Abstract:

We stand now at the threshold of the moment of arrival, with theorizations that start with the idea of intellection from the Global South as their premise. In one sense, it is a taking up of the standard again, continuing a tradition of epistemic resistance to what Ngugi had called the method of ‘Europhone Theory’ and ‘African fact’. A slew of recent work that engages with forms of thinking in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Arab world has allowed us to question the Eurocentricity of postcolonial theory and to engage with indigenous landscapes, epistemologies, and temporalities (Chen 2010; Cusicanqui 2020; Eze 1998; Escobar 2018; Elshakry, M 2014; Elshakry, O 2020; Santos 2018). There are many distinct intellectual trajectories here pointing to different futures of interpretation. What is very clear in these works is an engagement with long histories of intellection and debate in the Global South. What form should thought from the global South take? It is time now to not set our intellectual clocks to Euromerican time.

Speaker’s Bio:

Dilip Menon is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. He studied at the universities of Delhi, Oxford, and Cambridge and taught at Cambridge, Yale, Hyderabad, and Delhi, before moving to South Africa in 2010 as the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies. He is primarily a historian of ideas and has worked on issues of caste and inequality in modern India. Over the past decade, his work has engaged with the question of knowledge from the global south, leading to edited volumes on the histories of capitalism, concepts for the social sciences, and cinema as a space of connected imaginations. He has also attempted to move away from national to transnational, engaging with maritime over territorial histories and the idea of oceanic cosmopolitanism.

Introduction by Sangeeta Banerji, Assistant Professor of Human Geography, NYU Shanghai.