ABSTRACT

Within intellectual traditions in the Global South, there have been reflections on notions of self, community, and governance for several hundred years preceding the growth of a Euro-American conceptual vocabulary forged in the crucible of empire and Europe’s self-appointed role in the world. Recovering these categories of thought is not merely an act of sentimentality, it is rather, a stepping out beyond the glare of an ignorance created by Euro-American categories. It is an attempt to think societies and polities in their own terms and from within their concepts. Some of these may be translatable into categories familiar to existing social science theory; some may sit beside known concepts as markers of alterity; and yet others may be distinctive to a locale of life and thought. Not all conceptions are translatable across cultures and this gives us occasion to think about the hubris of the universal assumptions of the social sciences.

KEYWORDS: Global South, theoretical traditions

Euro-American theory provides our existing academic interpretations of the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. The impulse toward theorizing anew arises within the urgency of historical conjunctures. Decolonization provided an impetus within the Global South to imagine new relations to the past, present, and future; free of the political and intellectual teleologies imposed by the civilizational hierarchies of a colonial epistemology. There arose the necessity to look back, neither with nostalgia, nor anger. Rather, it was the need to recover from the amnesia imposed by colonial rule that had allowed an engagement with native pasts only as irrelevant, outmoded, or mired in forms of imagination unsuited to the idea of the modern.

At an obvious level, colonialism inculcated an amnesia toward local forms of intellection with their own long histories. More important, it fixed the location of the genealogy of thought (philosophy as originating in Greece, or in the European Enlightenment) occluding the circulation of ideas that then generated the habit of making distinctions between “western” and “eastern” ideas. Finally, it only allowed for the consolation of a distant golden age when there had been the efflorescence of thought in now colonized spaces; a body of thought that was now deemed irrelevant for the present condition of modernity. Sudipto Kaviraj theorizes the emergence of a Euronormality: an implicit reorientation of the social sciences everywhere toward European conceptualizations that were mere universalizations of its parochial histories.^{[1]Sudipta Kaviraj, “Marxism in Translation: Critical Reflections on Indian Political Thought”, in Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn, ed. Raymond Geuss and Richard Bourke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017),172–99.}

Of course, the idea of modernity itself was not only a temporal concept. It was also a political one, based on the self-regard of the former colonizing powers that allowed them to hold themselves up as models for emulation. Therefore, addressing amnesia in its various manifestations was behind the impulse to theory, to recover the loss of self and imagination under alien rule.^{[2]Ganesh Devy, After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian literary criticism (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1995.)} One could have used the metaphor of the compass oriented toward the north to characterize intellectual production in the former colonized world. However, this image itself is a normalized one, reflecting amnesia.

The Chinese, as we know, created their compasses to point to the true south, which was their cardinal direction: geographical as much as ethical (in the sense in which we use the phrase moral compass). The orientation to the “South” was not only about physical direction, but about metaphysical balance. The users of early Chinese compasses were as much concerned with orientation as an ethical and metaphysical imperative—in line with the compass’s primary geomantic purpose—as they were in fact about finding physical directions in the nonpermanent universe.

This essay concerns itself programmatically and polemically with the politics of knowledge in the academic space and addresses primarily the question of insularity, that is, the globalization of theoretical production from a limited geographical space and its parochial trajectories of development. It asks that we broaden our archive of concepts not only through engaging in transdisciplinary conversations, but also through moving away from Euro – American formulations to a conversation across regions, which is necessarily multilingual. The project of new ways of conceptualizing needs to be done not under the sign of commensurability that also establishes a meretricious and falsely transparent translation of ideas across spaces. A true conversation has to engage with the nuances and hardness of multilingualism as much as the quiddity of concepts.

All political locutions arise from a sense of place, existing, constructed, and imagined.

This essay imagines a speaking from the Global South, a space that bears the wound of former colonization, and therefore the loss of ways of thinking, imagining, and living. As de sousa Santos puts it, this is an “epistemological rather than a geographical south”^{[3] Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, eds.,“Epistemologies of the South— Giving Voice to the Diversity of the South,” in Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing Epistemologies of the Global South (London: Routledge, 2020), xvii.} from which an “alternative thinking of alternatives” can be carried forward.^{[4]Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Towards an Aesthetics of the Epistemologies of the South: Manifesto in Twenty-Two Theses,”in Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South, eds. de Sousa Santos and Meneses (London: Routledge, 2020), 118.} As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that thinking about the Global South (its traditions of intellection, its conceptual categories, and the miscegenated genealogies of western ideas) is a project that we need to, but have not yet, embarked upon.^{[5]Dilip M. Menon, “Thinking About the Global South: Affinity and Knowledge,” in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).} We have been through the enterprise of thinking from the Global South, which has meant, as in the case of postcolonial theory, the reiteration of a European episteme, but merely from our location. This does not mean a nativist rejection of European theory or an insistence that we work only on our spaces. The “space” that comprises Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the Caribbean cannot be thought without taking into account international relations of power and capital. We cannot also be unreflective of the interpellation of the Global South in the period of the cold war and the fact that we live in the time of the continuing “decompo- sition” of its political and intellectual structures.^{[6]Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New Delhi: Leftword Books, 2013); Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 205.} As Ann Laura Stoler has recently argued, “we live in a temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure” and there is the imperative to think of the (post)colonial sceptically and insist on “imperial durabilities in our times.”^{[7] Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University ess, 2016), ix.} This means too that we cannot think about the South as a merely theoretical space, leading us to verbal prestidigitation like north of the south, south of the north: Detroit as south in the United States, Johannesburg as north in Africa, and so on.

