Dutta - Theorizing From The Global South

Communication Theory ISSN 1050–3293
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Theorizing From the Global South:
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ct/article/30/4/349/5891917 by UQI Community Service and Research Centre user on 18 March 2024
Dismantling, Resisting, and Transforming
Communication Theory
Mohan J. Dutta1 & Mahuya Pal2
1
Te Pou Aro Korero: School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing Te Kunenga ki Purehuroha: Massey
University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North 4442, New Zealand
2
Department of Communication, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620, USA
This special issue explores what theory looks like from the Global South. Whether it is
in the work of the women farmers organized into Sanghams under the umbrella of the
Deccan Development Society (DDS) or in the organizing of farmers under the collective
formations of La Via Campesina, the emergent work of theory is intrinsically tied to
plural practices embedded in community life. We argue that we need to theorize from
the narratives embedded in experiences of actors who are disenfranchised from
metropolitan/mainstream/Euro-US/neoliberal economics and society. We mark the lo-
cal politics of the Global South at the intersections of the local and global forces as sites
of knowledge in this special issue.
Keywords: Global South, neoliberal, subaltern, decolonize, imaginaries, solidarity, resistance
doi:10.1093/ct/qtaa010
Theorizing from the Global South1 draws on an ongoing project of recognizing the
agentic capacities of peoples, communities, societies that have been and continue to
be projected as lacking, backward, and without agency in colonial formations of
knowledge production. Amidst contemporary forms of aggressive global capitalism,
with its frontiers constituted by accelerated forms of land acquisition, the South
constitutes the “extractive zones” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 3), the spaces of violent
displacements, expulsions, and organized murders in the service of neoliberal capi-
tal.2 Continuous with the capitalist impulse that has historically formed the back-
bone of the colonial project, the spaces of livelihoods, material and symbolic
creations, collective knowledge, and the bodies of communities in these extractive
zones are the targets of global capital as it seeks ever-new frontiers of profiteering.
Corresponding author: Mahuya Pal; e-mail: mpal@usf.edu
Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 V C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of 349
International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
Theorizing From the Global South M. J. Dutta & M. Pal
The bodies of expelled peoples, rendered stateless, form “floating zones” of the
South, in various spaces of non-belonging without rights. Simultaneously, networks
of capital in the North continually produce the South within the North, actively
generating massive raced, classed, and gendered inequalities; acquiring new lands;
expelling people and communities; generating new forms of precarious labor at the
service of transnational capital; and deploying police–military violence, incarcera-
tion, and techniques of surveillance to uphold these various forms of oppression
and exploitation.
We situate theorizing from the Global South in Communication Studies as a rec-
ognition of the embodied nature of lived struggles in the extractive spaces of the
South, in the “subterranean zones.” These are the spaces of knowledge generation
that are outside the colonizing gaze, churning out creative theoretical anchors in
their varied forms of embodied resistance to extractive capitalism. Disrupting the
racist claims of Enlightenment rationality in the West/North as well as the equally
racist claims laid by elite postcolonial theorists that see universal values as unique
to the Western project, the theorizing emergent from the South is both rooted in
contextually-based everyday lived empiricisms and in universal imaginations for
freedom and equality. Southern theory thus expresses human desires for universal
principles of social justice, rendered meaningful within contexts, and constituted in
particular struggles grounded in the agentic aspirations of communities in the
South. Recognizing the embodied forms of resistance to neocolonial capitalism
across the Global South, we suggest that unequal terrains of theorizing must be dis-
mantled. Theorizing from the South is a critique of extractive theorizing at the heart
of capital, with the project of theorizing itself a form of posturing that places post-
colonial elite gatekeepers as the token theorists of/from the South. The recognition
of theorizing from the South is a call to democratizing the spaces of theorizing, rec-
ognizing the pluralisms of theorizing work that are carried out by peoples, commu-
nities, movements in the South (de Sousa Santos, 2012; Dutta, 2004; Escobar, 2008;
Luthra, 2015).
In an interview titled How to Centre Indigenous People in Climate Conversations
(Hura, 2019), notes the indigenous climate activist Haylee Koroi:
From what I have seen of mainstream or global climate movements, they often
centre colonial ideas and are not necessarily prepared to give those ideas—or
their associated power—away. These movements call for inclusivity of indige-
nous people but that feels peripheral to me. Metaphorically, it’s like being asked
to gather around the fire that someone else has lit (after they’ve systematically
gone about putting my fire out for generations) and then asking me to help them
stoke it. Why can’t these movements support and resource pre-existing indige-
nous movements—including the continued push for Maori water rights, the pro-
tection of Ihumatao, the Hands Off Our Tamariki campaign, and calls against
Tuia 250? These are all opportunities for climate action but often Maori voices
350 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

