Theory from the South: Where are We?

As part of Spring Programme in Critical Thought, WiSER invites you to a lunchtime panel  

THEORY FROM THE SOUTH: WHERE ARE WE?  

In their 2012 book Theory From the South Jean and John Comaroff posited that the global South affords a privileged insight into the workings of the world at large.  They built on other theories which troubled the histories that modernity had presumed, including Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe and Homi Bhabha’s notion of the power of the ex-centric view. In late capitalism, the Comaroffs argued, old margins become new frontiers, prefiguring capitalist formations in the North. In response, scholars like Juan Obarrio have pressed on the Comaroff’s argument from a Latin American vantage point, rendering the picture of a single global South more complex, while still supporting their project of rendering Africa ‘in theory’.  Other scholars, like Ato Quayson, ask for more of a South-South dialogue in which the South is less a laboratory for the North than a harbinger of political forms and cultural questions within and across the South itself. Further interlocuters have asked where China is in a theory from the South schema, a country that styles itself as both North and South. This panel revisits and tests out theory from the South or southern theory, its current limits and possibilities, its continuing relevance and the new pressures it faces in the light of emerging planetary concerns, and concerns with the planetary.  

Anthony Bogues, Juan Obarrio, Sarah Nuttall, Dilip Menon and Achille Mbembe  

IN CONVERSATION 

~ All welcome ~