Thinking Culture and Cultural Studies—from/of the Global South

ABSTRACT

This essay invites us to consider the need to rethink culture and some theoretical/intellectual assumptions in Cultural Studies when we bring up the issue of the “Global South.” The essay makes a case for “going South” in Cultural Studies. It advances a notion of the South that is based on a frame of dispossession. The first section offers a historical overview of the Global South and considers where the Global South is today. The second section attempts to rethink the notion of ‘culture’ and some intellectual orientations in Cultural Studies when we move to the Global South.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Audrey Yue for her helpful reading and comments, and Greg Dickinson for inviting this forum.

Notes

1 Vandana Shiva, “The Polarised World of Globalisation,” Global Policy Forum, May 10, 2005, https://www.globalpolicy.org/globalization/defining-globalization/27674.html (accessed July 3, 2019).

2 John Pilger, an Australian-born filmmaker and author for Truth-Out.org, states that that nearly 14,000 Aboriginal children were “removed” from their family as of June 2013, continuing a century-old colonial policy. See “Australia Is Again Stealing Its Indigenous Children,” March 25, 2014, https://truthout.org/articles/australia-is-again-stealing-its-indigenous-children/ (accessed July 3, 2019).

3 For example, Raeywn Connell, Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge (London: Polity, 2007); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa (New York: Routledge 2016); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge, 2016); Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Sohini Chattopahyay, “Theories from the South II: Interview with Aditya Nigam” Borderlines, November 10, 2018, https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2018/11/10/theories-from-the-south-ii-interview-with-aditya-nigam (accessed July 3, 2019); Sohini Chattopadhyay, “Theories from the South I: An interview with Prathama Banerjee,” Borderlines, November 6, 2018, https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2018/11/6/theories-from-the-south-i-an-interview-with-prathama-banerjee (accessed July 3, 2019)

4 Chattopadhyay, “Theories from the South I”

5 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 1.

6 Walter Mignolo, ed. “Globalization and the De-Colonial Option,” special issue, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 155–523.

7 Willy Brandt, North-South: A Programme for Survival: Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). The Cancun Summit was formally called International Meeting on Cooperation and Development, see Edward A. Gargan, “Brandt Cautions Third World,” October 6, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/06/world/brandt-cautions-third-world.html (accessed July 16, 2019).

8 Arif Dirlik, “Global South: Predicament and Promise,” The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 12–23.

9 Ibid., 14.

10 For a description of this situation see Dwayne Wong, “The Colonial Nature of African Dictatorships,” Huffpost November 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-colonial-nature-of-african-dictatorships_b_5a006bb9e4b05e3e1f0a02d1 (accessed July 3, 2019).

11 Quoted in: Ibid.

12 Quoted in Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New York: Verso, 2014), loc, 164 of 7808, Kindle.

13 Abhishek Dey, “India has not Published Data on Farmer Suicides for the Last Two Years,” Scroll, June 8, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/881265/india-has-not-published-data-on-farmer-suicides-for-the-last-two-years (accessed July 3, 2019).

14 “Call for ‘Agro-Imperialism’ to Stop—Prof Dakora,” GhanaWeb, December 31, 2017, https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/Call-for-agro-imperialism-to-stop-Prof-Dakora-613629 (accessed July 12, 2019).

15 Arjun Appadurai, “Democracy Fatigue,” in The Great Recession, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), 1–12.

16 For a “rights” framework see Rosemary J. Coombe, “Honing a Critical Cultural Study of Human Rights,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (2010): 230–246; For an exception, see John Erni, “Reframing Cultural Studies: Human Rights as a Site of Legal-cultural Struggles,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (2010): 221–29.

17 Ibrahim J. Gassama, “Reaffirming Faith in the Dignity of Each Human Being: The United Nations, NGOs, and Apartheid,” Fordham International Law Journal 19, no. 4 (1995): 1465–509; Makau Mutua, “Hope and Despair for a New South Africa: The Limits of Rights Discourse,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 10 (1997): 63–114.

18 Mutua, “Hope and Despair,” 68.

19 Ibid.

20 Sohini Chattopahyay, “Theories from the South II: Interview with Aditya Nigam” Borderlines, November 10, 2018, https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2018/11/10/theories-from-the-south-ii-interview-with-aditya-nigam (accessed July 3, 2019).

21 Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).

22 “ACLU Statement on Ten Years of Guantanamo Bay,” https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-statement-ten-years-guantanamo (accessed July 14, 2019).

23 Quoted in Steve Paulson, “Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 29, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/ (accessed July 3, 2019).

24 Tim McDonnell, “Climate Change Creates a New Migration Crisis for Bangladesh” National Geographic, January 24, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/climate-change-drives-migration-crisis-in-bangladesh-from-dhaka-sundabans/ (accessed July 3, 2019).

25 Kanta Kumari Rigaud, Alex de Sherbinin, Bryan Jones, Jonas Bergmann, Vivian Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, Susana Adamo, Brent McCusker, Silke Heuser, Amelia Midgley, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2018).

26 McDonnell, “Climate Change”

27 Chitrangada Choudhury, “How Jharkhand govt broke law by taking fertile land from farmers for Adani,” Business Standard, December 3, 2018, https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/how-jharkhand-govt-broke-law-by-taking-fertile-land-from-farmers-for-adani-118120300103_1.html (accessed July 3, 2019).

