Author Archives: mzantsi

On the dangers of ‘reverse essentialism’

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While Southern Theory continues to grow, there is a danger that it develops insulated from critique. There is the risk that its political mission focuses exclusively on distinguishing a separate form of knowledge from the dominant north, repeating the kind of denial of southern roots prevalent in the North.  

A recent article by Gregor McLennan from University of Bristol offers a critical appreciation of Southern Theory:

Sociology is often pitched as the social science discipline most obviously in need of postcolonial deconstruction, owing to its ostensibly more transparent Eurocentrism as a formation. For this reason, even postcolonial scholars working within the ambit of sociology are reluctant to play up its analytical strengths in addition to exposing its ideological deficits. Without underestimating the profound impact of the growing body of postcolonial theorizing and research on self-reflexivity within sociology, this paper points up some key ways in which the structure of comprehension within postcolonial critique itself is characteristically sociological. Alternatively, if that latter conclusion is to remain in dispute, a number of core epistemological and socio-theoretical problems must be accepted as being, still, radically unresolved. Consequently, a more dialectical grasp of sociology’s role within this domain of enquiry and style of intellectual politics is needed. I develop these considerations by critically engaging with three recent currents of postcolonial critique – Raewyn Connell’s advocacy of “Southern Theory”; the project of “reinventing social emancipation” articulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos; and the “de-colonial option” fronted by Walter D. Mignolo.

He cites Santos’ caution against a simplistic North-South binary:

[Santos'] accepts that the register of South versus North, East versus West is a metaphorical one that, while effective as a ‘‘defamiliarizing’’ tactic, runs the risk of a sloppy reverse essentialism in which Europe and its traditions are treated as a ‘‘monolithic entity’’.

We are left with a challenging question. If we accept that the North-South division is indeed a generalisation, then what is its remaining meaning? It is possible to lay a similar charge with many oppositions, such as male-female, human-nature and capital-labour. The criticism doesn’t invalidate the opposition, but does caution against an essentialist reading of geopolitics. The opposition needs to be understood as a ongoing construction that is critically relevant to cultural trajectories, rather than something that occurs automatically when we cross the equator.

Reference

Gregor McLennan (2013), Postcolonial Critique: The Necessity of Sociology, in Julian Go (ed.) Postcolonial Sociology (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 24), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.119-144

In 2008, Paraguayan author predicted and described the Pope’s resignation

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Life, at times, imitates art.

In the novel, “The Apocalypse of Benedict” (El Apocalipsis según Benedicto) published in 2008, prize-winning Paraguayan author, Esteban Bedoya, accurately describes the Pope’s retirement at the age of 85. Incredibly, one paragraph of Bedoya’s novel reappeared 2 years later in 2010, when Benedict XVI, in an interview (which was later published as a book) with a German journalist, expressed a possible condition for his retirement. At the end of Bedoya’s short novel, after his retirement, the ex-Pope was continued to be called “Benedict”.

In the first part, with an admirable writing style that is both precise and surgical, Bedoya tells a story, very similar to reality, of the public life of Benedict XVI, whose full name is Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, who after the death of John Paul II, was elected as the 265th Pope on the 19th May, 2005.

In the second part, Bedoya unleashes his creativity and, amongst other events, Benedict XVI resigns. What follows, is a recommendation for anyone who has yet to read the book: to get themselves a copy and read it.

But it’s not just by coincidence or chance that Bedoya is lead to such an accurate prediction. It is however, the development of the novel that drives and justifies this outcome.

The resignation and retirement of the Pope, detailed in Bedoya’s fiction, is now seen today repeated in reality and has taken many by surprise. Accordingly, use of this fiction should be highlighted as an effective method to interpret and explain what really occurs in the dark, yet elaborate corridors of the Vatican.

