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Knowledge Cultures 10(3), 2022
pp. 7–11, ISSN 2327-5731, eISSN 2375-6527
Critical Theory in the Glocal South: Introduction
Kirsten Locke [email protected] Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand Jacoba Matapo [email protected] Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland University of Technology Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand And Pasley [email protected] Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato/University of Waikato Kirikiriroa/Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand Sean Sturm [email protected] Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
How to cite: Locke, K., Matapo, J., Pasley, A., & Sturm, S. (2022). Critical theory in the Glocal South: Introduction. Knowledge Cultures, 10(3), 7–11. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc10320221
The call for papers for this special issue of Knowledge Cultures invited critical and critical-creative responses to the question of what it is to do critical theory in the Glocal South. It proposed that doing critical theory ‘down here’ entails at least two paradoxes. Firstly, critical theory can embody a certain geopolitical paradox.
Historically, it is an intellectual tradition and set of practices rooted in the Western European (‘Western’) ‘Enlightenment.’ Epistemologically, however, it aims to produce ideas and outcomes that are true anywhere. As a result, when it is taken up elsewhere than in ‘the West,’ it can come to be seen as colonial, or, at the very least, to have ‘travelled’ more or less strangely (Saïd, 1983). Secondly, critical theory can express a certain positional paradox. It is at once inherently ‘suspicious’
(Felski, 2012) – of the status quo of social relations and phenomena, for example, in ideology or texts – and utopian in its hopes for social transformation (Lewis, 2006). Thus, it can seem at once hyper-‘critical’ and, to use a phrase beloved of its critics, ‘wildly impractical.’
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And, yet, despite these paradoxes, critical theory has been a powerful inspiration for intellectual work among ‘Southern’ scholars, especially Indigenous scholars, and a powerful instrument of social change in the Global South, in Indigenous communities, in particular. It has enabled Global Southerners to respond to global forces that emanate from elsewhere such as colonialism, racism, neoliberalism, environmental exploitation and patriarchy. Southern scholars have retheorised and reworked critical theory in multiple ways, all of which in differing degrees ‘glocalise’ it (Ritzer, 2003; see Mercier, 2011). They have chosen to localise it (Appadurai, 1996), provincialise it (Chakrabarty, 2000), decolonise it (Smith, 1999), indigenise it (Stewart, 2020), ‘materialise’ – and indigenise – it (Jones & Hoskins, 2016), epistemologise it (de Sousa Santos, 2015), ecologise it (de la Cadena, 2015), etc. Such glocalisations of critical theory augur a species of theory that, as Ocean Mercier (2011) puts it, ‘knows its limits and lays no claims to universalities or “globalisms,” respects local variations and counter-narratives, and allows for unique interpretations’ (p. 301).
It was in this spirit that we four co-editors of the special issue1 invited scholars to respond to the question posed in our call for papers. We specified that we sought contributions from scholars that were at all stages in their academic careers and that could draw on participant-led, post-qualitative or arts-based – i.e., experimental – methodologies. To encourage contributors in their (experi)mental travelling, we posed several questions to which they could choose to respond:
What does critical theory mean for you – and your community – here (i.e., where you are) and now?
How does critical theory ‘travel’ or get ‘translated’ (i.e., how has it been indigenised or Southernised, i.e., ‘glocalised,’ where you are)?
What does critical theory enable us to do, in practical terms (i.e., how is it transformative or creative?)
Some scholars chose to address their contributions directly to the ‘classical’
tradition of critical theory in the form of the work of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002); others chose to do critical work less explicitly informed by this tradition. The majority of the contributors positioned themselves as scholars from Aotearoa New Zealand because they currently work and/or study in academic institutions there (the special issue originated in the Critical Conversations seminar series hosted by the School of Critical Studies in Education of the Faculty of Education and Social Work at Waipapa Taumata Rau/the University of Auckland in 2021). However, their contributions reach across the
‘sea of islands’ that is the Pacific Ocean (Hau‘ofa, 2008): from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia to Tonga, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, across to Chile, Colombia and the United States, and beyond to the Canary Islands. And the contributors vary in their disciplinary backgrounds: from education to indigenous studies to gender studies to performance studies to sociology.
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The special issue sets out from Aotearoa/New Zealand and works its way east towards the Atlantic. Ngāi Tahu (Māori) scholar Simon Barber, in his ‘The Settler Baggage of Abstraction,’ reads the Pākehā (white settler)2 world that is patterned primarily on the concept of exchange from the perspective of its difference from – and hostility to – te Ao Māori (the Māori world), which is patterned primarily on the concept of whakapapa. He draws on the (proto-)critical theory of Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Gilbert Simondon as native informants of the Pākehā mode of life.
