Puzzlement of a déjà vu: Illuminaries of the global South

Abstract

The act of decentring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge as longstanding geopolitical anchors of epistemological authority presents déjà vu scenarios, involved in centre-staging processes. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’ of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can reproduce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This article considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus is on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitutes points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes places them high in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre-staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which fields are mapped in order to produce a point of intervention.

Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy

“…The typology introduced in this paper has several implications. One is for the project of decolonizing sociology (eg Connell, 1997Connell, , 2007Bhambra, 2014;Brunsma and Padilla Wyse, 2019;Go, 2017;Puwar, 2020). The concepts of bounding, domaining, non-attribution, and appropriation help us reconstruct the processes through which certain authors and epistemic perspectives were included in, or excluded from, the disciplinary 'canon'.…”

Penality at the Periphery: Deficits, Absences, and Negation

“…Some may balk at the use of Ireland as a springboard for a wider consideration of global/periphery knowledge dynamics. There is some simmering disagreement and discord surrounding discussions of where exactly can be regarded as peripheral or Southern, which at times looks set to become one of this area's hot debates, along with who should speak about these matters (see Moosavi, 2019;Puwar, 2020). This is an important conversation, of course.…”

Turning the Decolonial Gaze towards Ourselves: Decolonising the Curriculum and ‘Decolonial Reflexivity’ in Sociology and Social Theory

“…While one can only speculate on whether this is ironically related to Connell being white and from a Western country, what is more certain is that this attention has furthered discussions in the field. Thus, Connell has triggered heated responses throughout her career, ranging from those that attempt to systematically refute her arguments as analytically redundant (Collins, 1997) to those who accuse her of extracting from the South, silencing peripheral scholars, and indulging in white privilege (Puwar, 2020). 5 One of the richest critiques of the Westerncentrism of sociology and social theory comes from the impressive work of Bhambra (2007aBhambra ( , 2007bBhambra ( , 2014aBhambra ( , 2014bBhambra ( , 2016Bhambra ( , 2021).…”