One of the extracts from the novel that accurately describes certain sentiments and reasons for retirement which have since been publicly expressed by Benedict XVI himself, years after Bedoya’s novel had been published, includes:

The press speculated and started rumours which spoke of the retirement of the Pope: Benedict himself had announced his intention to resign in the case of being unable to carry out such responsibility (“The Apocalypse of Benedict”, page 21).

Benedict’s sentiment in Bedoya’s 2008 novel, fits perfectly with the paragraph highlighted by the Basque newspaper, GARA, on 12th February 2013 which reads:

The protagonist himself (Joseph Ratzinger), in a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald, confessed in November of 2010 his willingness to “resign due to illness, if physically, psychologically and spiritually (he) were not able to perform (his) job (in: http://preview.tinyurl.com/cy9az8y).

The idea is not to take away potential readers of the novel, so in it, after the resignation, the former Pope was continued to be referred to as Benedict…

In light of this, Cubadebate published the article: “Lombardi: We will continue to call him Benedict XVI” (in: http://tinyurl.com/bu7vd4r).

It’s worth highlighting the film “Habemus Papam”, by Italian film director Nani Moretti, which tells the fictional story of Cardinal Melville, who, when elected Pope, suffers a panic attack that prevents him from taking office. However, in the case of the Bedoya’s novel, both the identity and age of the Pope who decided to retire is actually depicted: the same Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, at age 85.

To think that a Pope can retire is not something extraordinary, even though the last time it happened was 598 years ago, but to actually predict the name and age of the Pope who has now, in real life, resigned and retired…. well that’s a different story.

In turn, author Frei Betto has so far written about five resignations, including that of Benedict XVI:

In the history of the Church there are four popes who resigned …: Benedict IX (01/05/1045), Gregory VI (20/12/1046), Celestine V (13/12/1294) and Gregory XII (04/07/1415). Benedict XVI will be the fifth, as of 28 February 2013 (in: http://tinyurl.com/bfdyls2).

Literature is also capable of writing the history of the future

In delving into universal literature and cases of authors who produced works considered clairvoyant, emerge the names of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and Manuel Scorza.

Julio Venre was a successful French writer thanks to his ability to attract a very diverse readership. He captivated audiences by pioneering the science fiction genre and his works were not only popular in his time, but even still today.

He predicted with great accuracy in his fantastic tales the appearance of some of the products generated by the technological advances of the twentieth century; TV, helicopters, submarines and spaceships (in: http://tinyurl.com/ylmn3om).

Herbert George Wells was a writer, novelist, historian and British philosopher. Wells wrote science fiction novels such as “The Time Machine” (1895), whose original title was “The Chronic Argonauts”, “The Invisible Man” (1897), “The War of the Worlds” (1898) and “The First Men in the Moon “(1901).

George Orwell, under the pseudonym of Eric Blair, was a British writer, and wrote the novel “1984″ in 1948. Perhaps this title arose as a rearrangement of the last digits of the year to place the work in the future. It is often cited as a counterexample to a utopia (an imagined place in which everything is perfect), with “dystopian fiction” (an imagined place in which everything is undesirable). In this book the concept of “Big Brother” emerges; a police state which is totalitarian, vigilant and repressive, as it used to be three decades ago, due to results of projects like “ECHELON” (UKUSA Security Agreement: United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Ray Douglas Bradbury, American science fiction writer, wrote fantasy stories with a poetic prose such as; “The Martian Chronicles” (1950), “The Golden Apples of the Sun” (1953), “A Medicine for Melancholy” (1960), “The Machineries of Joy” (1964) “Ghosts of the New” (1969), and among his novels, the unforgettable “Fahrenheit 451″ (1953), is also highlighted as part of his dystopian fiction.

Manuel Scorza, excellent writer, poet and social activist from Peru, wrote the monumental epic series “The Silent War”, composed of five novels: “Drums for Rancas” (1970); “Garabombo, the Invisible” (1972), “The Sleepless Rider “(1976), “The Ballard of Agapito Robles”(1976) and “Requiem for a Lightning Bolt” (1978). In the latest of the series, Scorza wrote about certain characters and their actions which, two years later, came true in a few sociopolitical cases in Peru.

