The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality

remained were, What kind of theory of colonialism do the authors want? Are they excavating the canon for a new universalist theory that centers colonialism, or do they want to emphasize the false universalism of social theory? How are they thinking of the relationships among capitalism, modernity, and empire? What is the essential constituting element of colonialism that eludes much of classical sociological theory? It is revealed at the end of the Du Bois chapter that what they want theory to do is actually somewhat narrow. ‘‘Du Bois understood,’’ they write, ‘‘that the local constitution of the colour line in the United States was the consequence of a global colour line, which derived from colonialism’’ (p. 206, emphasis added). What the authors have been searching for in the classical social theory canon is a theory of colonialism that centers race. They are defining race as the essential constituting element of colonialism, which explains why they see theories in the Marxist and Weberian traditions (and to a lesser extent Durkheimian) as inadequate. Even though many Marxists and Weberians have since developed theories of race and colonialism, what seems to underlie the authors’ position is a foundational tension in postcolonial sociology—that is, whether colonialism is about race or capitalism. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the authors contend that colonialism is foundationally constituted by racial hierarchies; therefore they discount theories that see colonialism as a problem of capitalism—so much so that this genre of theories of colonialism are dismissed as inadequate ways of theorizing colonialism. This revelation of a foundational tension within the relatively new subfield of postcolonial sociology is something I suspect that younger postcolonial sociologists, in particular, will have to grapple with. These important questions about race and capitalism will have to be interrogated, and it will be exciting to see how these debates play out as long as they don’t divide postcolonial sociology and hinder the essential efforts that postcolonial sociologists are undertaking to decolonize the discipline. Upon finishing this book, I found myself thinking of C. L. R. James’s essential theoretical conclusion in The Black Jacobins ([1938] 1989) that ‘‘The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.’’ Here, James got it right, and I wonder if this debate over race versus capitalism as the constituting element of colonialism is misguided. Empire is an element of the dialectical whole of historical capitalism of which the modern European construction of racial hierarchies is also a constituting element. Will this and other debates within postcolonial sociology ultimately lead us to a deeper understanding of histories and theories of colonialism and better help us to decolonize sociology, or will they serve as an obstacle in achieving these consequential theoretical and practical objectives?