Showing papers in "The Global South in 2017"
TL;DR: This paper argued that through the foreignizations diasporas bring to the Global North, the Global South is making claims not only in the North but also on the North by pushing the boundaries of the target language and culture rather than simply assimilating the translated text into it.
Abstract: This article tilts the North/South axis of the Global South scholarship towards the East/West axis, specifically the Middle East and Kurds. I first re-visit the notion of the Global South by using the conceptual tools of translation studies, especially the notion of “foreignizing translation,” a strategy aimed at pushing the boundaries of the target language (and culture) rather than simply assimilating the translated text into it. Besides arguing that the Global South perspective concerns itself with questioning North-South relations temporally and spatially, I focus on the foreignizations diasporas can bring to the Global North. As both insiders and outsiders to Northern spaces, diasporas are uniquely placed both in terms of the foreignizations they bring to the Global North and the entanglements of the North and South which they expose. In this paper I examine the “Global South in the North” by taking the Kurdish diaspora living in European metropoles as a case study and conceptualizing the Kurdish movement as a transnational indigenous movement. I argue that through the foreignizations diasporas bring, the Global South is making claims not only in the North but also on the North. By focusing on the role of diasporas and the Middle East, areas which have received little attention within Global South scholarship, I seek to complicate and thus enrich our understandings of the Global South.
41 citations
TL;DR: The Underground Railroad as discussed by the authors uses speculative aesthetics to explore the possibility of reparative justice; this aesthetic mission places the novel in the company of many contemporary writers exploring the poetics of peripheralization.
Abstract: Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad , tells the story of an enslaved woman, Cora, attempting to escape a Georgia plantation and make her way to freedom by using the underground railroad. Rather than figuring the railroad as a network of people helping Cora move in secret, Whitehead's novel transforms the underground railroad into a real train. This essay considers the effects of the novel's speculative premise in conjunction with its use of satire, focusing on the depictions of the nineteenth-century locations through which Cora moves. While these US states may at first appear to be likewise reimagined spaces, this essay focuses on resonances between the novel's depiction of these places and the real histories of racialized violence that extend beyond emancipation and into the present. The Underground Railroad deploys the poetics of what this essay terms "speculative satire" to reconfigure readers' understanding of these histories. In so doing, the novel uses speculative aesthetics to explore the possibility of reparative justice; this aesthetic mission places the novel in the company of many contemporary writers exploring the poetics of peripheralization. The novel's use of generic fantasy clarifies, rather than obscures, the ways in which violent colonial histories are often overlooked. In this way, it also redirects the usage of the term "fantasy" in criticism, where the genre is often associated with psychic and ideological mystifications. Thus, this essay argues that critics working to account for and redress national and regional fantasies should examine and instrumentalize the poetics of contemporary speculative fiction.
26 citations
TL;DR: The Global South is not an entity that exists per se but has to be understood as something that is created, imagined, invented, maintained, and recreated by the ever changing and never fixed status positions of social actors and institutions as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:There exist various and often vague definitions of the Global South in contemporary public discourse and academic publications. The objective of this introduction is to assess the different definitions and to advance the current theoretical discourse. It argues that the \"Global South,\" when not simplistically referred to in terms of geography, has great potential to consolidate and empower the various social actors that consider themselves to be in subaltern(ized) positionalities of global networks of power. The Global South is not an entity that exists per se but has to be understood as something that is created, imagined, invented, maintained, and recreated by the ever-changing and never fixed status positions of social actors and institutions. For the context of knowledge production in academic institutions, the idea of the Global South may be embraced as a process or practice through which new modes of knowledge production are created and learned and more balanced relationships in the global system of knowledge production are achieved.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the benefits and limitations of the Global South concept and its fundamentally different readings are discussed, and it is argued that it is vital to distinguish between the vocabulary's desired outcomes and its likely real effects.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Focusing on the benefits and limitations of the Global South concept and its fundamentally different readings, this article seeks to problematize our own role when using the term both as scholars and as engaged intellectuals. Historically, the Global South has been invoked by scholars and intellects from the so-called developed and less developed world alike. While the term has been used as a tool to denounce injustices, dependencies, and \"subalternity,\" it has also helped to reify problematic North-South dichotomies that have entrenched practices of inequality and domination. I argue that the heuristic, intellectual, and political value of the Global South requires a more thorough discussion. Merely welcoming it as a refreshing playground for unsettling old and unfair ordering systems seems insufficient. Offering a hopeful yet skeptical reading of the Global South, this article seeks to question that this category necessarily leads to radical transformations. To the contrary, it may reify rather than overcome injustices just like the previous concept of the \"Third World.\" I argue that it is vital to distinguish between the vocabulary's desired outcomes and its likely real effects. If our goal is to change the world (and not just parrot a utopian buzzword), we may need to elaborate precise conceptualizations and reflect upon their concrete—not just imagined—consequences. It is precisely the Global South concept's Janus-faced nature that has led to its success; while we cannot fully endorse it given its danger of abuse, we can neither completely abandon it given its interventionist potential.
