Lecture Series "Challenge(s) of the South"

Since 2000, ”Global South Studies” have produced an increasing flow of academic work across the humanities and social sciences proposing an innovative and comparative approach to cultures and societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the wake of the ”Third World”’, whose demise had already been announced in the 1990s, the concept ”Global South” takes account of continuing inequities within the global economy, but it also suggests a narrative of empowerment of the South by pointing for example to phenomena of de-occidentalization and growing lateral South-South relations. The term also encompasses the globalized flows of people, goods, finances and ideas and thus includes the reciprocal embedding of South(s) in the North and North(s) in the South.

The term is nonetheless problematic in a number of ways. ”Global South” is a terminology in part forged in the North that draws on a spatial metaphor highly resonant of Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment discourses of geographic alterity. However, the Southern usage of the ”Global South” indicates a desire to escape from the apparently eternal binary of colonial/postcolonial, in which the colonizer-colonized relationship remains intact. Knowledge produced in the context of the Global South ideally seeks alternative routes for exploring a globalized, multi-nodal world and profits from diversified perspectives and the inclusion of a multiplicity of voices and actors.

In our lecture series ”Challenge(s) of the South” we will discuss with experts from various fields of studies in humanities and social sciences both the utility and the pitfalls of the Global South as a heuristic category. We will also focus on critical debates on content and aims of Global South Studies that are indicative of the political dimension inherent in academic knowledge production—all the more so in the context of geopolitical hegemonies.

Thursdays from 2:15 to 3:45 PM in Room 327 (Brechtbau)