Global History from the Global South Readings

Younis

In the interwar period, the political language of time was used to present post-colonial black/African states as inferior to white colonial powers.

• In Haiti this was done by arguing the country had to come back under American rule as black independence had led to 'regression'. In Ethiopia this was done by arguing that Italian colonialism would bring Ethiopia into the future, and in Liberia this was done by arguing that Liberians had failed to construct a functioning state within the same timeline as European rulers.

• Pan-African activists responded to this by building literary networks of solidarity, taking colonial aggression in Haiti, Ethiopia and Liberia as proof that de-colonial progress was impossible in collaboration with Europeans.

Adi

Despite understanding the importance of recruiting black workers to their cause, the PCF and CPGB in France and Britain were repeatedly criticised by Comintern for failing to pay attention to black workers. Instead, black workers organised themselves into separate unions and organisations under activists like O'Connell and Kayoute, especially in seafaring communities, building to the Hamburg Conference of 1930.

• agency of black activists
• intersection of class and race interests - and failure of white unions and communists to prioritise
• splintering of activist movements due to internal debate and external repression

Brown

Global history has failed to represent Latin America as a centre of gravity, and when it is covered, Latin America is often depicted as a passive victim. Similarly, Latin American historians often focus on national histories rather than taking a more global approach. In order to address this, English should be decentred as the language of history, Latin American historians should be encouraged to take a transnational approach, the victim/agent dichotomy should be broken down, and historians should engage more with the work of non-historian de-colonial scholars like Mignolo.

"Instead of dismissing Mignolo and others for their sometimes crude ahistoricism, it is worth considering whether their interdisciplinary insights might be usefully applied to the global history of Latin America …Mignolo suggests that a decolonized global history would not have only one narrative of the history of Latin America but rather many voices relating parallel and interrelated histories."

Mother Tining

Oral history of resistance to the building of the Chico Dam project in the Philippines between 1973-1977; environmental movement to protect indigenous land led by women.

CLR James

Black Jacobins

• don't believe narratives that claim whatever system is inevitable - agency of enslaved people was core to Haitian Revolution
• enslaved people in the Caribbean were uniquely equipped for rebellion - again agency?
• recovering the history of the Haitian Revolution in context of global anti-colonialism in 20s and 30s
• providing historical basis to inspire and inform anti-colonialism in the present born in Trinidad while it was a British colony, to fairly middle class family, trained as a teacher

Conrad

While global history has a noble goal, the expense and perspective required cause it to be dominated by anglophone global north academics, who must be conscious of their role in reifying capitalism through the abstraction of processes like globalisation lest they recreate the eurocentric hierarchies they seek to challenge.

de Waal and Omar

The handing of power to private voluntary organisations in places like Somalia has led to supposedly 'neutral' organisations reproducing social issues and hierarchy by refusing to analyse root causes. Their reliance on charitable donations leads to a conflict of interest between the nuanced needs of local people and what looks good to Western donors.

Elshtain

Individualist 'rights' feminism risks playing into the existing power structures of state and reinforcing patriarchy, such as through the inclusion of women in warfare. One way to combat this could be by implementing 'maternal thinking' as a collectivist, pacifist feminist lens that draws alliances between different groups of women and also women with different groups of men.

Fanon

Wretched of the Earth Colonial society is built off of violence, with colonial policing systems existing to use both physical and psychological force to maintain the settler-native divide, and the geography of colonial environments serving to reinforce this through the creation of envy. As such, the only way to overthrow a violent system is by turning that violence back on itself. "The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers."

Hadouchi

The Pan-African Festival of Algiers is a film by William Klein recording the 1969 First Pan-African Cultural Festival. By using montages of archive footage, interviews with artists and activists, quotes from Pan-African thinkers like Fanon, and multiple languages side-by-side without voiceover, it presents a nuanced and diverse view of Pan-African liberation, with culture as a focus for resistance. This was done to contrast Leopold Senghor's N[]ritude movement, which attracted criticism for lacking diversity and accommodating colonisers like the French government.

Mamdani

The idea of 'right to protect' is applied unevenly and punitively by global North bodies through international law institutions; EG the USA is able to count action in Iraq as just counter-insurgency but label very similar action in Darfur as genocide. (Not that it wasn't genocide; both were bad).

Maudsley

Neopopulist accounts of the Chipko movement as a feminist or conservationist movement misunderstand the motivation of people in the Uttaranchal region to have political voice and a functioning economy, mythologising women's role while ignoring their actual motivations and political context.

Merchant

• Colonial-capitalist production has damaged the environment
• Women suffer disproportionately due to the disruption of jobs as subsistence farmers (application of European gender hierarchy), and health effects of pesticides etc.
• Women have organised resistance against ecological damage EG Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Maria Luisa Robleto, etc. 'the Death of Nature': 'An ethic of care, as elaborated by some feminists, falls prey to an essentialist critique that women's nature is to nurture.' • 'Are not women themselves thereby complicit in the assumption that women are "by nature" more caring, more emotional, and more nurturing then men? ' • 'If women, by identifying with nature, come to its rescue, do they not by these very actions cement their own oppression in a patriarchal society? ' use of the idea of science to remove spiritual/cultural element from nature

Parrot

Tricontentalism is distinct from other periods of anti-imperial resistance in combining radical revolutionary ideas with the powers of independent nation-states, acting as the 'second generation' of Third World leaders following the Bandung era. It is important to make this distinction in order to understand the diversity of anti-imperial thought, which also existed within the tricontinental movement.

