The Global South: Histories, Politics, Maps
Issue number 131 (May 2018)
Abstract Deadline: September 1, 2016
Issue editors: Pamila Gupta, Christopher J. Lee, Marissa Moorman, and Sandhya Shukla
The Radical History Review seeks submissions on the topic of the Global South. We are interested in work that engages with current discussions in a range of disciplines that seek to historicize the Global South as a concept, a geography, and a political project. Since the end of the Cold War, the Global South has been employed in ways both continuous with categories like “third world,” “developing world,” and “postcolonial,” and departing from those, to indicate a more radical approach to space, language, and power. It is also the case that the Global South has been used as shorthand for descriptions of the rise of economic wealth and power in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and a new global political order that has attended this shift. And insurgent political, social, and cultural movements, themselves organized under the rubric of the Global South, insistently challenge more recent neoliberal arrangements as well as dominant discourses of development. Area studies, freighted with Cold War projects of dividing up the world, may either be reenergized or made obsolete by new forms of knowledge organized by the Global South.
The Global South has multiple political and critical effects, which change over time, but certainly we see it as an opening to a new conversation about politics and history in the world. To this end we invite a wide variety of contributions that approach the Global South from interdisciplinary angles and with a diverse set of archives.
Questions and topics to be considered may include:
- Political formations like the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the development of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, and their connection to, or disconnect from, more recent movements.
- BRICS and other neoliberal projects as iterations of the Global South; regional federations that have developed challenges to the historic economic dominance of the United States and Europe.
- Histories of violence—whether colonialism, postcolonial autocracies, or Cold War struggles—that are made visible in and through the formation of the Global South.
- The usefulness of the concept of the Global South to pre-modern or early history more generally.
- The Global South in relation to areas studies (of Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Indian Ocean).
- Popular and visual cultures of the Global South.
- Race, class and ethnicity in the Global South.
- Formations of gender and sexuality in and through the Global South.
- Literary and cultural histories of the Global South that foreground less dominant nations of the southern hemisphere (and connections among those spaces) and/or that explore the complicated relationship between indigeneity and post/colonialism.
- Historicized analyses of political formations like the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, or the World Social Forum.
- New ways to think about science and technology, and/or proposals to address climate change.
Each issue of RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage submissions to our various departments, including:
- Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings)
- Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
- Public History (essays on commemoration and the politics of the past)
- Interviews (interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
- (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media–print, film, and digital)
Procedures for submission of articles: by September 1, 2016, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to write as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 131 Abstract Submission” in the subject line. Authors will then be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for full-length article submissions will be February 1, 2017. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or TIFF files at a minimum of 300 dpi) and secure permission to reprint all images. After undergoing the peer review process, those articles selected for publication will be undergo final revisions by authors, which will be due July 1, 2017, and articles will appear in the May 2018 issue of the Radical History Review.
Abstract Deadline: September 1, 2016