Tag Archives: modernity

The global South as an ontological position?

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.

How do we navigate Eurocentrism? Reflections from teaching postcolonial urban studies

For the past four years I have been teaching a lecture on postcolonial urban theory within The Urban Question—a first-semester course in the international Master’s Program in Urban Studies. In this lecture, I try to explain the relationship between the postcolonial and its impacts on both the urban condition and the production of urban knowledge. (Meaning: the traces of Eurocentrism in how we learn about and teach urban studies today). I encourage students to reflect on examples of postcolonial conditions in their own countries—regardless if their country has an official colonial past or not. This opens a series of interesting reflections and questions. Last year, a student asked if trying to tackle Eurocentrism meant being at odds with the aims of modernity, for example, democracy. A few years ago, a student from Turkey wondered: what happens when ultra-nationalist governments hijack the emancipatory aims of postcolonialism to oppress their own populations by arguing “Western” notions, for example, LGBTQ rights, are “colonial” and therefore have no place in their society?

These important questions are at the heart of postcolonial and decolonial debates and are precisely two points that Kanishka Goonewardena and Tanja Winkler touched upon during their interventions in A Non-Occidentalist West: Learning from Theories Outside the Canon, workshop #1 of the Dislocating Urban Studies Series (which was also a PhD course in which I contributed). Pointing out that not all critique of the West that comes from the global South aims towards emancipatory goals, Kanishka wondered: What forms of critique of Europe and the West are then valid? What is the nature of critique of the West? While Kanishka was thinking about the ultra-nationalist governments in India and Sri Lanka, his point had echoes of the question the student from Turkey had posed in my class. Tanja, in turn, reflected how the concerns of the left had been hijacked by the intellectual political right but for negative purposes. For example, the post-structuralist concern that “all knowledge is important” had been twisted to dismiss science, support regressive standpoints, and promote undemocratic contexts. This reminded of the first student’s concern that postcolonialism could be wielded as a tool to attack democracy.  

While we have not been able to settle these debates in class, the discussions around them have stayed with me because of the important question that they raise: how do we navigate Eurocentrism? In Kanishka’s view, we need to have a dialectical understanding of binaries, (for example, center-periphery and north-south), in order to engage with thinkers that are genuine internationalists in the sense that they are not constrained by their geographical locations. The point is to look at the global North and global South as locations that both contain centers and peripheries. For Tanja, our epistemic tools need to be reclaimed. Adding to this, a source of guidance for me has been the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) and his intervention A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Arguing that it is meaningless to carry out epistemological divisions across north/south, de Sousa Santos instead proposes engaging with thinkers that are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, regardless if their work can be labeled as “Western.” In his view, there is much to learn from theories that, even though were produced within Western modernity, can nevertheless offer tools to fight capitalism and colonialism. At the end of the day, as Aníbal Quijano (1992) argues through his work on coloniality of power, what we are trying to dismantle is the colonial side of modernity, not necessarily modernity itself.  

I am eager to hear what questions students raise this year.

References
  • Quijano A (1992) Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena 13(29): 11–20. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353.
  • Santos B de S (2010) A Non-Occidentalist West?: Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 103–125. DOI: 10.1177/0263276409348079.

Featured image: “Perpetual Ocean – Gulf Stream” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0