Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Professor Sampson's paper offers a valuable snapshot of the professional sociologist's craft.His methodological innovations will prove influential and his focus on durable inequality and the social ranking of places is instructive even if those dynamics are gravely complicated -as they are in contemporary London -by increasing inequality, the after-effects of the privatization and adjustments in the inflated market for dwelling space.Sampson's concern to show where what he calls the prevailing 'structuralist' analyses of these matters might be productively supplemented by a greater concern with matters of culture is to be applauded.I take the fact that he has drawn his epigraph from the inspirational fiction of Ralph Ellison as a warrant allowing my response to roam in different directions than the one he has himself followed.For those who are unfamiliar with Invisible Man (Ellison 2004), Ellison's mid-twentieth-century novel was in a deep dialogue with philosophical, sociological and political concerns.A rare and stimulating conversation between humanities, literature, psychology and social theory can be traced back through figures like Ellison and Richard Wright to the towering influence of W.E.B DuBois.That intellectual breadth is something that can enrich the contested domain of social science even as the dominance of rational choice models and mechanistically applied quantitative methods stifle and undermine other strategies of inquiry and academic reflection.Ellison's picaresque tale centres on the currency of visible -phenotypicaldifference and its special place within the US racial nomos -the spatial and legal order of racialized forms of power and inequality.He has much to teach us about those two totalizing categories 'blackness and whiteness' and the manichaean system into which the history of racial slavery organized them.Today, that arrangement is retreating in favour of more complex, multi-polar Gilroy (
Source: British Journal of Sociology
Author: Paul Gilroy
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2082735217