Tongan scholars Dagmar Dyck, Caroline Matamua, Dave Fa‘avae, Siosaia Sisitoutai and Ioane Fa‘avae’s ‘Mānava ‘i he Loto Manava: Creatively Critical Tongan Sense-Making in the Glocal South’ recentres critical theory in Te Moananui-nui-ā-Kiwa/Oceania on vā (relationality) to understand the entanglement of tangata ‘o e moana (people of the ocean) with other entities in the world like the fonua (land, or placenta) and moana (ocean) through concepts such as loto (heart, soul), mānava (breath of life), manava (womb, seat of life) and to‘utangata Tonga (generations of the Tonga people). In ‘Finding the Words: Using Critical Theory to Speak Back to our Institutions,’ Fijian critical university studies scholars Sereana and Chelsea Naepi describe their encounters with critical theory and reflect on the ways in which it has provided the words needed to speak back to their academic institutions, while acknowledging that critical theory developed elsewhere cannot always provide the words that they need to story their experiences as Indigenous scholars. Nathan Rew, in ‘Black Indigeneity and Oceanic Critical Theory,’
interweaves his experiences as a Papua New Guinean activist and student of critical theory in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland, New Zealand) to explore, first, how radical Black scholarship and critical race theory inform what he considers the underlying gesture of the critical tradition, namely, that all knowledge-making must be accompanied by the drive to change the world for the better, and, second, how in Oceanic critical theory such transformative knowledge-making is shaped by a relationality ‘grounded’ in a common ancestral connection to the ocean.
Critical-creative practitioners alys longley (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Francisco González Castro (Chile) offer ‘A Manifesto of Shambolic Form:
Approaching Creative-Critical Practice at the Intersection Where Artistic Research, the Global South and Critical Theory Coalesce.’ They discuss how knowledge co- creation in a South-South orientation across the Pacific can resist an extractive, neoliberal approach to co-authorship by finding a critical language-in-common through trust, motivation, language, listening, temporal practices and a recognition of cultural distance. Then, joined by Australian fellow practitioner Linda Knight and drawing on their work with others from the Mapping Porous Borders project, they describe, in ‘Mapping the Aesthetic Dimensions of Power: Ethically Wayfinding Across Borders,’ how artistic mapping and counter-mapping ‘at a distance’ during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled them to push back against colonial imperatives through practices of critical-creative collaboration and solidarity.
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In ‘Critical Theory and Academia: Ontological Im/possibilities for Upholding Plural Worlds,’ Colombian mestiza scholar Alejandra Jaramillo-Aristizabal addresses the paradoxes that accompany the adoption and expansion of critical theory in Latin America, attending to the dis/continuities between Euro-American and Latin American critical theorising, in particular, to how the tension between its emancipatory ethos and colonising dimension results from its unexamined ontological assumptions. She argues that, while Latin American critical theory inherits modernist ontological commitments, the grassroots (Black, Indigenous, peasant, popular) Latin American social thinking that informs it makes it more responsive to ontological difference. Finally, in ‘Decolonisation and the UnDoing of Critical Theory,’ cultural studies scholar Elba Ramirez and gender studies scholar And Pasley explore the colonialities of trans/gender in the Global South and guanche indigeneity in the Canary Islands to interrogate the in/adequacy of critical theory as a tool applied to Global South issues. They argue that critical theory tends to predetermine and essentialise relations, which undermines its capacity to engage justly with the multiplicitous im/possibilities of trans/gender and post/coloniality. Pasley looks to agential realism and Ramirez to te Ao Māori as offering the potential of more response-able becomings and more just worlds.
We thank the contributors for their curious and courageous critical and critical- creative responses to the question of what it is to do critical theory in the Glocal South. What their responses attest is that critical theory in the Glocal South can sustain multiple commitments to the pursuit of knowledge for the good of all (te whai ō te mātauranga hei oranga mō tātou katoa) – not only for those on top of the world, but also for those ‘down here’ in the South.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support and funding of the School of Critical Studies in Education of the Faculty of Education and Social Work at Waipapa Taumata Rau/the University of Auckland in preparing this issue.
Kirsten Locke, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2089-2793 Jacoba Matapo, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4615-0509 And Pasley, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0772-7889 Sean Sturm, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4011-7898
NOTES
1. The authors of this introduction and editors of the special issue are listed above in alphabetical order, rather than according to the nature of their contribution.
2. Note that the editors have endeavoured in the special issue to respect the contributors’
intentions with respect to the spelling, italicisation and glossing of Indigenous words. We have endeavoured to render the glottal stop used in several Pacific languages as consistently as possible using a left quotation mark (‘), or what is known as the koma liliu in Samoan or
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fakauʻa in Tongan. We have followed the convention in Aotearoa New Zealand not to italicise Māori (Indigenous Aotearoa New Zealand) words because Māori is an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand.
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