However, in the case of “The Apocalypse of Benedict” Esteban Bedoya went a step further, venturing into unchartered territory and creating a piece of literature which, five years ago, described with amazing accuracy something that then was the future and today is now the present.

International recognition of Bedoya’s nouvelle format

In some proposals for the classification of novel literary works nouvelle or novella is a story of a lesser extent than a novel and is defined by Julio Cortázar as a “genre somewhere between a story and a novel.”

With respect to the number of words in a nouvelle, some authors set their limits between 30,000 and 50,000 words, but it is not an inflexible rule. Two nouvelle works are: “The Tracker” by Julio Cortázar and “Perjury in Snow” by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

This extension which responds to the nouvelle format is apparently where Esteban Bedoya is most comfortable. “The Apocalypse of Benedict” in its Spanish version has 13,389 words and in English, 14,756. His excellent nouvelle will be republished under the title of “The Ear Collector” and in its Spanish version will be 35,914 words.

The novel “The Apocalypse of Benedict” is not limited to the accuracy of the story and guessing what happens now in 2013, it has outstanding literary merit pertaining to both the structure and the level of creativity. In fact, for this work Bedoya received the 2010 PEN America/Edward and Lily Tuck Prize for Paraguayan Literature.

As a writer, Bedoya has also received awards from the Academy of American Poets (1982) and publisher, Helguero (1983).

His much publicized novel “The Bear Pit” (2003), was translated into French under the title “La fosse aux Ours” (2005), the German title “Der Bärengraben” (2009) and published in France by La dernière Goutte.

His novel “The Evil Ones” (“Les Mal-aimés”) (2006) was translated and published in France as by L’Haremattan and the novel, now titled “The Ear Collector” will be translated into French and published in France by La dernière Goutte.

“The Apocalypse of Benedict” is being translated into English for publication in the United States.

After ten years of his creative work being published, Esteban Bedoya’s writing continues to increase in creativity, with genuine stories that are not only worthwhile reads, but are enjoyed with the same pleasure as that of the best of Augusto Roa Bastos.

Article by Vicente Brunetti from Kaos en la Red (translated by Gabrielle Hall).

DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION: REFLECTIONS ON THE CURRENT SOUTH AFRICAN MOMENT by Achille Mbembe

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Commenting on the South African predicament in a recent opinion piece in The Mail and Guardian, Mbembe wrote: “A planetary recoding of situations of misery, debt and enforced idleness is underway. Today, black people are still paying the price of yesterday’s racial discounts, without which white privilege would have been but a mirage. The next decade will see increasing conflict between market forces and democracy, between the rule of property and the rule of the poor. The capacity of the South African State to mediate between the rights of the propertyless and the requirements of capital accumulation will be severely tested”. In this lecture, Mbembe will reflect on the current South African political moment. He will also assess the crisis of culture which afflicts South Africa’s democracy and the extent to which contemporary struggles for emancipation truly transcend the law of repetition which Frantz Fanon foresaw as the biggest threat to difference and newness.

Achille MBEMBE is a Research Professor in History and Politics at WiSER and a Visiting Professor in the Romance Studies Department and The Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. He is a co-Convenor of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) and the Editor of the digital cultural magazine The Johannesburg Salon. He is the author of numerous books in French and is mostly known in the English-speaking world for his classic, On the Postcolony (Bil, Venter/Altron Award, 2005). His latest book, Sortir de la grande nuit (Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 2010) has sold more than 10,000 copies and will be published by Columbia University Press in 2013.

Thursday, 14th March 2013
6:00-7:30pm
WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University

Refreshments will be served

Please RSVP to Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za

What is the role of geography in sociopolitics?

