Decolonizing Politics, by Robbie Shilliam

What do Sarah Gilbert, designer of the Oxford vaccine, BioNTech’s Kati Kariko and Moderna’s Melissa Moore have in common? Every one of these leading scientists experienced professional marginalisation because of sexism, racism or both. Diverse voices struggle to be heard.

As a social scientist, I could chastise my STEM colleagues for allowing race and gender to thwart scientific discovery. Surely scientific research is a daring, collaborative, global effort on behalf of us all? No, I am not that naive. But I am that idealistic and hopeful. Progress in science should, for the sake of humanity, be the broadest possible dialogue of discovery.

The irrationality of marginalising brilliant minds is somehow clearer when we sit in judgement over our STEM colleagues. Yet various disciplines of the social sciences continue to avoid broadly based dialogues of discovery, rebuffing marginalised, diverse voices through an allegedly “rational” defence of the canon or a patronising dismissal of such voices as “interesting but not of interest to me”.

In Decolonizing Politics, Robbie Shilliam challenges political science to critically examine the colonial and racist logics at the foundations of the discipline. It may be an introductory text aimed at undergraduates, but I wish all mainstream political scientists dared to engage with its premise!

Taking his pedagogical cue from political theorist Manjeet Ramgotra, Shilliam brings disparate thinkers into conversation with each other – in the hope that a dialogue of discovery will lead to a better understanding of different political landscapes. Putting Immanuel Kant into discussion with Jamaican novelist Sylvia Wynter underscores how Kant’s philosophy of reason reproduced racial hierarchies, “tightening the fit between skin color and the capacity to exercise one’s full humanity”, and raises the question: what does coloniality deem to be human?

Elsewhere, the behaviourism of psychologist John Watson and the racial underpinnings of the 19th-century British essayist Walter Bagehot’s explanation of political behaviour are juxtaposed with the anticolonial psychiatry of Frantz Fanon. Through this dialogue, Shilliam explains that the “promotion of the norm” in political behaviour has been “profoundly undemocratic”.

The opening pages of the book reach back to the disciplinary foundations. Aristotle, who found himself implicated in both the Macedonian and Persian empires, worried about how empire might impact upon the “good life” of the city-state and the privileges of “citizenship”. Concerns about the colonial, Shilliam argues, sit at the heart of Aristotle’s desire to preserve the status quo, including his commitment to a hierarchy that leaves women and slaves at the political margins. “Imperial expansion and the colonial project,” we read, “intimately shaped political concepts” and “the polis itself.”

The book closes by bringing Aristotle into conversation with queer, Chicanx, cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldua. Where Aristotle, himself a marginalised man in Athens, warned Greek citizens of the threat of empire and the need to hold the centre by preserving the known hierarchy, Anzaldua, a marginalised mestiza at the borderlands of Spanish, Mexican, Texan and American political culture, has no interest in preserving the centre. Instead, she embraces a “non-dualistic, mixed, migratory” mestiza consciousness to reimagine the pursuit of politics.

Perhaps Shilliam’s most important contribution is in asking: can political science dare to consult the “sages at the margins” in a dialogue of discovery?

Angelia Wilson is professor of politics at the University of Manchester.

Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction
By Robbie Shilliam
Polity Press, 192pp, £45.00 and £15.99
ISBN 9781509539383 and 9781509539390
Published 29 April 2021