16 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that much of this literature has reduced liberalism's history into clichés about its homogenizing tendencies and its associations with contemporary neoliberalism, and argued the need for a renewed liberalism in the Global South.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:Scholars of the Global South often portray liberal philosophy as the antinomy of a more radical postcolonial politics. This essay asks if it is possible to integrate visions of liberal Enlightenment into conceptions of southern politics. Beginning with a theoretical engagement with illiberal scholarship, this essay argues that much of this literature has reduced liberalism's history into clichés about its homogenizing tendencies and its associations with contemporary neoliberalism. Ending with a discussion of the Philippines under the populist authoritarian, Rodrigo Duterte, illustrates the need for a renewed liberalism in the Global South.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the epistemic and practical possibilities that the notion of a global south may open are explored, drawing from works on the subject such as Anibal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America" (2000), Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos's Conocer desde el Sur (2006), but also from a long Italian Marxist tradition that goes from Antonio Gramsci's "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" (1926
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This paper looks at the epistemic and practical possibilities that the notion of a \"Global South\" may open. Drawing from works on the subject such as Anibal Quijano's \"Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America\" (2000), Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos's Conocer desde el Sur (2006) but also from a long Italian Marxist tradition that goes from Antonio Gramsci's \"Some Aspects of the Southern Question\" (1926) through Franco Cassano's Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (1996) to Franco Piperno's workerist Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale [Praise of the Southern Public Spirit] (1997), this essay considers the Global South as a possible commonplace where European Marxism and global post-colonial and de-colonial movements may meet.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the history of the formation of the global South as a political bloc in the form of the Group of Seventy Seven, or G77, and in their aspirations and negotiations at the United Nations.
Abstract: This article argues that the countries of the global South have defined themselves in a globally-positioned way since the 1960s - long before the current wave of neoliberal globalization or academic thinking about the ‘global South’. This is shown by tracing the history of the formation of the global South as a political bloc in the form of the Group of Seventy Seven, or G77, and in their aspirations and negotiations at the United Nations. The article explores how the G77 acts in the global political system, and how it tries to act on the global political system in order to produce a particular vision of the global. This is done through an analysis of some of the G77’s proposals of how to restructure the global order, including the NIEO and more recently in the UN’s Financing for Development conferences. The South’s vision of the global with stark disparities between North and South and their proposals to ameliorate the situation, is contrasted with a newly emerging Northern vision of the global which seeks to dissolve North and South into a neutral, holistic vision in which power and inequality is not salient.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the spatial construction of the slave plantation in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave is examined as a way to negotiate gender and racial hierarchies in US antebellum slave society.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay examines the spatial construction of the slave plantation in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave as a way to negotiate gender and racial hierarchies in US antebellum slave society. Through the movement (and stillness) of the film's two prominent female characters, the enslaved woman Patsey and the slave master's wife, Mrs. Epps, I consider Steve McQueen's emphasis on natural landscape and the built environment as a way to examine race, gender, labor, and slavery's unyielding acts of repetitive violence.
2 citations
TL;DR: Shih's City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong (2005) as mentioned in this paper presents the life story of Deyun Huang, who is kidnapped in China and sold into prostitution in colonial Hong Kong, where she endures colonial violence as a woman and a single mother in different physical locations.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article identifies and examines the place-based and protracted nature of narrating everyday life and survival under the slow violence of colonialism in Shu-Ching Shih's City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong (2005), in order to argue that such a narrative style better attends to the vicissitudes of quotidian lives and human interactions, and to the particularities of time and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hong Kong under British rule. The novel presents the life story of Deyun Huang, who is kidnapped in China and sold into prostitution in colonial Hong Kong, where she endures colonial violence as a woman and a single mother in different physical locations—brothels, pawnshops, and, later, her own property. Historically and contextually specific, and filled with realist elements that recuperate a condition of a believable past, Shih's novel brings to life a colonial Hong Kong that is concrete rather than conceptual; in so doing, the novel offers glimpses into the interstices of empire in the material world, while avoiding themes and tendencies that often bind together character development and nation-building and thus transcend diverse lived experiences into large-scale, decontextualized allegories of colonialism. Taken as a whole, this article reads City of the Queen as a literary attempt at representing and rewriting the individual lives of the colonized in Hong Kong, along with their emotions and uneventful ebbs and flows, which are seldom mentioned in official history or considered an integral part of postcolonial consciousness and discourse.
