In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.
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Theory and society
This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson's work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson's early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson's fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article's final section argues that Patterson's work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole.
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