Theorizing from the South

If we are to frame the temporality of theorizing from the Global South, Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of the moments of departure, manoeuvre, and arrival within Indian nationalist discourse is a compelling one to think, with a few modifications.^{[8]Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World  (London: Zed Books, 1986).} Chatterjee characterizes the intellection of anticolonialists in India as moving from the recognition of a break from tradition and the desire for Europe (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee), to a reconstitution and reimagining of indigenous thought as against an idea of Europe (Gandhi), to the confident assertion, with its compromises, of an independent nation (Nehru). The long decolonization moment, as countries in Asia and Africa achieved independence from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, had already created an impulse to decolonize the mind. This moment of departure with its staggered temporality was accompanied by the making of nations, the creation of pedagogical and economic infrastructure, and the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals. The emergent new native elite may have been rooted in nationalism, however, they had been schooled in structures of pedagogy that were governed by a knowledge in thrall to a Euro-American idea of the University and a replication of its disciplinary formations. The very idea of national being was governed by a split consciousness. The reality of the postcolonial nation was seen in empirical terms; thick descriptions of social and economic inequalities, as much as visions of science- and technology-driven futures, governed by the sign of self-reliance.

However, when it came to theorizing, intellectuals drew upon inherited social science paradigms—what Tagore called histories from elsewhere—rather than on indigenous traditions of intellection about self, community, politics, and ethics.

Ashis Nandy and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were among the first to address the colonial wound of amnesia, as it were, dredging language as much as psychoanalytic frames to think about resources of thought that had not been hijacked by a conception of singular trajectories of development toward a western state of being.^{[9]Ashish Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986).}

Fanon was the penumbral presence in their thought, the idea of the psychic devastation inflicted by colonialism and the need to heal were the dominant themes.

Nandy looked at the implicated selves of colonizer and colonized and in a characteristically innovative juxtaposition, studied Kipling as much as the Hindu mystic Vivekananda as contending with the discourses of hypermasculinity generated by colonialism. He was clear that there were other psychic resources within Indic traditions that allowed a recovery of self, particularly in Gandhi’s invocation of the “feminine,” of passive resistance, and of the notion of care and love as central to politics. Ngugi, in a parallel move, asked for a decolonization of the mind against the biggest weapon unleashed against the native mind. He called this the “cultural bomb” that annihilated a people’s belief in their languages, their heritages of struggle, and “ultimately in themselves,” which made them see “their past as one wasteland of non-achievement.”^{[10]Ibid., 3.} Both Nandy and Ngugi departed from the postindependence moonshot to the modern by addressing the amnesia toward what lay at hand; the intellectual resources and categories that would allow for the restitution of damaged selves.

The postcolonial theory of the next generation was the moment of manoeuvre, which reflected the presence within Euro-American academe of a postcolonial elite that bristled against the condescending characterization of the spaces that they came from as being not-yet-modern.^{[11]Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).} Dipesh Chakrabarty in his broadside against existing descriptions of decolonized societies, spoke of a reckoning of lack, a dispiriting accounting of absences—of capitalism, modernity, or of real democracy.^{[12]Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000).} However, he was also conscious of the “conceptual gifts,” as he called them, of historicism and of politics, from nineteenth-century Europe, which allowed a reconceptualization of the way forward. Postcolonial theorists like Chakrabarty, Spivak, and Bhabha challenged the imposition of singular trajectories of the future, deploying European epistemology with verve and skill, and denying derivativeness through adroit categories such as hybridity, interstitiality, strategic essentialism, and provincialization.^{[13]Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998).} These categories are revealing of the strategy of manoeuvre; one had to position oneself within an already determined field. If one were being uncharitable, mimicry as theorized by Bhabha was the way forward; like-yet-not-like, the unreadability of imitation as repetition or difference. However, postcolonial theory was characterized by a distinct forgetfulness toward indigenous systems of intellection; the theorists having been schooled in a paradigm framed by Euramerican social theory and its internal dissensions and critiques.

We stand now at the threshold of a moment of arrival, with theorizations that take the idea of intellection from the Global South as their premise.

In one sense, it is a taking up of the standard again, a theorizing from where we are; building on a 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.^{[14]Kuang-Hsin Chen, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Sylvia Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinikax Utxiwa: On Decolonizing Practices and Discourses, trans. Molly Geidel (London: Polity Press, 2020); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, African Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Omnia Elshakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham: Duke University Press, 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 with Euro-American intervention, entering and being transformed by already existing fields of interpretation. The act of reading Darwin or Freud in Egypt, for example, is not one of startled discovery but a negotiated and careful process of translation, situating within existing paradigms, and a questioning of the universalist assumptions of historical and psychological evolution. The South American thinkers rethink the temporality of the modern from the violent Spanish conquest and the genocide of native peoples by Europeans, such that the inauguration of modernity is less within the refined thought of the Enlightenment than the actions of the conquistadores.

Modernity and coloniality are the dyad with which the world has to be thought, which results in the idea of the pluriverse and of pluriversality rather than the emergence of any singular set of ideas that then are carried by Euro-America as the markers of civilization.