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Lorenzo Veracini

Senior Research Fellow, Swinburne University, Melbourne

‘North’ and ‘South’ are simultaneously geographical and sociopolitical categories. Colonialism – a hierarchical relationship that is premised on the superordination of a metropole that is premised on the subordination of a periphery – is fundamentally involved in both dialectics: in the first case, because it is premised on a distinction that only geographical displacement makes possible; in the second case, because it is a relationship – it defines self and other as it embeds them in an inherently unequal relationship.

Settler colonialism – a particular form of colonialism where the colonisers “come to stay” and are founders of political orders that are endowed with a specific self-constituent sovereign capacity – is a manipulation of both these categories and their ordering; this is why it should feature in any South-South dialogue.

Geographically, settler colonialism is premised on a displacement that is ultimately a non-displacement. Settlers transform geography and a capacity to do so is a measure of their success. As well as founders of political orders, therefore, they are destroyers of ecological ones (and therefore builders of new landscapes). Indeed, it is exactly because they are able to destroy existing ecosystems that they are so effective at establishing durable political regimes. As they consume places at a fierce rate and routinely dissolve distance, they Europeanise space. No wonder that the old term for settler colonialism was ‘planting’; their countries look like the ones they have left behind.

Of course settlers need to manipulate the terms of geographical representation as well. Wakefield’s imaginary goodbye to his grandmother is a case in point. As she mentioned how far New Zealand was, he tore the map, connected the opposed margins, and turned it upside down to place the settler colony to be at the centre of his representational system. James Vetch’s 1838 Map of Australia, another geographically imaginative act of settler colonial evocation, showed Spain and Portugal tucked in at the bottom.

This notion, however, is much older and Jean-Pierre Purry, colonial adventurer and serial promoter of (failed) settlements, tried to establish colonies in Australia, South Africa and North America because he assumed in an act of geographical speculation (he was a compulsive speculator) that colonisation – the reproduction of a self-supporting and virtuous sociopolitical bodies – would only be successful at around 33 degrees latitude, the latitude of biblical Canaan. These are all examples of decentering acts of geographical manipulation that envisage a north in the south.

Sociopolitically, settler colonialism also turns the metropole-periphery opposition upside down. This is why we can talk about a settler “revolution”. Settler colonialism establishes immediately autonomous sociopolitical bodies that, in the future, will be entirely independent of the ties that bind it to an originating locale. Settler colonialism is thus colonialism without permanent external subordination (settler control of indigenous alterities is not exactly external – that is why the notion of internal colonialism emerges in settler colonial contexts and is eventually reimported to Europe). Settler colonialism produces islands of autonomously colonising ‘North’ in the global ‘South’.

Question

How do we narrate the lack of exact fit between geography and sociopolitics when we approach the North-South divide (beside settler colonialism, the topic of my intervention, isn’t there plenty of ‘North’ in the ‘South’ and even much more ‘South’ in the ‘North’)?

¿Cómo narrar la falta de ajuste exacto entre la geografía y sociopolítica cuando nos acercamos a la división Norte-Sur (al lado de colonialismo, el tema de mi intervención, ¿no hay un montón de “Norte” en el “Sur”, y más aún mucho ‘Sur’ en el ‘Norte’)?

A statement and question offered to participants of the symposium Diálogo Trans-Pacífico y Sur-Sur: Perspectivas Alternativas a la Cultura y Pensamiento Eurocéntrico y Noroccidental, University of Santiago, 8-9 January 2013

How to move with honour between laws of the south?

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Shaun McVeigh

Associate Professor, Law School, University of Melbourne

I welcome the opportunities that this congress creates to discuss and reflect on many of the relationships formed across the South.