Sen

'Development' should be measured by the freedom of the general population rather than through economic statistics, as focusing solely on economics can lead to the curbing of freedoms, overlooking quality of life and overlooking the right to political and economic participation.

Sjoberg and Gentry

Narratives presenting violence committed by women show the remaining need for feminist analysis of choice and agency through their gender-specific understanding of criminal women.

Veale

Women who fought in the TPLF were socialised into a set of specific gender norms that then caused them to experience culture shock when they were made to reintegrate into domestic roles following the end of conflict. They reported linking their identity to their role as soldiers, feeling disappointment with their lack of equal status to men, and social exclusion due to not fitting into traditional femininity.

Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe

Challenging eurocentrism: Europe still part of the story, but part of a multi-centred world "The paradox of third-world social science is that we find western theories useful in understanding our societies."

David Armitage

'we are all global historians now… By that I mean, if you are not doing an explicitly transnational, international or global project, you have to explain why you are not' (2012)

de Sousa Santos

Epistemologies of the South "On the one side, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and all their satellite-oppressions. This is what we call the global North, a political, not geographical, location…On the other side, what we call the global South. We are not victims; we are victimized and offer resistance." p.10

Cooper

What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? focusing on globalisation can mean focusing on European imperialism, a lot of global historians are anglophone and funded by anglophone universities, recreating eurocentric hierarchies of knowledge

Prashad

The Darker Nations "The demise of the Third World has been catastrophic. People across the three continents continue to dream of something better, and many of them are organized into social movements or political parties. Their aspirations have a local voice. Beyond that, their hopes and dreams are unintelligible. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Third World agenda bore these beliefs from localities to national capitals and onward to the world stage." "The Third World was not a place. It was a project. During the seemingly interminable battles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed of a new world."

Guha

founding Subaltern Studies Group manifesto of Subaltern Studies 1 (and The Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency): challenging idea that history is driven by the politics of the elites

Spivak

Can the Subaltern Speak? how do we represent people who left no records/whose records have been destroyed? by only talking about the global South in the context of European exploitation, historians remain euro-centric

Quijano

'coloniality of power' hierarchal categories established under colonialism continue to shape understanding of power in Latin America - such as through sexism 'coloniality of knowledge' European ways of understanding what knowledge is persist in post-colonial Latin America

Mignolo

Darker Side of the Renaissance political and epistemic de-linking (separating from colonial hierarchies in the organisation of knowledge) is needed as part of de-colonisation process  "As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic de-linking here comes to the fore.

Tuhiwai Smith

understanding hierarchies of knowledge and how indigenous communities see research  "The word 'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful."

W.E.B. Dubois

Souls of Black Folk 'The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour-line — the question as to how far differences of race which show themselves chiefly in the colour of the skin and the texture of the hair are going to be made hereafter the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation.' (opening paragraph)

Butler

gender as performance, women 'doing' gender in war in order to fit in and be rewarded in social hierarchies in different contexts

Mama and Okazawa-Ray

Militarism, Conflict and Women's Activism in the Global Era women can move strategically within the combat economy

Negewo-Oda and White

Identity Transformation and Reintegration Among Ethiopian Women War Veterans 'Men combatants come home as 'war heroes' and women combatants simply come home'

Carson

Silent Spring quotes Keats 'the sage has withered on the lake and no bird sings' to talk about DDT pesticide use

Vandana Shiva

creating idea of 'pre-colonial golden age'; understanding of subsistence and conservation as enough to sustain family which was replaced by gender division of labour under capitalism using ancient Hindu cosmology to present nature as part of the feminine principle talks about commodity production destroying the environment, and the devaluing of traditionally 'women's' work which relies on interacting with nature changing control of access to resources EG setting up of male-dominated councils to control resources through colonial period and post-colonial acts of government

Esther Boserup

Africa as a region of female farming; women carrying out productive labour whereas men will fell trees and prepare land looking back to gender egalitarian societies of the past to argue that colonialism and capitalism led to the marginalisation of women and women's work

Leach and Green

ecofeminists can use simplistic analysis of case studies to overlook context outside of gender analysis understanding Bemba citemene system in Africa not as part of rituals of masculinity but part of market gardening economy done by women

Vaughan and Moore

ecofeminists should avoid metanarratives around the change from rural to modern societies

Jackson

organic perceptions of societies have reinforced oppressive systems historically

Krech

(1999) publication in which he claimed that, although there is evidence Native Americans had possessed both indigenous knowledge of and an ecological perspective on the environment, there is no evidence they had everactually, intentionally conserved natural resources

Michael Barnett

'paradox of emancipation and domination'; humanitarianism based on power imbalance

Didier Fassin

humanitarianism is a politics of life; which lives are valuable

Burke

Mecca of Revolution Algeria as an international city for resistance to colonialism - uniting NLF, PLO, Irish forces, etc,

Cynthia Enloe

male perspectives are used as the default from which to understand wars

Karen Warren

ecofeminism is 'structurally pluralistic, inclusivist and contextualist'; looking to understand ties between nature and cultural context