These works engage at one level with the frictions encountered by intellectual paradigms and concepts from Europe as intellectuals in the Global South grapple with them or deploy them strategically. At another, they work with indigenous ideas that do not merely mirror European categories (unproductive questions like is there an idea of “logic” in African cultures?) but have a purchase in local imaginations and ways of being which are seen as distinctive and rooted.  Most important, they restore, each in their different ways, Euro-American violence—physical and epistemic—to its central place in the making of the world as we see it.

Word Making and Worldmaking

In this moment of arrival, we need to think with questions of inheritance as much as a rejection of a colonial patrimony. The concepts we think with—from modernity to secularism and democracy—have embedded in them both an implicit ideal trajectory as much as a hierarchical politics of spaces.^{[15]Sudipta Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” Archives Europèennes de Sociologie 46, no. 4 (2005): 497–526.} Words have to arise from particular worlds. For too long we have thought with the trajectories of a European history and its self-regarding nativist epistemology that was rendered universal largely through the violence of conquest and empire. As the aphorism goes, a language is a dialect backed by an army. Benedict Anderson has argued that colonialism generated a double consciousness of the world: the connection between colony and metropole—London and Delhi; Jakarta and Amsterdam; Hanoi and Paris.^{[16]Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998).} This seems to suggest that the geography generated by empire exhausted the possibility of other worlds and connections. Existing networks before the onset of colonialism were never severed entirely as Engseng Ho shows in his magnificent study of the uninterrupted flow of people, ideas, and commerce over half a millennium from the Hadramawt to South East Asia.^{[17] Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).} Moreover, empire created what I have called new “geographies of affinity,” which exceeded the incarcerative and schematic maps that reflected merely the imperial hubris of control.^{[18]Kris Manjapra,Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) and Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Nico Slate, Coloured Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).} Rebecca Karl, in her work on late nineteenth-century Chinese nationalists shows how they drew on the historical experiences of the resistance in the Philippines to American imperialism; the Boer resistance to the British; and going back in time, to the partition of Poland in the eighteenth century that sparked off nationalism.^{[19]Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).} These alternative geographies of resistance generated their own vocabularies and concepts l ike that of swadeshi—of one’s world—in the early twentieth century in India. Much of this new work has alerted us to the parallel and emergent maps of a “coloured cosmopolitanism,” of “entanglements” beside the map of empire, and of the world of oceanic movements that laughed to scorn the inscribing of imperial borders and shadow lines in the dust.^{[20]Dilip M. Menon, “The Many Spaces and Times of Swadeshi,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 42 (2012): 44–52.}

There are clusters of ideas that we can think together when reflecting on words and worlds. The first question is of the ineluctable relation between language and lifeworlds. This is usually overlooked when we engage with the act of theorizing as opposed to description. We could indeed ask of the elite postcolonial theorists from the decolonized world—who present themselves as the resistant underdogs of the academic hierarchies of knowledge production—can they, as subalterns, speak? Or does a theoretical production from Europe speak through them? To go back to Chakrabarty’s idea of the gift of the Enlightenment, one is reminded of Derrida’s reading of the idea of the pharmakon as remedy and poison.^{[21]Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171.} If lifeworlds must provide the infrastructure for thinking, questions of knowledge of languages other than English, as much as situating oneself within existing traditions of intellection in Asia and Africa are important. Overcoming amnesia as much as insisting on a sense of thinking from a place are central to the work of theory. We need to move away from merely critiquing the shortcomings, prejudices, and occlusions of a theory that comes from elsewhere and move robustly toward recognizing its possible obsolescence or irrelevance for our concerns. A critique of Kant for his “proto-racism,” as the philosopher Bernasconi termed it, was necessary and timely when it was done. In the moment of arrival, we must ask ourselves, does Kant have anything to contribute at all to the enterprise of theorizing from the Global South?^{[22]Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 2013); Theodore Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).} This is not about a retreat into nativism but of choosing our conversations after arriving at a true recognition of what we have to say.

The second question is that of intelligibility and translation of ideas: we do need to converse across intellectual traditions even as we recover from what Maria Lugones has termed the “colonial wound”^{[23]Maria Lugones, “Toward a decolonial feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–59.} and think with Confucianism, or Buddhist philosophy or African ways of being in the world. We need not swing from asking misplaced questions of whether there are ideas of individualism or secularism in African and Indian languages to the equally ill-conceived venture of assuming that concepts in the languages of the Global South have exact or resonant equivalents in English and European languages. What we need is the beginning of a conversation in a space, which has been dominated by a monologue, as much as monolingualism.

In Werner Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984), set in Australia in a landscape of contest between white settlers and aboriginal people, there is a scene in which a white judge arbitrates claims for land. Aboriginals and their interpreters present demands based on existing indigenous occupation of territory as well as ancient claims to ancestral dreaming spaces. Decisions are made till a lone aboriginal appears and speaks eloquently and for long about a claim. The judge asks for an interpreter and on enquiry is told that the man is dumb. Nonplussed, the judge asks what this means since the man is so obviously voluble. He is told that the man is the last speaker of his language so no one understands him; he may as well be “dumb.” In the end, the act of theorizing is a speaking to the world and this anecdote serves as a parable of the limits of communication. Although untranslatability may be an exigent issue, we must also see it as a conjunctural and temporal one. Given time and engagement meaning may emerge. Or not.

