Dissonant intimacies: South-South asymmetries, coloniality and failure

I will present some work in progress on the possibilities and limits of creating new epistemic infrastructures and orientations which are invested in South-South knowledge-production and collaborations. That is, academic investments and critical dispositions that work to decenter the global North by placing, instead, conversations within and across the global South at their heart. While the exercise of building South-South links – through funded projects, student grants, university partnerships, etc – seems, on the face of it, to be a natural good, I show their tensions, contradictions, limits and even failures. I use failure to reflect on the lack of equality or equivalence as opposed to easily assumed symmetry or commensurability within the global South, or South-South asymmetries (mediated, in no small part, by the coloniality of knowledge and power). What might a critical interrogation of failure reveal for our collective desires for and indeed, for the epistemological and institutional necessity of decentering the North and thinking the South differently?