In this introduction to the second of two special issues on “New Critical Directions in Global South Studies,” the editors reflect on the state of the field, provide a brief discussion of analogous projects in other disciplines, and give an overview of the essays contained in the issue.

Focusing on Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), this essay argues that analysis of works that enlist the conventions of popular or genre fiction is crucial for understanding the complex ways in which contemporary African novels engage with and respond to the material realities of globalization. Secret History, for instance, both invokes and refuses the epistemic certainties typically promised by the detective plot. In place of solving a mystery and depicting a subsequent return to order, the novel proffers a principle of hermeneutic skepticism that is attuned to multiplicity, simultaneity, and discontinuity. This principle is echoed in another, better-known work, Teju Cole's Open City (2011), whose protagonist resembles the central character in Secret History. Together, these novels present history as an accumulation of traces, remainders, and ghostly presences, all of which are subject to new kinds of recoding and distortion in the present. The novels' theorization of history and epistemology, in turn, controverts narratives of globalization as a unifying force or homogenizing process in which differences are smoothed out to facilitate the flows of goods and capital. In doing so, these contemporary African novels become "global" by turning critical attention to the power dynamics that structure the present.

This essay investigates the critical function of science fiction (SF) tropes in SF and non-SF works by and about Africans. It begins with the assertion that works that invoke SF tropes, even if they are not properly speaking SF, can productively be read within the frame of SF. It then analyzes the ways in which writers and visual artists use speculative technological advances to explore the systematic marginalization of the African continent in the world-system. Drawing on Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson, it illustrates how these works use the cognitive estrangement characteristic of SF to posit a break in established systems of thought; this is, ultimately, a utopian gesture. Works discussed include Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space, Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts, and Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts.

This introductory article to the special issue takes stock of the scholarly impact of the last fifteen years of Global South studies scholarship in the field of literary and cultural studies, and comparative literature in particular. It contends that the Global South offers a dynamic framework for comparison of economic, political, and cultural inequalities beyond state-centric forms of analysis, and for this reason, is uniquely germane to the interests of comparative literature. The Global South has become a significant category for the field not in spite of its conceptual indeterminacy, but precisely because the resulting lack of fixity provides an adaptive and multiscalar comparative framework. That is, it offers an opportunity to shift the scale through which we compare, in which North–South or South–South analysis may occur across national lines or from block to block. True to the relational and directional spirit of the concept, the editors understand Global South studies as a series of directions or movements, a confluence of critical currents emerging from a variety of already existing fields. Ultimately, this introduction traces those critical coordinates and points to recent and promising directions in this scholarship as it intersects with comparative literature today.

No abstract