A related question is one of time. What is lost when one reflects with the social theory of modernity, and its abbreviated sense of time, that creates a timeline from the Enlightenment in Europe? The idea of time here is a judgment on societies that are present at the same time as Euro-America, but inhabit their own temporality, rather than the putative common time  of the modern.^{[24]Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).}

How far back does one have to go to write a history of the present?

This is not merely an empirical question of deciding whether one wants to work with hundred year stretches of time or go back a few hundred, perhaps thousand years, to establish the longue durée of processes. One of the consequences of periodization (ancient, medieval, and modern) is the establishment of a caesura between these periods at the same time as assuming a continuity within.^{[25]Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).} There is a further complication arising in colonized spaces that the time of the modern, which also is the time of the colonial, is seen as distinct and separate from the earlier periods that are not just temporal segments but also involve judgments of lack, that is, the lack of political stability, rationality, or traditions of thinking equality. So, while Confucius or the Buddha may have been sages, they are not seen as thinkers or philosophers in a modern sense, since “philosophy” is seen as invoking a set of questions that trace their genealogy to Greece.^{[26] Bryan Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Peter Adamson, A History of Philosophy Without Gaps, 5 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016–2020).}

As Derrida has observed, “philosophy has never been the unfolding responsible for a unique, originary assignation linked to a unique language or to the place of a sole people. Philosophy does not have one sole memory. Under its Greek name and in its European memory, it has always been bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear and polyglot. We must adjust our practice of the history of philosophy, our practice of history and of philosophy, to this reality which was also a chance, and which more than ever remains a chance.”^{[27]Jacques Derrida, “Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline: The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (The Example of an International Institution),” trans. Thomas Dutoit, Surfaces 4, no. 310, Folio 1, 1994, accessed October 15, 2020.} Derrida raises the significant questions of special origin that is always already corrupted by miscegenation and what he calls chance, which we might from the Global South, prefer to term conquest and conscious erasure. This introduces another set of problems. A page of contemporary western philosophy may have references to Plato as much as Augustine, Spinoza, and Levinas, from different spaces and times. The invented genealogy with Greece^{[28]Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985), vol. 1 (Rutland: Rutland Local History and Record Society, 1987); and Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).} and years of commentary as much as political and intellectual consolidation in western Europe (not uninflected by empire and the demand for a “European canon”) has made Plato a contemporary of Foucault, so to speak. On the other hand, in Indian philosophy, the idea of the hermetic spaces of “ancient” and “medieval” India has entailed that those who work on “modern” India do not look back in order to work with reflections on aesthetics, political economy, or jurisprudence.

The colonial caesura has meant that in order to work with the abbreviated time of the modern, there is a resort to theorizing from Europe. Those who work on “ancient” India are seen as Indologists, whose work is of little relevance for theorizing the present. The iniquitous imperial shadow of the division into Hindu, Muslim, and British (not Christian) periods is reflected, for example, in seeing the texts and thinkers of the “medieval” period as unavailable for thinking the modern. This reflects an inability to think with connected histories and the circulation of ideas and freezes the idea of provenance generating a reluctance to think about miscegenated genealogies. Moreover, there is a general suspicion about the availability of ideas of freedom, equality, and emancipation within Asian and African traditions of thinking; a condescension arising from centuries of imperial rhetoric of the rescue of the native from the sleep of reason.^{[29]Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Press, 2015); Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2009).} Just as the thought of Aristotle and Plato has been recuperated from their uncritical location in a slave society; or Kant from his anti-blackness and misogyny;^{[30]Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., “The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997 ) ; Robert Bernasconi and Sybol Cook, eds., Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).} there is work to be done in recovering political philosophy and thinking about freedom from Asian and African traditions of thought.

Where do ideas come from?

The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah points to “the mistake of thinking what is western is only western.”^{[31]Kwame Anthony Appiah,“There is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,”The Guardian, 9 Nov. 2016, accessed 24 November, 2021.} Recently in an edited volume on capitalism, we reacted against this directional theorizing, as it were, by raising the question of provenance of ideas in the field of intellectual history and political economy.^{[32]Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, eds., Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020).} It is noteworthy that both Francois Quesnay and Turgot are said to have been influenced by Chinese thought. Confucianism, Daoism, and idealized Chinese policies arguably influenced the Physiocrats’ repudiation of mercantilism and the conceptualization of laissez-faire which later also influenced Adam Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand.” Especially from 1600 onwards, European theoreticians were influenced by Jesuit missionaries like Du Halde who reported favorably on many Chinese institutions, technologies, economic ideas, ideologies, and attitudes. Quesnay, who was known as the “European Confucius” among his followers, advocated the alleged Chinese lack of government interference and regulation of the economy. He proposed the introduction of the Chinese examination system in France and believed that China was the only kingdom in the world that had established institutions where the “science of making laws” (la science de faire des loix) could be studied.

