Dr John Narayan

John joined King’s in September 2019 having previously held a lectureship in Sociology at Birmingham City University. Prior to this he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham. John is the chair of The Institute of Race Relations and is part of the Editorial Working Committee for Race & Class.

Research

• Racial Capitalism
• Race, Racism & Anti-Racism
• Globalization and Democracy
• Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism
• Social & Political Theory

John has interdisciplinary research interests, which centre on the interlinkages between globalization, inequality and racialization, and on the global aspects of anti-racist and democratic politics.

His most recent research has focused on the understudied transnationalism of Black Power and political theory created by groups such as The Black Panther Party. This project has sought to retrieve this history and highlight how the global politics of Black Power provides lessons about the link between anti-racism and democratic politics in an age of resurgent nativism in Europe and the USA. John has published the results of this research in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Theory, Culture and Society, Current Sociology, and The Sociological Review. He is currently completing his second monograph based on the project’s findings

Teaching

• Resisting Racial Capitalism
• The Making of Modern Europe

PhD Supervision

John welcomes doctoral applications in any area related to his research interests.

Publications

Books

(2016) John Dewey: The Global Public and its Problems. Manchester University Press: Manchester (paperback version 2019).

Edited Volumes/Journal Special Issues

(2023) New Circuits of Anti-Racism, Race and Class. Vol 65, Issue 1

(2017) ‘Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism?’ (co-edited with Leon Sealey-Huggins) Third World Quarterly.  Vol. 38 (11).

(2016) European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies. (co-edited with Gurminder K. Bhambra), International Library of Sociology Series, Routledge: London.

Journal Articles

(2023) 'New Times or new circuits: recovering Sivanandan’s political economy.' Race & Class, 65(1), 14–33.

(2020) 'Brexit as Heredity Redux: Imperialism, Biomedicne and the NHS in Britain’ The Sociological Review doi.org/10.1177/0038026120914177

(2020) ‘‘Surviving Pending Revolution: self-determination in the age of proto-neoliberalism’ Current Sociology. doi.org/10.1177/0011392119886870

(2019)  ‘British Black Power: the anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism.’  The Sociological Review, Vol. 65 (5), pp. 945-947.

(2019) ‘Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: an unacknowledged theory of empire’ Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 36 (3), pp. 57-85.

(2017) ‘Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism?’ (co-authored with Leon Sealey-Huggins) Third World Quarterly.  Vol. 38 (11), pp. 2387-2395.

(2017) ‘The wages of whiteness in the absence of wages: racial capitalism, reactionary intercommunalism and Trumpism’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 38 (11), pp. 2482-2500.

Book Chapters

(2021) ‘Huey P. Newton 1942-1989’ in Callincos, A., Kouvelakis, S., and Pradella, L. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism. Routledge: Abingdon.

(2017) ‘Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: The Spectre of the Third World Project’ in Davies, D., Lormbard, E., and Mountford, B. (eds.) Fighting Words: Fourteen Books That Shaped the Post-Colonial World. Peter Lang: Oxford.

(2016) ‘Fanon’s Decolonized Europe: The Double Promise of Coloured Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Austerity’ in Narayan, J. and Bhambra, G.K. (eds.) European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies. Routledge: London.

(2016) ‘Introduction: Colonial Histories and the Post-Colonial Present of European Cosmopolitanism,’  (co-authored with Gurminder K. Bhambra) in Narayan, J. and Bhambra, G.K. (eds.) European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies. Routledge: London.