Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order

Caroline Levander Walter Mignolo

The Global South, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 1-11 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/gbs.2011.0001

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The Global South and World Dis/Order

Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo

Introduction:

ABSTRACT

This special issue introduction explores the institutional, disciplinary, and geopolitical possibilities of global south as an emergent conceptual apparatus. More particularly, it explores how tensions between ordering and disordering implicit in global south might provide a useful heuristic for those engaged in a wide range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political work. By exploring global south and world dis/ order we want to avoid the modern assumption that change is good in and of itself, even as we want to revisit long-standing assumptions about how the world has been ordered.

Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance (2011); Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (2006); Alternatives to Privatization in the Global South (2011); Geographies of Developing Areas: The Global South in a Changing World (2009); Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (2010); Institutions of the Global South (2008). These are just a few of the recent titles that collectively suggest that the term global south seems to be a new and powerful ordering system for academic disciplines as well as for geographies, politics, and cultures. This special issue is interested in exploring the possibilitiesinstitutional, disciplinary, geopoliticalof global south as an emergent conceptual apparatus and, more particularly, in exploring how tensions between ordering and disordering implicit in global south might provide a useful heuristic for those engaged in a wide range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political work. In this issue we therefore bring together political theorists, historians, literary and cultural scholars, African and African Americanists, sociologists, cartographers, and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies specialists in an effort to resist the disciplinary ordering through which institutions have graphed methods of analysis
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and knowledge production onto stable territorial frameworks. Intellectual inquiry can all too easily naturalize territoriality. Disciplinary languages, frames of reference, and methods of inquiryas much or even more than the languages and dialects that the worlds peoples speakcan and do all too easily sustain and normalize the ways in which we parse power systems in an increasingly global age. But if disciplinary languages have a history of upholding national boundaries, regional differences, and geopolitical hierarchies, this issue suggests productive pathways and contact points for new modes of scholarly exchange that can work against such long-standing imperatives. By exploring global south and world dis/order we want to avoid the modern assumption that change is good in and of itself, even as we want to revisit long-standing assumptions about how the world has been ordered. We began this conversation in September 2008 at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where we had been invited to deliver the inaugural lectures and a seminar on the global south. More particularly, we began the conversation that would lead to this special issue while sharing a beer and looking at each other across the divide that, like the fence then being built between the US and Mexico, separates and so easily provokes hostility between what feel to be the warring camps of those cognate territorial fields of Latin American Studies and American Studies. But we quickly found more than an uneasy truce. We found ourselves engaged in an energetic and at times intellectually vertiginous thought experiment in the current place and possibilities of disciplinary modes of inquiry in the territorial sorting implicit in global ordering. Rather than asking how practitioners of political theory, sociology, cultural studies, or history might collaborate across disciplinary divides or how cognate area studies inter-disciplines might live more peacefully in the global academic village that university administrators are building (often with our help), we found ourselves asking how those thinking about territoriality and geopoliticsregardless of our locations within academic fieldsmight envision or conceptualize the possibilities and the impediments of global south as an emergent dis/ordering system. That was the moment in which the idea behind the issue began to take shape as a project engaged in delinking from studying an object, area or region and in turning toward the subject that wants to know and understand. To know what, to understand what, why, with what purpose?these are the questions we began asking each other. The questions we found ourselves asking ultimately turned into who is talking about the global southwhen, why, where? And it is this set of questions that we invitedand challengedour contributors to contemplate. Soon we went beyond the initial conversation about the Americas North/ South divide (represented in essays by Herlinghaus, Milian, Saldivar, and Rojas-Sotelo) and considered the historical foundations of that current divide. We realized that it was necessary to consider the legal and international relations
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and contexts governing the generation of this global south (Grovogui). From such a perspective, we were able to ask ourselves, how do Caribbean peoples see themselves in the map of the Americas and the global south (Casimir)? We then considered how Europe might come into the picture with its own divide, North and South (Dainotto), and with its own West/South East division (Grzinic). When we approached the East, the open question was about the former Russian Federation and its own mapping of North/South and East/West (Tlostanova). Certainly, the global south could not be mapped without a contribution from Asia. Located in the East by Western appropriation of cardinal directions since the invention of the magnetic compass, Asias intellectuals, politicians, and scholars make particular meaning of global south and translate it into journalism and art in particular ways (Ching). All of our contributors splendid global dis/order is powerfully captured in the mapping with which we begin the issuePedro Laschs map, The Indianization of Globalization. We are not interested in generating catchy tag lines or keywords that those in different disciplines can import into their home departments to facilitate disciplinary