The emergence of political economy in western Europe cannot be disentangled from developments in and encounters with Asia and Asians. The possible transmission of economic ideas from West Asia to Europe add to this problem of provenance. The Persian polymaths Ghazali (c. 1058–1111) and Tusi (1201–1274) may have influenced the conceptualization of division of labor manifested in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and French political economists and philosophers since William Petty. Indeed, Adam Smith’s discussion on the manufacture of pins citing Delaire, referenced in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, bears a remarkable similarity to Ghazali’s elaboration of the concept of division of labor using the example of a needle factory (instead of a pin factory). Jean-Louis Peaucelle points out that Smith based his analysis on the descriptions published in Diderot’s Encyclopédie and other publications such as those by the Paris Academy of Science. Although there is no proof for any direct transmission, it is worth noting that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a thorough interest in Arabic learning in England and other European countries, a movement Alexander Bevilacqua has most recently termed “The Republic of Arabic Letters.”^{[33]Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).}

How to Think with Words

How are we to think about generating concepts from the Global South? In one sense, this question is redundant since those studying Indian or African philosophy, or indeed anthropology, have always engaged with indigenous words and their entailments. The problem then could be merely one of transcending disciplines and bringing the work already done to bear while reflecting on social theory from our parts of the world. This is a pragmatic answer and addresses the silos within which our academic work is done. There may be a more fundamental problem arising from the politics of academic publishing in the sense that establishing commensurability involves using already established disciplinary jargon. So, Ibn Khaldun’s idea of asabiyya may translate well in political theory or sociology journals on West Asia but brought into the realm of historical writing on spaces in Europe, South Asia, or Africa, it requires glossing. Or the use of rasa theory from South Asia, if extended beyond the aesthetic realm or into another geographical space it demands explanation in a way that the use of words such as jouissance, différance, or oikumene do not.

There is assumed to be a hard particularity, quiddity even, associated with words from the Global South. They do not seem to travel well, just as academics from these spaces at times encounter checks at borders and are often denied entry into Euramerican spaces.

In their book Words in Motion, Anna Tsing and Carol Gluck conceptualize a “global lexicon” of words that travel, acquiring layers of meaning as they do.^{[34]Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).} As they put it, “We have chosen words that do work in the world, whether organizing, mobilizing, inspiring, excluding, suppressing, or covering up . . . [we] track these words as they cross cultural borders and become embedded in social and political practices . . . ”^{[35] bid., 20.} The essays consider words such as “seguranza/security,” “komisyon/commission,” “aqalliyya/minority,” “saburaimu/sublime,” and so on. It is a social, political, and ethnographic treatment that tends to follow the grain of academic politics. These are words with a history of theoretical exposition and practical governmentality from Europe that then come to be translated into thought and practice in the Global South. The direction of travel is predictable as it follows the trajectory of modernity eastwards into formerly colonized spaces that then engage in the task of what Pascale Casanova termed “intranslation.”

In her work on the dissemination of the novel within “The World Republic of Letters,” Casanova argues that initial engagements with the form of the novel involved translating European novels into indigenous languages allowing for the artifact to be domesticated as it were within an indigenous imaginary.^{[36]Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a critical engagement, see Dilip M Menon, “Un Cosmopolitisme Local,” in Des litteratures combatives: L’internationale des nationalisms litteraires, ed. Pascale Casanova (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2011).} The direction is unilinear and the domestication of western modernity and its concepts the desired outcome. There appears to be little “friction” to use Tsing’s own conceptualization in the movement of western concepts rooted in a particular history into another domain.^{[37]Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).} It’s the story of a romance, two concepts come together, overcoming all obstacles and melding together.

It may be apposite to think with an anecdote from the organizing of the conference on producing concepts from the Global South held in Johannesburg in 2016 that underlies these reflections. One of the articles was on the concept of asabiyya (social solidarity, group consciousness) derived from Ibn Khaldun and invoked during the uprisings in the Arab and North African world in 2011. The author of the piece, a Palestinian academic, was teaching and thinking with this idea from his location at Birzeit University. Early in the morning, on the opening day of the conference, he called to say that he had been through several roadblocks put up by Israeli authorities, got inordinately delayed in getting to the airport, and had missed his flight. Travel, whether of bodies or of theory, is governed by protocols of movement and their restriction. In the case of the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa of 2011, they were swiftly named the Arab Spring, absorbing them into a European history and vocabulary of political dissent: the 1848 revolutions and the “springtime of the peoples.” The concept of asabiyya was too located in a dense and particular history as also a contemporary perception of Islam as the space of unfreedom for it to travel well.^{[38]Stephane Lacroix and Jean-Pierre Filiu, Revisiting the Arab Uprisings: The Politics of a Revolutionary Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Magid Shihade, “Asabiyya- Solidarity in the Age of Barbarism: An Afro-Arab-Asian Alternative,” Current Sociology 68, no. 2 (2020): 263–78.} The assiduous commentary that has allowed the fictive and continuous genealogy between ancient Greece and Europe has also rested on an occlusion of the Arab bridge. What allowed for the Renaissance in Europe and the turn to the ancient world was the remembering of figures like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina (Europeanized subsequently as Averroes and Avicenna) and their engagement with Greece in the age of classical Islam.^{[39] Jack Goody, Islam in Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).} So, the question we must ask is: what allowed the travel of European knowledge? There is the obvious answer of colonialism and power, which allowed for the projection of European nativism as a universal. This becomes evident in the words that remain untranslated in the engagement with social theory around the world: praxis, polis, the Hegelian idea of aufheben, or the Lacanian idea of the Imaginary. If one were to think of words from the Global South that have acquired this status of untranslatedness/universality, it would be words such as fatwa, jihad, karma, dharma, yin, yin, yang, ubuntu, and so on. These words become metonyms for the civilizations that they come from, seemingly encapsulating only the essence of their ways of being and thought. Other ideas do not travel well; they remain mired within their localism.

