Like other things that were popular in the nineties––the Macarena, say, or Hypercolor t-shirts—“postmodernism” has not aged well. For a time, terms such as postmodernism, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and posthistoire marked the spirit of the age, at least in the academy. Indeed, the rise of the “posties” seemed to augur a revolution across the humanities and social sciences. Historians had to worry about the collapse of grand narratives, and about the ways in which modes of literary representation threatened their naïve assumptions about epistemic realism. Critical theorists had to grapple with the demise of Marxism as a live political option. Postcolonial theory and poststructuralism threw into sharp relief the ideological limitations of much history, social theory, and literary criticism. Scholars on all sides rushed to man the barricades. Social historians picked up their pens to rebuff the postmodern challenge, even as they took a turn toward more reflexive, and less materialist, modes of cultural history; Marxists sought to explain postmodern discourse as the ideological substrate of the fractured world of “late” capitalism; literary scholars learned to speak in the fearsome theoretical vernaculars of poststructuralism.

And then… well, what exactly? Around the turn of the millennium, the postmodern tide ebbed rapidly. It is tempting to conclude that this was because, in the wake of 9/11 and the unending wars unleashed in its aftermath, it became more difficult to convince oneself that history had come to an end, or that there was a real worry about whether anything existed outside of the text. But this judgment misses the mark. For one thing, it suggests that the postmodern, poststructural, or postcolonial turns were a kind of childish indulgence, which had to be forgone when the real world came crashing in once again. Such a claim underplays the serious theoretical and practical challenges laid down by those labelled (often to the distaste of those so-labelled) postmodern or poststructuralist writers. A grasp on the ideas of many of these authors is now simply a pre-requisite of serious scholarship in the humanistic disciplines. Another reason for casting doubt on the notion that the return of History with a capital “H” shunted postmodernism aside is a matter of simple historical fact: enthusiasm for the various “posts” began to weaken well before the turn of the century. Postmodernism ran out of steam in the late-1990s as theoretical interests moved elsewhere.

Simon Susen’s The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences and Julian Go’s Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory take us back to the intellectual moment of the 1990s. But the similarities between the two projects end there. This will be obvious enough from their respective subject matters. Postcolonial thought—a term that Go uses to capture not just “postcolonial theory” in the vein of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, but also the work of the subaltern studies movement––intersects only partially with postmodernism. To be sure, poststructuralist texts helped to shape the writings of Bhabha and Spivak; and the postcolonial critique of the purportedly normative status of European modernity in so much “Western” thought about the world outside Europe and North America certainly gave added bite to the postmodern questioning of modernity as a collective project. Nevertheless, one would be selling postcolonial thought seriously short if one reduced it to another species of postmodernism. Strikingly, neither Susen nor Go associates the two. Postcolonial theory has no place in Susen’s exhaustive taxonomy of the major “turns” in postmodern social science. Go, meanwhile, gives us one of the powerful reasons for this separation: postcolonial thought was, to a large extent, born outside of the social sciences, and prospered both in the discourse of anticolonial thinkers and, later, in the academic humanities.

More on Go’s treatment of the origins of postcolonial thought in a moment. For now, let us note that there is another, more telling difference between the two books, which follows to a certain extent from this basic difference between the postmodern turn and postcolonial thought. Go makes a case for the enduring value of postcolonial thought; Susen, on the other hand, has come to bury postmodernism. That Susen’s enterprise is, ultimately, a destructive one, is not immediately apparent. The vast bulk of The ‘Postmodern Turn’ is devoted to the careful botanizing of postmodernist thought, as it impressed upon the social sciences during its heroic phase of the 1980s and 1990s. Five of its six chapters take up the descriptive labours of drawing out the movement’s main themes. Susen identifies five “turns” that defined the difference that postmodernism made in the social sciences: a turn toward relativism in epistemology; toward an interpretive approach in methodology; a “cultural turn” in sociology; a “contingent turn” in historiography; and an “autonomous turn” in politics. Each of these turns is analyzed in terms of three basic oppositions between “modern” and “postmodern” sensibilities: for example, the interpretive turn, on Susen’s account, involved a shift from explanation to understanding, mechanics to dialectics, and ideology to discourse.

Susen’s mode of analysis here is overwhelmingly—and avowedly—thematic: in his discussions of the various turns that shaped postmodernism in the social sciences, Susen eschews almost entirely specific names, texts, and events. Texts are marshalled together and arranged by theme: very few specific events, debates, or thinkers are mentioned by name or assessed in a sustained fashion. Rather, these are all tagged in accordance with Susen’s classification scheme and assigned to their rightful place as indifferent expressions of this or that “turn” and its three organizing oppositions. Not that Susen is unaware of the fact that his corpus of evidence is composed of texts written by authors involved in concrete attempts to win arguments: the Introduction offers a list of postmodern thinkers, and proceeds to categorize them in terms of region, nationality, native language, period, generation, sympathies toward the postmodern turn, and so on. But Susen’s sprawling taxonomy precludes any serious treatment of postmodernism as a sustained series of interventions by particular authors.