business as usual. We arent interested in issuing intellectual trade restrictions on how individuals exchange and build new intellectual infrastructure. We are, however, interested in dis/ordering the assumptions that are incipient within disciplinary formations and that can work, through seemingly effortless intellectual sleights of hand, to make the world as we think we know it seem inevitable, static, and ubiquitous. We are more interested in the knowing subject than in the known object. We are therefore not asking what the global south is, but rather for whom and under what conditions the global south becomes relevant. We therefore structure this issue around such constellations or flashpoints as cartography, remapping, and textualities rather than around particular fieldsbe they disciplinary or geographic. That said, we do find that our interlocutors range across a wide array of geographic and disciplinary fields. In order to frame what we, as co-editors, aim to achieve with this project, we suggest at least three large discursive formations and loci of enunciation. The Global South is not an existing entity to be described by different disciplines, but an entity that has been invented in the struggle and conflicts between imperial global domination and emancipatory and decolonial forces that do not acquiesce with global designs. Thus, it is well knownto start withthat Global South is the geopolitical concept replacing Third World after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From this perspective, the global south is the location of underdevelopment and emerging nations that needs the support of the global north (G7, IMF, World Bank, and the like). However, from the perspective of the inhabitants (and we say consciously inhabitants rather than citizens, regional or global), the Global South is the location where new visions of the future are emerging and where the global political and decolonial society is at work. A third trajectory is the force with which the global
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south is stepping in the very heart of the global norththe South of the US (as Claudia Milian describes it), the South of Europe (outlined in Dainottos essay), and the South East of Europe (interrogated by Grzinic). Interestingly enough, as Grzinic observes, the Global South within the North (EU and the US) merges with the increasing presence of the South in the North enacted by massive migration from Africa, Asia, South-Central America, the Caribbean, and, alas, the former Eastern Europe. The global south from the perspective of those who inhabit it is the struggle between institutions and actors who aligned with the global north (e.g., Colombia, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia). We are finishing this introduction at the time of the Egyptian uprising against the government and its foreign supporters. In a way, this upheaval is, paradoxically, a democratic revolution against those who supported Hosni Mubarak in his long lasting dictatorial regime (the former Western Europe and the US) and those actors and institutions that are moving toward new horizons of life delinking from the global north, even if they are doing it in diverse and controversial ways (Bolivia, Iran, Brazil, Turkey, China). In this already complex picture we can see that the global south is only understood in relation to the global north, both entangled in long lasting historical relations of Western imperial expansion. Global South is not only displacing the idea of the Third World but also the tension between East and West. China is constantly reminding us, by its very presence in the global scene, that while it was one of the non-aligned countries and therefore one of the Third World countries during the Mao Zedong years, it would be difficult today to see China as clearly aligned in the global south. The story gets more complicated when we consider that regional configuration of East and South East Asia. South East is both at once, South and East, such that not only does the West-East divide become a fuzzy domain but so does the NorthSouth divide. What is clear, however, is that knowledge is controlled by history, actors, and institutions located in the North and in the West. And it is because the imperial loci of enunciation is in the West (the West of Jerusalem) and in the North (the magnetic compass that replaced sun-rise as point of reference and of orientation) that the East and the South appeared as second class regions of the world. These are all the places whose daily time is marked in reference to Greenwich, although neither of these countries participated in making Greenwich the point of reference. It was an epistemic decision of the British Empire to place the center of time right in their backyard. In a nutshell, the Global South (like democracy, development, and many other concepts) is now the place of struggles between, on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity and modernization together with the logic of coloniality and domination, and, on the other, the struggle for independent thought and decolonial freedom. From the perspective of the global north, the global south needs help. From the perspective of the inhabitants of those
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regions that are not aligned with the global north, the global south names the places where decolonial emancipations are taking place and where new horizons of life are emerging. A case in point is the strong argument advanced by Jean Casimir on Haiti and the Grand South. His argument introduces the notion of inhabitants that calls into question the imperial notion of citizen. Inhabitants are those who name the dwelling place, those who in-habit a place, a land, and not those who depend on the law and the rights dictated by a State that leaves the inhabitants out of its citizens. Roberto Dainotto challenges us to conceptualize and to question the border, limit or frontier that defines or designates the South of Europe in the first place. Asking what kind of conceptual border forms the global south epistemologically as well as historically, Dainotto takes the precise moment of European modernity to explore how the European south became the conceptual apparatus through which an emergent logic of identity began to take shape in the eighteenth century. Marina Grzinic unveils the disappearing acts that both divided Europe into Western and Eastern regions and located both regions firmly in the pasta former Western and a former Eastern Europe. The semantic change hides the reality that the European Union is a new name for former Western Europe. She argues that Southeastern Europe (comprising Albania, BosniaHerzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia) has become synonymous