A locus classicus for thinking with concepts is Raymond Williams’s Keywords. It is presented neither as a dictionary (implying a completeness within a language) nor as a glossary (implying completeness within a specified field) but as an “inquiry into a vocabulary.”^{[40]Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).} There is a suggestion of arbitrariness that is intellectually appealing; an insight into a personal choice of words that are a point of entry into a changing landscape. They are “elements of problems,” a phrase that implies connections and entanglements between words as they are deployed and extrapolated in different contexts and times. Fundamental to such an enterprise is the faith that certain words are not transparent and need working and worrying with; one must chart their itineraries within a landscape to comprehend them less as indicative of one meaning but rather as embodying potentialities. Questions must be asked of words, other than establishing a correspondence and equivalence with another word yielding merely a deceptive clarity. Williams says, “. . . in any major language, and especially in periods of change, a necessary confidence and concern for clarity can quickly become brittle, if the questions involved are not faced.”^{[41]Ibid., xxviii.}

An enquiry into words demands both an economy of delineation as well as an openness to a proliferation of meanings.

To step back from the timidity of a desire for precision would allow for an understanding that “. . . the variations and confusions of meaning are not just faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or deficiencies of education . . . they embody different experiences and readings of experience.”^{[42] Ibid., xxxv.} Williams opens up the possibility of exploring words relationally as well as thinking about the problem of individual enunciations that are connected to experience. This is the work that needs to be done with the languages that we work with; of building words into concepts and establishing landscapes of meanings and connections. There is arguably a hermeticism in Williams’s enterprise; that of a limited landscape of the space of the island and a forgetfulness of empire, that has to be surmounted and critiqued.

The move from word to concept that we have yet to initiate comes with an attendant set of questions. Not all words are inherently open to conceptual exposition and if they are, they may relate to particular contexts of experience. Thus, one cannot move blithely from an Upanisadic, Buddhist, or Yoruba world of thinking to a universal one without doing violence to the potentialities of the word and its limits. We need to engage with the idea of the untranslatable, that some words acquire conceptual entailments not only through the task of exposition, but perhaps only within particular worlds. There might be something ineffable in cultural and historical terms about words from certain traditions that do not allow for an easy transfer or translatio. Even as we think with the idea of conversation across traditions, this must be borne in mind. As Johannes Bronkhorst wrote recently, introducing the idea of sabda and reflecting on the relation between language and reality in classical Indian philosophy, “The most serious mistake a modern reader can make is to assume that Indian philosophers were just like modern philosophers, the main difference being that they lived many centuries ago, in India, and expressed themselves in different languages, mainly Sanskrit. This would be overlooking the fact that most human activities, including philosophizing, are profoundly embedded in the beliefs, presuppositions, and expectations that characterize the culture and period in which they take place.”^{[43]Johannes Bronkhorst, A Śabda Reader: Language in Indian Classical Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019): 3–7.}

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is the insistence of Édouard Glissant on what he calls the “right to opacity,” a refusal of the reduction of difference to mere transparency. As he asserts, his stance does not premise itself on obscurity or inhospitality. It is not about generating impenetrability but rather, insisting on “irreducible singularity.”^{[44]Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.}

Resisting an easy commensurability is an act of responsibility, which recognizes the possible opacity of the other in a twin gesture.

Another way of conceiving the question of untranslatability is, as Barbara Cassin suggests, of apprehending it as not one of addressing the generation of meaning alone. It is also a question of temporality; that a word or concept is untranslatable for the moment and may in the future travel better. It points not only to questions of inadequacies of interpretation, or an inherent quiddity, but to potentialities: that time generates new contexts and conjunctures of receptivity.^{[45]Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).}

Moreover, there is the question of interminability: that the work of translation is never really done or finished. This question is central to Koselleck’s method of seeing words in time, not only as prisoners of their temporal location, but that “new time” creates concepts that arise to meet the challenge of history.^{[46]Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).} The birth of a new world generates the birth of new words to conceptually frame newness. Language remains fundamentally open and ambiguous rather than merely being the residue of all human experiences till then. Given the moment of arrival that we inhabit, and the search for a new conceptual vocabulary, we stand at the cusp of new historical redefinitions.

When we speak about developing words into concepts and the work involved in doing so, there is always the drag of tradition. Intellection happens within a field of questions about provenance, genealogy, and exposition as much as hermetic ideas of African, Indian, or Chinese philosophy. There are certain protocols of thinking and regimes of concepts within which one deliberates, as we have seen with the work of Williams (an English glossary) or Koselleck (a European conceptual universe). Glissant brings to such ideas a bracing rejection of tradition in the name of a moment of thoughtful pause, of an extended, but not permanent impenetrability. Conceiving of thinking from the Global South (an imagined unity generated by political affinity) we are only too conscious of a layered and differentiated as much as a polyglot landscape of ideas and reflection.^{[47]Menon, “Thinking About the Global South.”} Once one posits a plurality of traditions, there arises a plurality of ways of thinking and a more disparate set of objects. This can be alarming, in that we may be opening up to the anarchy of diversity, and we become querulous of the object of our enquiry. However, if we imagine the departure we are making as the beginning of a set of conversations across traditions (which are themselves internally differentiated), then a more provisional approach becomes possible.