For many Australia is viewed politically, juridically and economically as an outpost of the North. The Australian state has done little to alter the colonial forms of belief and government by which Australia was established as a sovereign nation. It continues the expropriation of the life, land, and laws of the South. However, there are also many involved in assisting Australia take up its place again as a pacific nation of the South, a nation able to live with justly with its own laws and one capable of honouring the laws of the Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of the South. At the centre of this lies a concern with the conduct of lawful relations. For the non-Indigenous peoples of Australia and elsewhere who live by laws inherited from the North it is necessary to think again about what it means to live lawfully and to honour laws. Only one part of this will be concerned with human duties and human rights.

At present as a jurist and jurisprudent I am involved in two projects engaging a lawful South. One, with Kevin Murray, involves developing ways in which designers from Australia might engage with artisans and crafts people of the south in ways that create honourable relations of exchange and trade. Another, with Sundhya Pahuja, involves maintaining international law as a meeting places of laws rather than as an administrative domain of the North.

Question

How do we conduct ourselves with honour as we move within and between the laws of the South?

¿Cómo nos comportamos con honor como nos movemos dentro y entre las leyes del Sur?

A statement and question offered to participants of the symposium Diálogo Trans-Pacífico y Sur-Sur: Perspectivas Alternativas a la Cultura y Pensamiento Eurocéntrico y Noroccidental, University of Santiago, 8-9 January 2013

Who are your moral heroes?

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Christine Black

Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Griffith Center for Coastal Management, Griffith University, Brisbane

Greetings from Dr Christine Black

I have been asked to contribute to this conference through this intermediary of writing a few paragraphs to convey a message from Australia. As an Indigenous woman of the Kombumerri and Munaljahalai peoples I want to first acknowledge the spirits of your lands and those who have come before you and those who will come after you. Your continent is a powerful and vast land that has experienced continuous invasion like no other continent on this earth. And yet it prevails and gives your people life. We should all be thankful for what the land we walk upon each day gives to us personally. Furthermore your Indigenous Peoples have survived through all these invasions and have preserved and protected the ancient knowledge of your lands. To preserve a culture and law takes strength and moral fortitude. It is not preserved by technology but relationships, relationships between humans and their beloved land. Land teaches people how to live on it, and to understand the law of a land takes thousands of years of caring for land.

Australia has a unique responsibility to the world. That responsibility is to must preserve and perpetuate the oldest continuous culture and law in the world. This is a great honor bestowed upon Australians by providence.

It has also been my personal responsibility to continue and share that ancient knowledge and law. I have carried out this responsibility by writing a book on Indigenous legal theory entitled The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter of an Indigenous Jurisprudence. (Routledge). This book is made up of many stories of how the law of sharing and caring is the most important moral compass a peoples can live by. That caring begins with caring for the Land and environment. The book is not just meant for academics, as the knowledge of our Senior Law People is for everyone to learn how important it is to understand that lawful behaviour comes from caring for Land and not just ourselves.

Question

I have also been asked to pose a question to the participants. I would therefore ask; who, in your opinion has demonstrated moral courage which others of the South could learn from? In other words who are your heroes and how can citizens of other nations in the South learn from their exemplar moral behavior.

¿Qui, en su opinión, ha demostrado coraje moral que otros del Sur puede aprender? ¿En otras palabras, que son sus héroes y cómo pueden los ciudadanos de otras naciones en el Sur de aprender de su comportamiento ejemplar moral?

A statement and question offered to participants of the symposium Diálogo Trans-Pacífico y Sur-Sur: Perspectivas Alternativas a la Cultura y Pensamiento Eurocéntrico y Noroccidental, University of Santiago, 8-9 January 2013

How to prioritise the intellectual work of the global South?