1 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigates what it means that the aesthetic choices of an older realism have been persistently replicated in the semi-periphery of the world by taking up the case of South Korean literature and cinema, and argues that this dilemma is reflected and finally negated in Chang-dong Lee's realism.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article investigates what it means that the aesthetic choices of an older realism have been persistently replicated in the global (semi-) periphery. In the fully modern, industrialized, and even cybernetic metropolises outside the West, we find a curious resistance to the modernist styles to which avant-garde practice has been driven to conform in the taste cultures of the international art world. Analyzing the demands of western modernist style that influence the process of making \"world literature/cinema,\" this article explores the relationship of peripheral thinking to the history of aesthetic forms in the core by taking up the case of South Korean literature and cinema. Through textual analysis of South Korean neo-realism or Shin Sasiljueui found in Chang-dong Lee's Poetry (2010), in particular, this article illuminates one of the ways in which South Korean neo-realism discloses the power of a realism that has not yet fully blossomed. South Korean cinema, in particular, has long struggled between a desire to be responsive to western expectations of Third World cinema, on the one hand, and to be liberated from its desire for recognition, on the other. Looking at how this dilemma is reflected and finally negated in Chang-dong Lee's realism, I argue that his aesthetics allow us to rethink realism not as a dead end on the way to modernism, but as a sort of ethical program after the hegemony of western modernist aesthetics.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how much of what Césaire constellates can be linked both genealogically and aesthetically to two distinct temporal schemas associated with Greek antiquity: Dionysiac cyclical renewal and kairological right time.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:In Aimé Césaire's first tragedy, Et les chiens se taisaient (first published in 1946), an anti-colonial hero called the Rebel struggles in a pre-abolition story-world where the past holds a prophetic grasp on the future. Césaire articulates social transformation through untimely temporal structures associated with organic life cycles, seasonal change and meteorological unpredictability. These ecological models provide the figural registers through which Césaire depicts revolution as a violent eruption of the new at all levels of existence. Unable to be foreseen or contained, these poetic acts of violent creation involve the specific intensity and peculiar temporality of birth. This essay suggests that Les chiens' slave revolt performs the untimeliness of decolonization as a poetics that fundamentally rejects mechanical notions of change determined by linear models of time and history. By reading Les chiens through allusions to its philosophical source material, I show how much of what Césaire constellates can be linked both genealogically and aesthetically to two distinct temporal schemas associated with Greek antiquity: Dionysiac cyclical renewal and kairological \"right time.\" While often opposed on a philosophical level, these two untimely schemas, as juxtaposed by Césaire, express the plural and poetic temporality of decolonial revolution's tragic eruptions. His encounter with Nietzsche's Dionysiac and with the kairos of political theologians involved concepts that, in their capacity as expressions of primitivity, reveal at once the civilizational heritage of Africa as well as the destructive forces capable of undoing European imperialism.
TL;DR: This article argued that the American experience in Southeast Asia should be read within a genealogy of American imperialism that incorporates the cultural dimension by placing limits on the textual use of perspective, and they took the history of Vietnam's decolonization as its test case.
Abstract: Although perspective as a narrative category is sometimes treated as a technical issue for the writer, increasingly contemporary fiction coming from the United States must be read in terms of geopolitics, given the history of American hegemony and the move in US writing toward global settings. A poetics of peripheralization approach best facilitates this type of reading, since it addresses the political dimension of literature's more formal properties. Reading US literature against global cultural production is also essential. This article takes the history of Vietnam's decolonization as its test case. Narratives dealing with this history by Moroccan Abdallah Saaf, US-based Franco-Austrian Bernard Fall, and Korean Hwang Sok-yong here provide a context for reading perspective in Vietnam novels by Tim O'Brien as inherently political. My claim here is that the American experience in Southeast Asia should be read within a genealogy of American imperialism that incorporates the cultural dimension by placing limits on the textual use of perspective.