We can begin to think with the power of anecdotes in conversation as much as pedagogy through the introduction of analogy, disjuncture, and exemplarity. And above all to introduce the idea of a provisional thought rather than one informed by certitude. Walter Benjamin reflects on the idea of the anecdote thus: “Uprising of the anecdotes . . . The constructions of history are comparable to instructions that commandeer the true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history, which demands “empathy” that makes everything abstract.“Empathy”: this is what newspaper reading terminates in. The true method of making things present is: to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). Only anecdotes can do this for us.”^{[48]Walter Benjamin, “First Sketches Paris Arcades I,” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc Laughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 846.}

Such an engagement works with the conversational mode and the “insurgency” of the example offered in an anecdote. The anecdote is situated within a conversation but points beyond it to a field of possible connections and is based on indirection: a pointing to as much as a pointing away from. Although anecdotes appear to be merely elements of a conversation, they gesture toward histories, practices, and persons who are condensed in a story. Amlan Dasgupta in his study of musical practices and musical pedagogy within North Indian gharanas or lineage—schools of music—points to the centrality of anecdotes to instruction in musical evocations as much as carrying forward the distinctiveness of the style of a gharana.^{[49] Amlan Dasgupta, “Women and Music: The Case of North India,” vol. 4 of Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, ed. Bharati Ray (History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilizations) (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005); and My Life: Sangeet Samrat Khan Sahab Alladiya Khan (Kolkata: Thema Publishers, 2012).}

The idea of anecdotes that link different times and spaces and exceed the time present in a narration, can be thought through with Edouard Glissant’s idea of archipelagic thinking. Noncontiguous and scattered islands are brought together through acts of imagination of affinity and thought itself is required to be flexible and limber to make the connections. As he puts it “errant thought silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities . . . at the same time, from difficult, uncertain paths of identity that call to us.”^{[50]Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 19.} To exceed the idea of bounded space and internal connections and move to the idea of space as constructed and imagined by imagined connections, allows us to see that anecdotes, fragments, and islands can be held together through the work of imagination, creating other narratives. The Caribbean itself becomes a narrative constructed of islands/anecdotes brought together through the ingenuity of imagining relation: “the Caribbean is . . . a sea that explodes the scattered land into an arc. A sea that diffracts . . . the reality of archipelagos . . . a natural illustration of the thought of Relation.”^{[51]Ibid., 34.}

Two Words

The idea of the anecdote can become a point of entry into thinking with words from different languages and traditions and bringing them into conversation. Their seeming isolation, island-ness, and location within putative bounded spaces of traditions, is disrupted when one imagines their relation to other words within other traditions. An archipelagic affinity can be forged between these words in different spaces and languages, and this is what makes the work of concept formation possible. To explicate the logic of this thinking, I take up two of the words from two conferences on concepts from the Global South that I organized in 2016 and 2018, which are forthcoming as a volume.

A word in isiZulu from the nineteenth century (now no longer in use) may resonate with a theoretical enterprise in the twenty-first century that tries to connect Asian and African histories and ways of being and becomes a signal for a moment of departure. Or a word in Urdu that speaks more generally to the experience of hierarchy, which again summons up the “insurgency of  the anecdote” and the creation of an archipelagic imagination of relations. The conferences commissioned articles from scholars across disciplines working with their native languages. These scholars were asked to reflect on one word that in their mind carried conceptual entailments. These word/anecdotes from different traditions (in sixteen languages) allowed for conversations imagining connections and relations and reflection on how words could acquire conceptual status.

As Reinhart Koselleck, one of the foremost conceptual historians puts it, “A word can be unambiguous in use . . . The concept, on the other hand, must retain multiple meanings in order to be a concept. The concept is tied to a word, but it is at the same time more than the word. According to our method, a word becomes a concept, when the full richness of a social and political context of meaning, in which, and for which, a word is used is taken up by the word. Concepts are thus concentrations of multiple meanings [emphasis added].”^{[52]Quoted in Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (London: Berghahn, 2014): 172.} It is in the conversations between words that a conceptual universe emerges.

Izithunguthu: The historians Cynthia Kros and John Wright speak of James Stuart, an official in the Natal Colonial Civil Service and a Zulu linguist, who began to compile an English-Zulu dictionary in South Africa and between 1897 and 1900 engaged in discussion with over fifty individuals. The idea was to engage in conversations about ideas of self, community, history, and politics and to arrive at equivalences between English and Zulu words. Between 28 May and 17 June 1901, he decided to collect information in the city of Durban. Word had got around of the enterprise and an elderly man, Thununu, associated with Zulu royalty, decided to take the newly introduced train service to the city to meet with Stuart. Given the immediate circumstance of the Natal Rebellion, and tensions within the Qwabe community, Stuart had his own agenda in what became less a conversation, and more an enquiry of Thununu. At some point, Thununu tells Stuart, “You can write and remember; for our part we are merely izithunguthu.” As Wright and Kros in their essay on this word point out, this one word encompasses many meanings, ranging from Thununu’s sense of personal discomfiture to a more general sense of the disequilibrium in the conversation. That Stuart is asking questions that are not those of Thununu’s and that the latter has no answers to give that accord with the paradigm of Stuart’s enquiries is also encompassed by the word. The word gestures toward the incommensurability inherent in the colonial encounter. If colonialism is a process of establishing equivalences and absorbing histories and cultures into a singular and hierarchical narrative, izithunguthu represents the recalcitrance of the particular that exceeds the enterprise of empire. It is what surfaces as the unease that never goes away and creates a politics of incommensurability. Truly a word that creates an archipelago of similar experience through the colonized world: the encounter between power and obdurateness.^{[53]John Wright and Cynthia Kros, “izithunguthu,” in Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, ed. Dilip M. Menon (London: Routledge, 2022).}

