The African Renaissance Challenge and Sociological Reclamations in the South

• Published in: Current sociology Vol. 54; no. 3; pp. 357 - 380
• Main Author: Sitas, Ari
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi SAGE Publications 01-05-2006; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Academic discipline; Colonialism; Culture; Deconstruction; Developing countries; Dominant Ideologies; Intellectual work; LDCs; Local Knowledge; Norms; North and South; Postmodernism; Sociological Research; Sociological theory; Sociologists; Sociology; South Africa; Traditional Societies; Africa; indigenous norms; South Africa; African Renaissance; intellectual work
• ISSN: 0011-3921; 1461-7064
• DOI: 10.1177/0011392106063186

This article critically evaluates whether sociologists in the ‘South’ are offered any creative breathing space by either the adoption of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought or the current indigenization drive of the African Renaissance initiative in South Africa. The article argues that neither does. It traces the impasse to which many of these currents lead, and the way they fail to overcome conventional sociology's derogation of intellectual work that does not take as its founding rules part of any canon. It then provides a suggestion for a way out, by moving away from a ‘culture of application’ and imitation and away from simplistic critiques or ‘deconstruction’ without substantive intellectual work to buttress such critical claims. Only then can an African Renaissance achieve its aims of creating a sociology that does not involve a dialectic of ‘self-abnegation’, one which says that what is ‘absent’ is what one's society does not possess of the ‘norm’; and that what has to be ‘negated’ is that which constitutes one's ‘alterity’ – be it indigenous norms, values or seemingly aberrant institutions.