with animosity inbetween countries. With the exceptions of Greece (a member of the European Union since 1981), Slovenia (a member since May 1, 2004), Bulgaria and Romania (members since January 1, 2007), the rest of Southeastern Europe is today renamed the West Balkans. Madina Tlostanova brings a new and disturbing configuration to bear on the epistemological framework of the global south, as she points out the current uneasy place of Russia in the global dis/order. Once the Soviet Union and the Second World after its collapse, both Russia as well as Central Asia and Caucasus were left out of the map. Now Russia is the poor North who has its own problematic South (Caucasus) and a Central (like in Central America), places that join the disparaged regions identified as East, South, and Central: all of them are neither the North nor the West, where classifications are made and knowledge is controlled. From such a viewpoint, Tlostanova forcefully contends that the question being asked by those living in this newly made invisible landscape is not so much where are we in relation to the global south? but rather what does it mean to be a void, to be nothing in the new architecture of the world? For Leo Ching, it is the south of the Japan/Southeast Asia relation that embeds within it complex and unchanging patterns of power and domination
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framing Japans economic recovery as it went from prewar empire to postwar subimperial force after World War II. Japans tenuous relations to Southeast Asia are enabled by postwar discourses of a north/south divide, and it is these tensions that are at work in the popular terebi eiga or TV movies that feature familiar war-time Asian heroes who uphold justice and thereby enact for Japanese viewers the trauma of its imperialist endeavors. Like Ching, Hermann Herlinghaus finds in textual material new narrative imaginaries that regraph cultural praxis and experiences. Elaborating on the Chilean Roberto Bolaos novel 2666, Herlinghaus considers how pharmacological perspectives shape narratives of the constitution of a Western and colonial modernity. In such a cultural praxis, the Mexican-U.S. border region operates as a fraught site through which a global aesthetics of sobriety gains shape and texture, a fact upon which Bolaos text depends for its critique of Western academic knowledge. Jos David Saldvar similarly turns to literary materialin this case the archive of Americanitys literaturesto illustrate how the literature of the Global South takes possession of what has been dispossessed. By linking Quijano and Wallersteins notion of Americanity with Junot Dazs Fuk Americanus in The Brief Wondrous Live of Oscar Wao, Saldvar translates a sociological term into the vocabulary of literature: Americanity and Fuk Americanus are the consequences of European classification and hierarchization. Oscar Wao responds to the realities of Americanity with a deadly search for decolonial love, and decolonial loves point of origination is the global south, because decolonial love is unthinkable in the global north where classifications are made. Saldvar concludes that Dazs transmodern novel turns colonial difference into his favorhe manages the classification instead of letting the colonial difference manage him (and all Latino/as in the US). Claudia Milian focuses our attention on the elided migratory margins within a hemispheric community of North and South to ask key questions of those engaged in thinking through Global South: What happens to gender analysis when we script identity as Latino/a or Chicano/a?, and what does the global south offer that border studies, comparative ethnic studies, Latin American studies and transamerican studies do not? In order to begin to answer these questions, Milian offers Latin@ as a textual signifier of the complex bodily and cultural spaces that Latinos and Latinas occupy. This approach to representing the multi-dimensionality of Central American-American through multiple semiotics is visualized in three tags of Peru Anas that Milian photographed. In such spaces between words and within phrases, she contemplates an identity-in-the-making that is engendered by displacement and that has yet to arrive in the U.S. Latino and Latina world or Latin America. Miguel Rojas-Sotelos essay considers in detail how visual communities and formsin this case the Havana Biennaleoperate as networks of meaning
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making and artistic community formation. The group of cultural mega-events presented through the Havana Biennale (19842009) has projected Cubas interest in being at the center of world affairs and has highlighted an alternative cosmopolitan Southern modernism. As Rojas-Sotelo importantly observes, too often the cultural subject of the South remains absent from debates about the political subject of the global south, but the events comprising the Havana Biennale spotlight how artistic debates and practices that take place in a particular location within the global south have contributed in the last twenty-five years to a redefinition of global arts network. With these essays as rich context, the final contribution by Siba Grovogui reminds us that Global South is not a directional but a symbolic designation that captures the possibilities of cohesion that can emerge when former colonial entities engage in political projects of decolonization. After sketching in broad strokes the political contours of Global South as a designator of global territorial order, Grovogui details how the set of practices, attitudes, and relations embedded in the term provide a powerful disavowal of institutional and cultural practices associated with colonialism and imperialism. For Grovogui the possibilities inherent in Global South are euphorically limitless, once we recognize the extent to which the term operates as a call and label signifying the emergence of nothing less than a different world based on responsibility to self and others. If we conclude with Grovoguis powerful call to revisit cartographic projections generated by the West (such as the 1974 Peters Map) that magnified the territory of colonial powers and minimized the space of those they colonized, we begin with Pedro Laschs account of the map that does precisely that. This image resonates with the goals of this special issue: to approach the global south as a nested network of world dis/order in which reconfigurations of power become possible in places of struggle. The image and commentary with which we begin the collection, in short, let us suddenly see the full complexity and struggle between logics of coloniality and domination, on the one hand, and independent thought and alternative freedoms, on the other.
Where is the Global South?