28 Ibid.

29 Santos, Epistemologies of the South.

30 Rinky Kalsy and Mahesvari Autar, “Web of Life,” (Anecdote Films, 2012), https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/13072/Web-of-Life- (accessed July 16, 2019).

31 Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in The Everyday Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 93.

32 Ibid., 93, Emphasis added.

33 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For instance, Gauri Viswanathan, while recognizing William’s brilliance, notes that his engagement with Britain’s imperial influence was primarily in terms of “economic profits” (p. 194). However, according to him, there is a lack of analysis and “explanation of the particular forms in which English culture came to be expressed” (p. 195) and how those forms were intimately tied to colonialisms. “Raymond Williams and British Colonialism,” in Cultural Materialism: Raymond Williams ed. Christopher Pendergast (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995): 188–210.

34 Raymond Williams, “Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 49 (emphasis added).

35 Khalid Latif, “Inside the Rohingya Refugee Camps,” Tricycle, 2018, https://tricycle.org/magazine/inside-rohingya-refugee-camps/ (accessed July 3, 2019).

36 Williams, “Analysis of Culture,” 49.

37 Handel K. Wright “Dare We De-Centre Birmingham?: Troubling the ‘Origin’ and Trajectories of Cultural Studies,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 33–56.

38 Ibid., 34.

39 Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s scholarly examination of dancehalls in the Caribbean is one example of a study that has focused on dance but it is not a nonacademic outuput. See Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (Ottawa: University of University Press, 2010).

40 Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism 5, no. 1 (1992): 11.

41 Lawrence Grossberg, “The Cultural Studies’ Crossroads Blues,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no 1 (1998): 67.

42 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalisation and the World System, ed. Anthony King (London: Macmillan, 1991), 42.

43 prabhakar kamble, “Performance Human in Una Gujrat 2016 prabhakar kamble,” YouTube video, 4:55, December 21, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohjdt_uPLoc.

44 Rumi Samadhan, “Contemporary Indian Art: Revolt and Rupture,” Hakara, 2018, http://www.hakara.in/rumi-samadhan/ (accessed July 9, 2019).

45 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78.

46 “Dongrias’ resounding ‘No’ to Vedanta mine ahead of London AGM,” Survival International July 31, 2013, https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9406 (accessed July 3, 2019).

47 “India: ‘Proud Not Primitive’ Campaign Challenges Prejudice Against Tribal Peoples,” Survival International July 2, 2013, https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9350 (accessed July 9, 2019).

48 The Pachamama in the Andes is another example for such spirituality.

49 Gaurav Jain and Neha Sethi, “ All Niyamgiri Villages Turn Down Vedanta’s Mining Proposal,” August 19, 2013, https://www.livemint.com/Companies/ZNlmBdg6rur3VOR7UvAmFN/Villages-reject-Vedantas-proposal-to-mine-bauxite.html (accessed July 16, 2019).

50 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Kalyan Sanyal Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Dehli: Routledge, 2007); see also Sandro Mezzadra, “How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011) 151–170; Chattopadhyay, “Theories from the South II”; Chattopadhyay, “Theories from the South I.”

51 Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.”

52 Mignolo in his interpretation of Quijano refers to this as “non totalitarian totalities” (p. 452). I prefer ‘nonauthoritarian’ as to me that better captures the sense I am attempting to convey here. See Walter Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 449–514.

53 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Epistemologies of the South and the Future,” From the European South 1 (2016): 20 (emphasis added).

54 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak, “Planetarity,” Paragraph 38, no. 2 (2015): 290–92.

55 Spivak, “Planetarity,” 291.

56 Ibid., 291–292.

57 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 101.

58 Spivak, “Planetarity,” 291–92.

59 Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Doreen van Thom, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1.

60 I see this in Donna Haraway’s concept of the “Chthulucene” where she includes “diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces” such as the Pachamama and Spider-Woman among others but the spiritual aspect is not adequately addressed or pushed far enough in her book. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 101. I also saw this recently in Vinciane Despret and Michel Mueret, “Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 24–36 that makes room for spirits/gods in their cosmoecological approach but again it is not developed much. A work that should be mentioned here is Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). While its focus is not the spiritual, this provocative treatise invites us to recognize how nature (or other nonhuman living creates) has a self (e.g., forests), or selves, and it is living (92) because it constituted by a semiotic system that exceed human forms of representation but that also represents the humans. For Kohn, to be constituted through signs is to be living, communicating.

61 See Despret and Mueret, “Cosmoecological Sheep.”

62 For environmental legal scholars, see David Boyd, Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that could Save the World (Toronto: ECW Press, 2017).

63 I am well aware that there are debates about the “commons” and that the “commons” is not free of power. In this context, however, I do not wish to enter these conversations as that is not the focus of the essay. Nor do I have the space to cover the debate.

64 Ned Dodington, “The Nature-Rights Movement or the ‘Law of Mother Earth’,” The Expanded Environment, June 2, 2011, http://www.expandedenvironment.org/the-nature-rights-movement-or-the-law-of-mother-earth/ (accessed July 10, 2019).

65 Ramchandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 1–83.

66 I thank Audrey Yue for reminding me of this.

67 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Power of Superstition in Public Life in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 16–19.

68 Kuan Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).