Claudio E. Benzecry |  |
The U.S., Latin America, and the Global South
Whether on dissertation committees, scholarly panels, or when conducting peer review, we have all been confronted by what to make of cases that do not happen in the United States. Are they generalizable? Exceptional? And what do we call these cases if they’re not in Western Europe: “third world”, “peripheral,” “developing”? A vocable has come to be preferred: “Global South.”
This letter addresses this nominal issue, and cautions us against the facile and automatic use of a concept that has become devoid of the critical and relational character it was born with. As used in common sociological parlance, it is mobilized to make immediate sense of phenomena happening in non-US and non-Western European contexts, and transformed – to paraphrase Brazilian sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi – into a kind of orientalism in the name of diversity. The metaphor, when well used, refers not to an actual place but rather to a relational quality with respect to the metropole, which actually illuminates the same postcolonial and peripheral dynamics within, for instance, the US itself. (Something currently advanced by scholars of race, many of them part of the DuBoisian Scholars Network.)
Whether on dissertation committees, scholarly panels, or when conducting peer review, we have all been confronted by what to make of cases that do not happen in the United States. Are they generalizable? Exceptional? And what do we call these cases if they’re not in Western Europe: “third world”, “peripheral,” “developing”? A vocable has come to be preferred: “Global South.”
This letter addresses this nominal issue, and cautions us against the facile and automatic use of a concept that has become devoid of the critical and relational character it was born with. As used in common sociological parlance, it is mobilized to make immediate sense of phenomena happening in non-US and non-Western European contexts, and transformed – to paraphrase Brazilian sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi – into a kind of orientalism in the name of diversity. The metaphor, when well used, refers not to an actual place but rather to a relational quality with respect to the metropole, which actually illuminates the same postcolonial and peripheral dynamics within, for instance, the US itself. (Something currently advanced by scholars of race, many of them part of the DuBoisian Scholars Network.)
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