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A statement and question offered to participants of the symposium Diálogo Trans-Pacífico y Sur-Sur: Perspectivas Alternativas a la Cultura y Pensamiento Eurocéntrico y Noroccidental, University of Santiago, 8-9 January 2013

Raewyn Connell

Professor of Sociology, University of Sydney

Dear Colleagues,

Greetings from Sydney! I am a sociologist, interested in both empirical research and social theory. I have been working for many years on the critique of Northern dominance in social science, and on the positive task of building a globally inclusive social science. Only this, I believe, will realize social science’s potential to be the democratic self-knowledge of society on a world scale. This project requires continuing encounters between intellectual workers across the global South. My book Southern Theory, published in 2007, records both the critique of Northern social science, and my encounters with social thought in Africa, Iran, Latin America and India, as well as Australia. Since publishing that book I have been studying Southern formations of gender theory, and I am currently working on Southern analyses of neoliberalism, and on the uses of Southern perspectives in applied social science.

Question

The question I would pose for your consideration is: How do we develop curricula in higher education – especially in theory courses, which are both vital and difficult to change – that prioritize the intellectual work of the global South? What are the growth points around which new teaching agendas can crystallize?

¿Cómo podemos desarrollar planes de estudio en la educación superior – especialmente en cursos teóricos, que son a la vez importante y difícil de cambiar – que priorizan el trabajo intelectual de los países del Sur? ¿Cuáles son los puntos de crecimiento en torno al cual las nuevas agendas de enseñanza pueden cristalizar?

The Cultural Cringe and Social Science

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There is a problem about intellectual work in settler-colonial societies that deeply affects social science.

The problem was named “The Cultural Cringe” by the Australian critic Arthur Phillips, in a pungent article published in 1950 by the new literary magazine Meanjin. Phillips diagnosed “a disease of the Australian mind”, an assumption of inferiority vis-a-vis England, a deep dependence on imported judgments and tastes. Phillips shrewdly observed that this resulted in “the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual” from Australian society, a disdainful attitude that equated the rough, the uncultured and the local.

Phillips was talking about literature and art, but the same issues arise in science. The Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji described the situation in his important 1997 book Endogenous Knowledge. There is a global division of labour: data are gathered in the colony, but theory is made in the metropole. Scientists from the global South travel to the USA and Europe for training and recognition, learn Northern intellectual frameworks, try to get published in Northern journals. Hountondji calls this attitude “extraversion”, being oriented to external sources of authority. It is found both in settler and colonized societies.

What Phillips called a disease is better analyzed by Hountondji as part of a global economy of culture. It’s structural, not personal. Ultimately it has to do with the way the public realm is created in colonial societies.

The colonizers claimed to have the true religion or a superior civilization, but what they crucially had was warships, muskets, cavalry, cannon, steam power and the ruthlessness to use them for conquest. As Hilaire Belloc observed,

Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not.

Imperial force enabled settlement, up to the point of demographic dominance over indigenous people, and demographic dominance was mainly achieved by immigration. The colonial state achieved local order, so far as it could – the colonies were violent places – through imperial law and bureaucracy. Settler schools and newspapers were modelled from the start on those of the home country. When the colonists felt they were up to universities (the 1850s, in Sydney and Melbourne) they imported both the academics and the curricula direct from what was, without irony, called the mother country.

Settler colonialism thus produced a truncated public realm. The leading institutions and technologies were developed in the metropole; most of the capital that underpinned colonial development came from the metropole; and key political decisions were also made there. In 1939 the Prime Minister famously announced on radio that “Great Britain has declared war on [Germany], and that, as a result, Australia is also at war”. The gesture was repeated as recently as 2003, when the Prime Minister of the day sent Australian troops into Iraq.

For social sciences in a settler-colonial society, this produces an “as-if” form of knowledge. Research is done as if the researcher were standing in the metropole, or as if the society being studied were part of the metropole. Thus, Australian psychology is full of experiments using scales developed in the United States, Australian economics is full of models developed in the United States, Australian sociology is full of concepts developed in France.

When these studies are published, there is normally no discussion of whether such ideas really apply in a settler-colonial context. What might be called the productive arc of methodology – the movement of thought in which concepts and methods are generated from actual social experience – is missing, in settler society’s truncated public realm of social science. That arc was traversed in the metropole. Its results, packaged as theory or methodology, are simply imported.

