Introduction: New Critical Directions in Global South Studies

Abstract

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.

Introduction: Methods in China-India Studies

“…However, Mangalagiri's scholarship calls for methodological vigilance to the frames of dominance that continue to organize such South-South exchange, including to the nation-states’ (often invisible) interventions in and packaging of those forms of “culture” deemed suitable for diplomacy (Mangalagiri 2021b). This critical turn in 1950s China-India research mirrors a resonant development in Global South studies, in which an initial wave of scholarship “focused on discourses of solidarity made possible by the ‘mutual recognition’ of peoples’ shared conditions at the margins of global capital” while a newer “second wave […] works to complicate these dynamics of recognition” (Armillas-Tiseyra and Mahler 2021, p. 477). Attending to the unequal structures of power that made 1950s China-India cultural exchange possible can therefore compellingly extend this new direction in Global South studies.…”