Since the launch issue of The Global South in 2007, scholars of global South studies have defined and refined, then expanded, their collective reach: from Africa and Latin America to the U.S. South and the Pacific Rim, to India and the Caribbean and Southern enclaves within global North spaces. Yet the idea of global South studies as a distinct sub-discipline is relatively new; see e.g., the Association of Third World Studies’s 2017 rechristening as the Association of Global South Studies. This latter period has also seen the first steps toward global South studies defining itself as an interdisciplinary field (e.g., Mignolo & Levander 2011; Armillas-Tiseyra 2014; López 2021).
Walter Mignolo & Caroline Levander were among the first to ask toward what end global South studies would seek to entangle its “disciplinary languages, frames of reference, and methods of inquiry” toward an interdisciplinary methodology (Mignolo 2011). How does doing so better illuminate our chosen objects of study? Part of their answer lies in combining methodologies that revise a previous “disciplinary ordering” and challenge “stable territorial frameworks,” such as national and/or linguistic boundaries.
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra later builds on these insights toward a more sustained engagement with method. Referring to “current conversations about working beyond the limits of ‘national literatures’,” Armillas-Tiseyra problematizes the ordering of location in terms of both geography and disciplinary “stable territorial frameworks” (Armillas-Tiseyra 2014). Such interventions refine the question of method—not just what we do in global South studies but why we do it that way. Through such interventions, we begin to glimpse a methodology that orients our project in terms of global relations and the impact of a history of inequalities on the peoples and cultures of the Global South.
This panel, then, presents disciplinary methods that show promise as tools for global South scholarship. Does self-identifying as a global South scholar signal consensus only around an object of study, or also agreement regarding methods? Each of the papers balances a broader communal perspective against the contribution a particular narrative genre or aesthetic category or disciplinary application might make to a metamethodology of the global South. Collectively they exemplify the possibilities and challenges we face as a self-described interdisciplinary field.
Nishant Shahani will begin with a series of “methodological provocations on theorizing queer subjects” in a global South frame. Shahani’s immediate context is India, but his critiques of axiomatic assumptions hold a broader efficacy for LGBTQ subjects across the global South. Several texts have critiqued Northern theoretical and disciplinary assumptions and argued for the South as a site of knowledge production (Connell 2007; Comaroff 2012). Shahani’s intersecting these discourses with South Asian, feminist and queer studies provide a ground from which new kinds of global-South queer theorizing might emerge.
Similar concerns inform Suchismito Khatua’s paper on the decolonial avant-garde. Khatua follows Geeta Kapur’s call for a “politics of conjunction,” repositioning an avant-garde historically understood as European in terms both global and embedded in local idiomatic forms (Kapur 2018). The point of intersection here is between a renewed Southern avant-garde and decolonial theory, suggesting further theoretical interventions of and from the global South.
Also engaging Southern intellectual and cultural productions, Ignacio Sánchez Prado critiques the frequent emphasis in global South studies on North-South divides and coloniality. Sánchez Prado argues that such approaches fail to recognize how cosmopolitanism and the critical appropriation of Northern culture by global South cultural agents and audiences impact decolonization and the mediation of capitalist modernity. Invoking Miriam Hansen’s work on vernacular modernism, he proposes popular cosmopolitanism—specifically the cinema—as a way to think the critical engagements of global South audiences with high and media culture from the global North (Hansen 1999, 2000). Cosmopolitanism here works as a critical method to engage global South cultures beyond the methodological constraints of decoloniality and subalternity.
What the papers share is a Southern interdisciplinarity that would not necessarily transcend the strengths and limitations of its various individual methods, nor impose a definitive orthodoxy, but offer a snapshot in time that frames the prolixity of intellectual strands with which we are assembling our collective project. Together they enhance and expand the methodological toolkit with which to continue refining the work we do under the banner of global South studies.