Latour’s Actor Network Theory carries ideological biases that exculpate colonialism

Evidence

Recognizing modern power as lacking an organizing logic—one of its most distinctive features—does not on its own explain Wolfe’s purported distinction between genocide and colonialism. We need another explicans, which, once introduced, will remove the explanatory difficulties occasioned by the distinction and, I will argue, the distinction itself. The sophisticated Actor Network Theory has many parts, most of them are eminently useful, while some others are not without ideological biases, including a narrowly defined theory of agency that amounted, in certain writings, to reducing the culpabilities of nothing less than colonialism itself (through arrogating an indefensible form of agency to the “natives”). I am here interested in only one part of it, which I shall metaphorically call, not without a pun, “Latour’s Stone.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 387

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which ANT writings specifically ‘arrogate defensible agency to the natives’ and thereby reduce colonial culpability? Worth chasing the citation.