To extraverted thought, what is imported from the metropole simply is theory or method – no other meaning for those terms is recognized. So, on the rare occasions where an Australian journal conducts a conceptual discussion, it is conducted wholly within European or US parameters, and often by invited European and US writers, at that. Australian social scientists writing theory usually do so by commentary on European and US theorists.

The fact that the settler population is mostly white, English-speaking, and has European ancestors creates an illusion of identity. Politicians encourage this by constantly talking of Australia as a “Western country”, a nonsense term that a surprising number of social scientists still use.

Current trends in universities are worsening the problem. Neoliberal policy-makers drive Australian universities and academics to compete with each other. The key metrics for this competition involve recognition in the metropole, especially, publication and citation in highly-ranked metropolitan journals. Since metropolitan journals operate within metropolitan intellectual cultures (we can’t expect them to do otherwise!), the message for Australian scientists is clear: do it the US/EU way, if you want promotion and grants in Australia.

Social science in a settler-colonial society therefore tends to split between an abstracted theoretical discourse, conducted as if in the metropole with little or no local reference, and an applied social science in which methodologies developed in the metropole are applied to empirical studies of local social problems.

The social problems – class, patriarchy, racism, environmental destruction, and more – are all too real. But the methodologies are rarely sufficient to understand them in depth. Why? Because the social problems of settler society partly arise from the nature of settler colonialism itself, especially from its truncated public realm. When key determinants are located in the relationship with the metropole, or in the dynamics of the world economy, a social science using methods and concepts developed for the metropole to describe itself, and constantly looking for authority to the metropole, is in a specific way displaced. Like the literary culture criticized by Phillips, though trying to describe local society it is estranged from it.

Estrangement of intellectuals is recognized, indeed a cliché of Australian cultural history. There are also well-known responses to it. One is the angry rejection of the cultural cringe in the name of an anti-imperial nationalism. That was the note struck by Bulletin school of writers in the 1890s, especially the radicals who associated English culture with a despised upper class in the colonies. Settler intellectuals don’t have Aboriginal culture to fall back on, though the “Jindyworobak” movement poets of the 1930s tried – the result being an arrogant act of colonial re-appropriation, as well as some interesting poetry. Some go into exile, but in a way that inverts the exile stories known since Ovid. It is exile to the metropole. The result can be the haunted double vision of the world seen in The Man Who Loved Children, the great work of Australia’s first modernist novelist, Christina Stead, who wrote it in exile in the United States.

These responses are available to social scientists too, and we can trace them through the history of social sciences in settler societies. The greatest social scientist Australia has produced, the pre-historian Vere Gordon Childe, went down the track of exile, working in Europe for most of his career from the 1920s on. He came back to the Blue Mountains near Sydney to die.

The problem can’t be solved on an individual basis. It requires collective and institutional change, on a scale that is only now becoming clear. It requires, in fact, a re-making of social science on a world scale. It is worth enquiring whether there is a specific role for settler-colonial intellectuals in that re-making.

Raewyn Connell is Professor of Sociology at University of Sydney – see www.raewynconnell.net.

Comaroffs: ‘Theory from the South

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A recent journal article from the Comaroffs rallies the cause for a southern perspective. But it leaves much work to be done in developing the critical tools that might achieve this.

‘The Global South’ has become a shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the ‘Global North’ spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the Northern Hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, and ethnic conflict, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? In what measure? What might this mean for the very dualism on which such global oppositions rest? Drawing on recent research, primarily in Africa, this paper touches on a range of familiar themes—law, labor, and the contours of contemporary capitalism—in order to ask how we might understand these things with theory developed from an ‘ex-centric’ vantage. This view renders some key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.

Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff ‘Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa’ Anthropological Forum Vol. 22, No. 2, July 2012, 113–131