As the contributors to our special issue collectively make clear, Global South is an expression of relatively recent coinage, and its uptake in common and academic parlance has dramatically increased since 1989. In the US, the global south refers to a South that reaches beyond the geographical borders of the countrya South that is implicated in many global networks. This is nowhere more evident than in the two particular locations within the US global south that the co-editors of this special issue occupy. High Point, in North Carolina, f or example, has been described as Furniture Capital of the World and
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North Carolina International City. Located along the Texas gulf coast, Houston has likewise been identified by prominent publications of global capital like The Economist as the quintessential new American citynot so much at the southern margins of U.S. socioeconomic activity but rather at the center of hemispheric as well as global economic convergences. Even such icons of the Deep South as Mississippis William Faulkner has, in recent years, been re-contextualized within global as well as hemispheric, rather than national southern, routes that emphasize his interconnections with Fuentes and Mrquez, among many others, and that highlight, for example, the transnational dimensions of slavery in the Americas. As the case of Faulkner might suggest, global configurations intersect with hemispheric figurations of the South in ways that potentially destabilize geopolitical frames of reference. A Hemispheric South gestures to a South of the US and a South of the Bordera Hemispheric South where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. But this point where the North of South America becomes a Southern Hemisphere, particularly once put into play with a global southern grid, focuses our attention on networks that extend South-to-Southnetworks that have the potential to engage decolonial forces in art, knowledge, ethics, politics, and creative practice. It is these networkswhich, at times, may come into fullest view when we apply the multiple lenses of global as well as hemispheric approaches to the southin which we are interested. If the indices of a Hemispheric South orient us to networks filtering through as well as beyond the Americas, Global South is commonly used outside of the US, from South America to South Africa (both meaning a country and sub-Saharan Africa) to South Asia and South East Asia in order to highlight interconnections between sectors of the world distinguishing themselves from the Global North (without which, of course, Global South doesnt mean much). In this context, however, Global South is not the expression used, but instead South-to-South relationsa term that refers to a network that intentionally leaves out the global north. In this geo-political configuration, the global south is taking the place of the Third World and the implied global north the place of the First World. Add to this configuration the long history of the South of Europe, which, unlike the South of the US, is the South of a continent, a continent that is identified, however, with the global north. Moreover, the South of Europe collides with the North of Africa, in a way that parallels the US borderlands. Much like one can say of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, one can say of Europe, from the perspective of a Mahgrebian immigrant, that the Third World grates with the First and bleeds. To place Global South in the larger picture of geo-historical location, we also must remember Central: Central Europe, Central America, Central
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Asiaplaces that, as many of our contributors remind us, are neither in the South nor in the North but that somehow are marginal in relation to the global north. Central America is sandwiched between the Global South/ Third World and the Global North/First World; Central Asia between upcoming East and South East Asia and its Western limits with Eastern Europe; and Central Europe seems to be the buffer zone that resists the union of Eurasia and remains as a buffer zone between Central Asia and Western Europe. Powerful as these designations of the worlds regions have become in our thinking, they are not inscribed on planet earth and cannot be seen from a satellite. Rather, they have been historically, economically, politically, and ideologically constructed. But who constructed them? In the first place, the globe was mapped since 1500 by cartography and international lawwhat Carl Schmitt describes as linear global thinkingand by the advent of Europe and the control and management of knowledge. East and West are concepts that come from the Renaissance; North and South from the Enlightenment. However, once regions were classified, people belonging to those regions began, in uneven ways, to assume their location and work