Awqāt/aukāt: A word that is used in Urdu in India to denote status but having a presence in Arabic, Hindi, and Persian with similar connotations. Francesca Orsini through an exploration of the genealogy of the word in dictionaries from colonial times shows that the word awqāt has roots in the word waqt meaning time. Thus, the question of status comes to be connected at the hip to time; that status is changeable is inherent in the very word itself. In a hierarchical society such as India, governed by caste and multiple ineffable distinctions, the word awqat is located in a landscape of inequality and right.The idea that everyone has a right to be someone or do something is not generally recognized.Thus, if persons aspire above their station to do or say something, the rebuke is, what is your awqāt that you dare to say/do this? What Orsini shows is that in the post-independence landscape of northern India, inequality has been challenged not only by policies of affirmative action, but also by the emergence of movements among the dalits or the former untouchable castes, and a lower caste politics leading to the ascension of a dalit leader as chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh. Awqat has changed with waqt and the hierarchies have been unsettled. Now it is possible for a dalit to say, when challenged by an upper caste, “what is your awqat that you can speak like this to me?” A word for our times when hierarchies are being questioned and lives considered dispensable are beginning to matter. A word that compresses the intimate connection of status and time and speaks across borders to spaces not only in the Global South but across the world. A word that embodies a conceptual possibility through its “concentration of multiple meanings.”^{[54]Francesca Orsini, “awquat/auqat,” in Menon, Concepts from the Global South.}

Coda

Doing theory from the Global South stems from the exigent demand for decolonizing knowledge and developing a conceptual vocabulary from traditions of located intellection. We cannot go on as we are doing; southern fact, northern theory, as it were. The issue is not so much of producing concepts commensurable with those generated by Euro-American epistemology like the ideas of the sublime, or of reason, logic, and so on, which we can see for example in the works of African thinkers within the tradition of analytical philosophy.^{[55]Polycarp Ikuenobe,“Logical Positivism, Analytic Method, and Criticisms of Ethnophilosophy,”Metaphilosophy 35, no. 4 (2004): 479–503.}

Questions like is there an idea of logic, mind, and matter in Indian/Islamic/Chinese/African/ Caribbean/American traditions of thinking are moot. How can we make our conceptual vocabulary without our effort being overdetermined by the anxiety of how it would translate or travel within a Euro-American conceptual world? The idea of translation lies at the heart of the social sciences, since it seeks to make visible worlds of thought, life, and material production. Although we live in an interconnected world (through the histories of colonialism, migration, and telecommunications), language is the threshold on which we stumble, as we try and enter spaces of thought other than ours.

English has emerged for contingent historical reasons as the hegemonic language of international communication whether in politics, academics, or tourism.^{[56] Aamir Mufti, Forget English: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).} However, the question of a universal language raises several theoretical issues. Postcolonial theory, while it sought to make visible intellection from spaces that were once seen as mere recipients of Enlightenment from Europe, resolved this problem by rendering visible colonized spaces through an existing library of categories. Categories derived from a Euro-American historical experience have been used to render transparent processes in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Democracy, modernity, capitalism, class, history, ethics, and politics have been some of the universal categories that have been the prisms through which the diversity of the world has been refracted back into a singularity of concepts.

The search for commensurability and the tyranny of monolingualism has characterized academic practice whether in Europe or the spaces that it colonized. Concepts from a European history, such as secularism, individualism, and rationality in all their singular brightness have travelled well. Social sciences in the post-colony have assiduously found these categories to be in existence, waiting to come into being, or culturally absent without asking whether indigenous concepts have related to time, history, and self differently. Societies and individuals are not commensurable in some absolute way, it is merely a heuristic hubris that assumes this. And of course, the sheer relief of there being equivalence that allows comparisons between Mongolia and Munich, Rotterdam and Rajasthan. However, given the ways of power in the world, travel is a privilege as also an act of power. Concepts from Asia and Africa are seen as mired in particularism; the fact that the idea of universals is merely a self-regarding European nativism that was backed by armies is often forgotten.

Within intellectual traditions in the Global South, there have been reflections on notions of self, community, and governance for several hundred years preceding the growth of a Euro-American conceptual vocabulary forged in the crucible of empire and Europe’s self-appointed role in the world. Recovering these categories of thought is not merely an act of sentimentality, it is rather, a stepping out beyond the glare of an ignorance created by Euro-American categories. It is an attempt to think societies and polities in their own terms and from within their concepts. Some of these may be translatable into categories familiar to existing social science theory, some may sit beside known concepts as markers of alterity, and yet others may be distinctive to a locale of life and thought. Not all conceptions are translatable across cultures, and this gives us occasion to think about the hubris of the universal assumptions of our academic practices.

First published in Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 59, Number 1, 2022, pp. 142-162 (Article)
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Published by Penn State University Press doi: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.1.0142