt as an African civilization. This thesis was rejected as “unscientific” but was published by Presence Africaine and hailed by Aimé Césaire as pathbreaking (Eckert 2011). Diop’s second thesis also failed, but his third doctoral thesis succeeded at the Sorbonne. The African origin of Civilization was a translation of his 1967 text Antériorité des civilisations nègres, (Diop, 1967) and contained selections from the published version of his 1951 doctorate. C. A. Diop had worked most closely with philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
A classic example is Jomo Kenyatta’s LSE doctoral thesis, based on the supervision of Malinowski, which became Facing Mount Kenya [Kenyatta 1938].
Patterson, email with the author, May 21, 2019.
Interview by the author with Orlando Patterson, Cambridge, MA, November 21st, 2014.
For Patterson’s critique of presentism, see Patterson (2004).
German historical sociologists exhibited little interest in slavery and only a few wrote about colonialism.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Orlando Patterson, for taking the time to answer many of my questions and for reading an earlier version of this article, and Fiona Greenland, for comments on earlier versions.
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Steinmetz, G. Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism, anti-positivism, and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre. Theor Soc 48, 799–822 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09368-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09368-y