within these systems of classification. Thus, Global South can be seen at the confluence and conflicts between systems of knowledge and ways of conceptualizing space, cultures, and ways of knowing. However, the metaphor of the global south has been appropriated and resignified. While the global south is a metaphor for poverty, oppression, and suffering that, as Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has it, promotes and provokes an epistemology of the South, from India to SubSaharan Africa to South America, South-to-South networks have been underway for some time now. It is these networksmany of which filter through hemispheric, regional, and micro-regional communitiesthat are our guiding concern in this issue. In the Philippines, Walden Bello, academic, activist, and political analyst, has been for years pointing toward the conjunction of the global south and de-globalization. This issue explores those components of South-to-South relationsbe they operative within the rubric of a global south or a hemispheric Americas South or boththat engage with decolonial forces in art, knowledge, ethics, sensibilities, and politics. With these thoughts in mind, this special issue engaged a disciplinarily diverse group of eleven scholars in personal conversation about the politics of scholarship, without abandoning scholarly expectations, of what Hemispheric/ Global South meant to them and to their work, and what they think it means today. We were interested in getting their thoughts on why we are talking about the global south today. We were interested in their thoughts about what Hemispheric South could mean in a tradition in which the hemisphere was defined as Western Hemisphere in relation to Europe. Or better yet, we were interested in exploring what changing the accent from Western Hemisphere
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to Hemispheric South and from East-West relations (Occidentalism/Orientalism) to North/South relations opens up in terms of ways of knowing and access to decolonial forms of expression. What we found indicates the remarkable vitality of global south as a dis/ ordering designator of decolonial projects. The eleven contributions to this special issue suggest, collectively, that Global South is, among other things, a design drawn from and implemented by imperial local histories; it is part of imperial globalism. As such, Global South is an expression that emerges out of these forces and is bound up with this dense fabric of meaning making. But, as this special issue explores, it is a term not inevitably reducible to or complicit with such frameworks. All eleven contributions, in various ways, call global designs into question and open up the possibility of networking among local histories. They flesh out the shape and texture of a global southexploring those aspects of the global south that are not entirely coincident with or pressed into the inevitable service of the latest phases of modernity. Rather than a series of locations, the global south offers, as these contributions illustrate, a series of identifications and opportunities that might be understood to engage with decolonial (instead of imperial) local histories. The term, therefore, can be variously used or contested in ways that move beyond the polarized political possibilities of complicity or resistance. In this issue, we explore this often-overlooked aspect of the global south because the terms that have tended to set the debate (resistance and complicity) have foreclosed alternative political possibilities. Resistance means that those within the grasp of the meaning-making apparatus designating Global South have already accepted the rules of the gamethat there is an imperial plan with which they must comply or against which they can choose to resist. Our contributors, however, consider those aspects of Global South (locations within it or constituencies comprising it) that seem to explore re-existence (a term coined by Colombian cultural critic and activist Adolfo Albn Achinte) rather than resistanceaspects that invent or imagine new rules of the game imposed by the global north or that connect to epistemic political disobedience. In this context, as our special issue suggests, the expression can refer, in dynamic and complex ways, to phenomena in which thousands of places are inventing and delinking rather than following the rules of the game imposed by the global north and its surrogates in the global south. Once again, the revolution of the hands in North Africa and the Arab world shows the entanglement of North imperial designs and South beneficiaries. If the global south can function as a metaphor for locations where delinking and re-existences are underway, then this issue intends to be aligned with global struggles for non-imperial democratization. And therein, our issue suggests, lies the global souths world dis/ordering potential and possibility.

