Puzzlement of a déjà vu: Illuminaries of the global South

Abstract

The act of decentring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge as longstanding geopolitical anchors of epistemological authority presents déjà vu scenarios, involved in centre-staging processes. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’ of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can reproduce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This article considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus is on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitutes points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes places them high in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre-staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which fields are mapped in order to produce a point of intervention.