This semester, I have been running a PhD course titled Urbanism: Perspectives from the global South, where we seek to reflect on where and how we should come to understand the urban condition through a “southern urban critique” lens – this, without forgetting the fundamental question: “What is the urban?” Earlier this month, we had the great pleasure of welcoming Tariq Jazeel (University College London), who led an engaging seminar and delivered a thought-provoking public lecture. For the seminar, I asked Tariq to reflect on the idea of the global South as an ontological position and connect it to discussions about the tensions between the particular and the universal. During his intervention, Tariq shared he was uneasy with the idea of a single ontological position, since there are many global Souths. He then proceeded to encourage us to reflect on the strategic value of the concept “global South.” What is it exactly, and what does it help us do?
Most of the people around the seminar table had a connection to the global South (understood broadly as a geographical location), but we could not agree on an answer. One person reflected on how the global South was a feeling – something that resonates inside of you. Somebody else said it was a political call for justice. I added it was an act of positionality, a marker to highlight a relation of unequal power. The discussion continued. Perhaps we used “the global South” for lack of a better word? Something instead of the “non-West,” or to describe that that is beyond the EuroAmerican heartland? Tariq agreed the global South served a purpose of strategic essentialism but warned us of the burden of representation.
A week after the seminar with Tariq, I was invited to be an opponent for the final presentations of the actions plans developed by the participants of Danida’s “Sustainable and Inclusive Urban Development” – convened by, among others, the incredible Jacob Rasmussen (Roskilde University). Listening to brilliant presentations that dealt with urban challenges in Nairobi, Casablanca, Medellín and São Paulo, I remembered Tariq’s question and could finally articulate an answer. Following the work of Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), the global South is, of course, not a geographical location but a relation. However, as hinted by my colleagues, the global South is also embodied knowledge. It is an understanding of an everyday life that heavily relies on informal practices and social infrastructures. It is a shared burden, a sense of lack (e.g. basic infrastructure, waste management services), and a heightened risk of death (e.g. the impacts of climate change). This is not to fall into the trap of exoticizing the global South as the Other, the “heart of darkness” (Roy 2009), but to highlight that the global South shares a “colonial wound,” as brilliantly argued by Sultana (2022). So yes, the global South is an ontological position from which new forms of knowledge can be created – “theory is in the flesh,” to borrow the words of Sultana (2022), in the “fleshiness of our bodies, minds, soils, kin.”
However, Tariq was right to point the dangers of the “burden of representation,” remind us that there are many global Souths, and to hint at the limitations of thinking about the global South as a geographical location. Homogenizing the global South ignores historical differences and blinds us to the islands of wealth that exist within it. We cannot forget about the elites that live in the “postcolony” (Mbembe in Melgaço and Xavier Pinto Coelho 2022), who likely experience the “colonial wound” differently. A second important point that Tariq raised was to remind us that there are “singularities” in the periphery/global South that resist being known in the epistemic domains of Western modernity (Jazeel 2019). Concepts such as “world,” “global,” “theory,” and “the city” have roots in European modernity and might keep us in an intellectual prison. Some concepts are so loaded with the legacy of Western modernity that we might need to replace them with another “language” – one that must be learned through a process of translation (Jazeel 2019; also see Roy 2011). Otherwise, echoing Lorde (1983), we might be trying to explain the realities of the global South with the master’s tools.
So let us think about the global South as an ontological position – but with care, attentive to historical difference, so that our move does not end up being an act that homogenizes, ignores, and erases the differences across the global Souths.
References
- Comaroff J and Comaroff JL (2012) Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Anthropological Forum 22(2): 113–131.
- Jazeel T (2019) Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 40(1): 5–21
- Melgaço L and Xavier Pinto Coelho L (2022) Race and Space in the Postcolony: A Relational Study on Urban Planning Under Racial Capitalism in Brazil and South Africa. City and Community 21(3): 214–237
- Lorde A (1983) The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Lorde A Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Crossing Press: Berkeley.
- Roy A (2011) Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 223–238.
- Sultana F (2022) The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography (99):102638
Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro 