Abstract
Traces of the South
There is an extensive literature on how the superficially geographical category of the (global) South exceeds and transcends geography, at least as considered from the perspective of purely two-dimensional maps. Unsurprisingly, the literature doesn’t converge on a single alternative meaning because there are at least three levels of discourse that function separately while constantly interacting: an historical understanding of the material, political, economic and cultural polarization of modernity; a structural understanding of the patterns of inequality, domination and subjugation that express the cumulative effects of the aforementioned polarization; and a political language of subjectivation that seeks to root, within historical and structural understanding, contemporary dynamics of mobilization anchored in specific modes of solidarity. Of course, one could imagine the three levels fitting together seamlessly, but even the most superficial observation points to tensions and fault lines that fragment the South in the very terms of its unity, particularly in the face of current dynamics of social change which, as many specialists have pointed out, tend to make the South in some respects “northern” just as the North takes on features of the South. Furthermore, this superficial homogenization – exemplified in the decline of inequalities between states as measured by conventional indicators – is clearly a specific modality of polarization – exemplified in growing inequalities within states, in both North and South. In order to offer a framework for thinking about these tensions and fault lines as constitutive of the very idea of the South – a “feature”, not a “bug”, as the cliché goes – I propose to focus on the question of traces, which creates a bridge between two very different, but equally, important paradigms. The first is topological: it considers how social spaces are structured materially and symbolically and how the connections operative within them are traces of a structure that is never immediately apparent and is too complex to grasp as a whole. The second paradigm is historical. It concerns the traces of the past in the present, which reveal aspects of the same topology, but considered genetically and generatively rather than structurally. The South exists through its traces, the ambivalence and multidimensionality of which, in a context of change, shape the space of its possible meanings.