In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the Global South has emerged as a predominant term in conversations about culture, politics, and the challenges facing regions of the globe formerly identified as the Third – or, “developing” – World.
Widespread use notwithstanding, there is ongoing debate about what, exactly, the Global South “is.” Like the Third World, the Global South is both a place and an idea: a synonym for “underdevelopment” and the basis for transnational political collaboration; the result of and response to the consolidation of neoliberal globalization; as well as the place that has been left out or behind and the space from which alternatives to the current global order might be imagined and brought about.
Yet it endures. This is because the Global South offers an adaptive comparative framework within which to tackle questions that are at the center of current work in the humanities and social sciences. Understood in this sense, the apparent unwieldiness of the Global South in fact makes it a key paradigm for addressing global issues in the present.
This two-day symposium seeks to move beyond issues of definition (or, delimitation) and to cultivate the Global South as a way of thinking about the present. Incorporating scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, it explores a range of issues and critical vocabularies associated with the larger framework of the Global South.
Image credit: The Fuller Projection (Dymaxion World Map) is used with permission from The Buckminster Fuller Institute.