After spending most of the book neutrally cataloguing postmodernist discourse, Susen veers in a very different direction in the final chapter of the book. Rather winningly, Susen admits the shortcomings of his thematic approach, the principal weakness of which, he rightly notes, is “its tendency to over-generalize” [232]. Moreover, Susen acknowledges, such an approach also tends to underplay the amount of disagreement about the sources, import, and wider normative status of postmodernism as an intellectual construct. His defense of his treatment of postmodernism in thematic terms is that it brings to light the most basic features of the postmodern “turn” itself: namely, as Susen conceives it, the shift it marked from “the Enlightenment belief in the relative determinacy of both the natural and the social world to the—increasingly widespread—post-Enlightenment belief in the radical indeterminacy of all material and symbolic forms of existence” (1; repeated verbatim 39, 233, 258). This is, to say the least, a very high altitude from which to describe the major developments of modern intellectual and cultural history. In any case, Susen then proceeds to make two moves that change the complexion of the book. First, he notes that “modernity” has never been the monolith that the “postmodernists” made of it. On the contrary, it has itself been an open-ended, self-critical enterprise, itself conscious of its instability. Postmodernism is in that sense another iteration of the great unfinished project of modernity, rather than its negation. Second, Susen presents a list of major criticisms of postmodernism. Jarringly, after recording these criticisms, Susen adds no gloss to his comments, but moves to a conclusion that simply summarizes the preceding chapters. The implication of that final chapter, if not the intent behind it, seems clear: “postmodernism,” while a complex phenomenon, has serious, if not insurmountable limits as a form of critique. But we cannot be wholly sure of Susen’s position. Rather than weigh the force of these criticisms against possible defenses of postmodernist positions, Susen just states them.

While The ‘Postmodern Turn’ leaves us wondering whether postmodernism was worth all the fuss, Go’s book leaves us in no doubt as to the value of postcolonial thought for social theory. His main thesis is that the social sciences could and should be transformed by an encounter with postcolonial theory. Although Go has some interest in “how social science might inform postcolonial thought,” he is avowedly “more concerned about one direction in this relation: how postcolonial thought might reorient social theory” [ix]. The challenge, as Go sees it, is that social scientists have long proven resistant to the insights of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. Go recalls: “Back in the 1990s, when I was still taking courses at the University of Chicago as a PhD student in sociology, something called ‘postcolonial studies’ was in the air. Students were talking about it. Seminars were filled.” Yet Go’s mentors in both fields offered little encouragement to his budding sense that the two traditions could learn from one another. Some of this mutual resistance is due to clashing professional norms: postcolonial thought has, at least in recent years, found its home in humanities departments; sociology (at least in some of its modes) has maintained aspirations to objective and universal scientific knowledge. But Go finds a much deeper contrast: “Social theory was born of empire with the metropoles of power, but postcolonial thought… emerged in [a] context of anti-imperialism. It emerged from the margins if not the underbelly of empire, flourishing amidst anti-imperial protest and resistance from subjugated peoples around the world” [6]. Insofar as social science was forged as an instrument of empire, and postcolonial thought has had the world-historical, emancipatory mission of resisting empire, it is small wonder that social theory and postcolonial thought have proven as difficult to mix as oil and water.

Go stages the encounter between the two traditions in two steps. First, he surveys the two main “waves” of postcolonial thought. The first wave emerged from the upheavals of the anticolonial revolutions themselves, and involved activist-theorists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, and Franz Fanon. The second wave came from the academy, especially in North America, and drew on the work of critics, historians, and philosophers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Although a more academic affair, the second wave of postcolonial thought succeeded in illuminating the structure and operation of the “imperial episteme.” Go’s second step is to consider the constitutive blind spots in the sociological imagination in the light of these challenges from postcolonial studies, and to consider how those limitations might be remedied. The insights of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies bring to light, in particular, four problematic tendencies in the tradition of social theory: its inclination toward “Orientalist” modes of interpretation; the “analytic bifurcation” through which empire and colonialism are ignored or repressed in the social-scientific theorization of modernity; the “repression” of colonial agency in the making of modernity; and the enduring “metrocentricism” of Western social thought. As a counter to these tendencies, Go proposes two remedies. Analytic bifurcation—which for Go is the root of the inclinations toward Orientalism and the suppression of colonial agency—can be combatted by mobilizing the “relational” approaches of writers such as Bourdieu and Latour. A “postcolonial relationalism” would cut across traditional theories and narratives that isolate and universalize the European experience of modernity, and would show how the relevant sociological “fields” or “networks” involved in making modern societies crisscrossed territories across the globe. Moreover, the persistent metrocentrism of social theory may be counteracted by a theorization of the subaltern standpoint. Here Go mobilizes feminist standpoint theory and perspectival realism in the philosophy and sociology of science. The main thrust of this approach is to move the site from which knowledge of the social is constructed from the (implicitly normative) metropole to the position of subaltern peoples.

There is much to admire in Go’s attempt to imagine what a genuinely postcolonial social science might look like. He is keen to stress that his sketches of a postcolonial relationalism and a subaltern standpoint theory are not meant to be prescriptive: rather, they are examples of the forms that social theory might take if and when it takes seriously the postcolonial challenge. His book ends with a stirring call for further work—a “third wave” of postcolonial thought now anchored, perhaps, in the social sciences. Reflecting on Go’s argument, one is struck by how much, in the end, he concedes to social theory in his account of what a postcolonial social theory would look like. Certainly, postcolonial studies show us where the blockages in our imaginations are to be found. But those blockages are removed, for the most part, with the tools of social theory. What does it say about the sociological tradition if mainstream social theory (Bourdieu, Latour) and science studies (Giere, Longino) already furnish the tools we need for a postcolonial social science? Perhaps Go would want to say that these theories provide starting points for further reflection, and that we ought (as Go does at certain points in the book) return to the postcolonial authors for deeper insights. Still, Go might have reflected on why it is that the resources for counteracting the effects of Orientalism, analytic bifurcation, and so on, come from approaches of social theory largely untouched by postcolonial critique. Even if this reservation has some force, however, sociologists would do well to consider Go’s important and provocative book. The theory wars of the 1990s are not over yet.