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Works Cited
Achinte, Adolfo Albn. Interculturalidad sin decolonialidad: colonialidades circulantes y prcticas de reexistencia. Diversidad, interculturalidad y construccin de ciudad. Eds. Wilmer Villa Amaya and Arturo Grueso Bonilla. Bogot: Universidad Pedaggica Nacional Secretara de Gobierno de Bogot, 2008. Bello, Walden, Herbert Docena, Marissa de Guzman, and Mary Lou Malig. The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines. London: Zed Books, 2006. Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline Anne. Institutions of the Global South. New York: Routledge, 2009. Brown, Judith M. Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Casimir, Jean. Haitis Need for A Great South. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 1436. Ching, Leo. Champion of Justice: How Asian Heroes Saved Japanese Imperialism. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 85100. Dainotto, Roberto. Does Europe Have a South? An Essay on Borders. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 3750. Grovogui, Siba. A Revolution Nonetheless: The Global South in International Relations. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 175190. Grzinic, Marina. Southeastern Europe and the Question of Knowledge, Capital, and Power. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 5165. Herlinguas, Hermann. Placebo Intellectuals in the Wake of Cosmopolitanism: A Pharmacological Approach to Roberto Bolaos novel 2666. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 101119. Violence in the Global South. New York: Zed Books, 2009. Lasch, Pedro. The Indianization of Globalization. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 1213 McDonald, David A., and Greg Ruiters, eds. Alternatives to Privatization: Options for Essential Services in the Global South. New York: Routledge, 2011. Meth, Paula, Glyn Williams, and Katie Willis. Geographies of Developing Areas: The Global South in a Changing World. New York: Routledge, 2009. Milian, Claudia. Central American-Americanness, Latino/a Studies, and The Global South. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): . 137152 Motta, Sara C., and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, eds. Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Rojas-Sotelo, Miguel. The Other Network: The Havana Biennale and the Global South. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 153174. Saldvar, Jos David. Conjectures on Americanity and Junot Dazs Fuk Americanus in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 120136. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. Eurozine (2006) 133. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006. Tlostanova, Madina. The South of the Poor North: Caucasus Subjectivity and the Complex of Secondary Australism. The Global South 5.1 (Spring 2011): 6684.

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