Thoughts on Theorizing from the South: An Interview with John Comaroff

Abstract

discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinking global relations through the praxis of critical scholarship. NOTE: The following interview, conducted by Lisandro Claudio, took place in Copenhagen in November 2015. Its content arises largely out of the recent publication of Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). * LC: How do you define the Global South? JC: This is not an easy question to answer. The Global South has multiple referents, multiple meanings. In ordinary conversation, of course, its primary denotation is geographical: it signifies, hemispherically, the lower half of the planet, its underside. But this is a grotesque simplification, a realist-and often racist-conceit. The term has a far more complex fan of significata. Superficially, it describes those reaches of the planet that were formerly colonized, although not always at the same time; those parts of the world that European imperial metropoles "discovered," conquered by means of one or another form of violence, exploited for economic and political purposes, and took to be part of their so-called overseas "possessions." A more subtle conceptualization treats the Global South less as a geopolitical or even an historical entity-in spatiotemporal terms, that is-than as a relational term that takes on its substance by virtue of its contrast, be it binary or complementary or orthogonal or even at times rhizomatic, to the global north. Because it is a relational sign, a "shifter" if you prefer the technical linguistic designation, its content is constantly shifting. In some contexts, its connotation is largely imaginative: it stands as a loose, and quite plastic, rhetorical trope of otherness to EuroAmerica. In others, it takes on a hard-edged materiality, as in the formation of BRICS (a geo-economic axis that brings together Brazil, India, South Africa, China, and Russia); or, in the world of finance, as a zone in which credit ratings are low, labile, and carefully regulated, and toward which G8 policies require regularly to be negotiated. For the critical scholar, however-and here is the point-our theory-work requires that we do not take "the global south" as an analytic category in or for itself. Our task is to interrogate and explain the various ways in which the term is understood, deployed, commissioned, and contested. In Theory from the South, Jean Comaroff and I make the argument that, whatever else it might be taken to denote, geopolitically or imaginatively or economically, "the global south" alludes to any ex-centric location-a location external to self-appointed, historical centers, that is, in a world of metamorphosing relations among, even deconstructions of, centers-and-peripheries-from which to look at the contemporary planetary order Source: Cuny.edu.

The scalar politics of difference: Researching consumption and marketing outside the west

“…The essence of decolonizing knowledge is to break the illusion of the universality of Western epistemology, and highlight the provincial location of all theory (Chakrabarty, 2000;Mignolo, 2009). Theorizing from the South, therefore, is neither about replacing one hegemon with another, nor producing theories of people of the south or 'about' the south (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012b). Rather, as a 'concept-metaphor', it stands for the wider analytical project of disrupting current knowledge-power relations (Connell, 2007) as well as mobilizing new ways of thinking, learning and doing (Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010).…”

Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: The creative agencies of plants in contested ecologies

“…Statesmen began to refer explicitly to proteas as a natural asset. Proteas figured as diplomats in political spectacles to project positive images of the apartheid state abroad (Boehi, 2016), while botanists began referring to them as endangered species worthy of conservation and part of a ‘unique biome type’, ensuring their status as a ‘passionately protected icon of national, natural rootedness' (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 99). The King Protea ( Protea cynaroides ) was proclaimed South Africa's national flower in 1976, prompting poet and prominent anti-apartheid activist Don Mattera (2007, orig.…”

“…More-than-human geographies have sought to counter these habits of neglect, responding to an ethical imperative to understand the agency of plants (Pitt, 2015; see also Ingold, 2013; Marks, 2012; Schiebinger, 2007), their social lives (Head and Atchison, 2009), their affective and organisational agency on humans (Ginn, 2014; Hitchings and Jones, 2004; Jones and Cloke, 2008), their evolution with people and mutual reliance for survival (Head et al, 2012), and the particular and complex ways that plants have of doing things (Brice, 2014; Hall, 2011; Jones and Cloke, 2002). Anthropologists and ethnobotanists have also contemplated medicinal plants as agents/actants/beings (Gibson, 2018a, 2018b).…”

Translocal Care Across Kosovo’s Borders

“…By tracing individual trajectories of family members in and from Opoja and their divergent social positionings and relating them to wider family dynamics in Kosovo's south and abroad, I present a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of the gendered and generational notions of family, family-provided care and family solidarity across borders. As such, this perspective also allows 'theorising from the South' (Comaroff and Claudio 2015), or also from the 'margins' of Europe (Römhild 2010), as Kosovo is oft en seen as an underdeveloped periphery of the European centre in relation to global -and more specifi cally Europeanprocesses and entanglements. Th is feeds into the West-centric and Eurocentric bias that views certain countries and populations as on the fringes of the EU -not just geographically but also culturally (Balibar 2004).…”