M. J. Dutta & M. Pal Theorizing From the Global South
are shouting alone. It often feels that white movements co-opt indigenous ideas,
give them new names, and then claim them as their own.
The articulations offered by Haylee Koroi and many social change activists in the
Global South invite us to de-center the spaces for theorizing, interrogating where
the work of theorizing actually takes place, who is doing the work of theorizing, and
who is claiming the rewards of theorizing.
Moreover, we interrogate the politics of ownership (including our own claims to
own) in the name of the Global South, suggesting that the radical politics of knowl-
edge production in/from the South is a call to radical equality in the structures of
theorizing. Theorizing from the South is an invitation to democratizing the very
sites and spaces of theorizing, recognizing the imminent work of making spaces for
voices from the South originating from Southern struggles (de Sousa Santos, 2012).
Indigenous activists, artists, farmers, land warriors at the forefront of struggles in
the extractive zones of the globe are actively theorizing the transformative processes
that offer hope amidst the global onslaughts of the capitalocene. The work of theo-
rizing is a project of solidarity, grounded in everyday embodied actions situated
amidst struggles for sovereignty (see for instance Gómez-Barris, 2017).
The articles presented in this special issue, Theorizing Communication from the
Global South, grapple with the question of communication theory from/in the south,
embedded in the empirical evidence emergent from the everyday contexts of life in the
Global South. The attention to the particular, situated within the everyday contexts of
communication in the South, is in an ongoing dialogue with the universal. The articles
in this collection depict the ways in which the turn to the South is an invitation to the
development of universal theories of communication, voiced in and moving out from
spaces in the Global South. They break open the parochial divides of humanities/social
sciences, sub-disciplinary formations, and organizational structures that emerge from
the parochial habits of largely North American institutions. Each of these articles grap-
ples with the ongoing question of what it means to theorize the Global South within
the contexts of the practical politics of transformations. Although we set out with an
open-ended call, we are delighted to witness the predominant representation of theo-
rists from the Global South in this collection.
Harry Salazar takes us to the inaugural moment of the neoliberal experiment in
Chile through the deployment of neo-imperial strategy. The human rights viola-
tions, mass murders, and imprisonments that were carried out in Chile paradoxi-
cally in the name of democracy form the birthing narrative of neoliberalism.
Analyzing the political advertising campaign Franja de Propaganda Electoral—
“Official Space for Electoral Propaganda,” he depicts the ways in which a mediated
space created the opening for articulating Chilean human rights violations in the
face of authoritarian control in the service of the free market. The campaign created
an imagination of democratic life, which in turn opened up the space for conversa-
tions on the enduring suppression of Chilean human rights memory.
Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 351

In his piece, “The imperialism of categories: Concepts and contexts in communi-

cation for social change,” Pradip Thomas carefully dismantles the ontological cate-
gories that inhabit the universal claims of theories of social change originating from
the metropole/North. Working specifically from the empirical context of India,
Thomas powerfully attends to the colonizing impetus of the posts in diaspora theo-
rizing, distanced from the persistent realities and entanglements of caste, class, and
communication inequalities. Drawing upon his fieldwork with the indigenous
South Indian community of the Irulas, he then offers us a contextually grounded
framework for theorizing communication for social change that originates from lo-
cal theory as the point of engagement. In the back-and-forth movement between lo-
cal theory emergent from the everyday lived experiences of Irulas at the margins of
Chennai, a metropolitan site of production in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu
and Harvey’s “Accumulation by dispossession,” Thomas cogently makes a case for
interwoven communication theorizing that flows between the local and the global.
Brian Semujju theorizes dependency relations in small media based on empirical
investigation of community audio towers in Uganda that use horn speakers for
transmission. Here, the theorizing of small media from within the context of
Uganda renders impure the universal categories of media theorizing of community
media, bringing forth conceptual categories that remain unexplored in the hege-
monic literature. The accounts of everyday uses, relationships of media content pro-
duction, and the relationship between small media and society put forth conceptual
nodes that are absent in metropolitan theorizing; simultaneously, the empirically
immersed accounts of small media uses put forth a Southern conceptual network
tied to the everyday experiences of poverty, marginality, and negotiations of struc-
tural conditions.
Finally, in his article, “Internalized orientalism: Toward a postcolonial media
theory and de-westernizing communication research from the global south,” Anas
Alahmed interrupts hegemonic postcolonial media theorizing originating from the
metropole by proposing the concept of internal orientalism. Analyzing the hege-
monic Egyptian media portrayals of the Arab Spring, attention is drawn to the
workings of power in the depictions of resistance. The workings of power are inter-
rogated, unpacking the deployment of orientalist tropes by postcolonial power
structures in reproducing hegemonic formations. What is salient is the analysis of
the inequalities in distribution of power, the relationships of power, and agendas of
those in power. The role of self-orientalization is critically theorized as a communi-
cative resource that serve specific forms of power in postcolonial societies.
Each of these pieces grapples critically with the question of what it means to theorize
communicative phenomena from within the contexts of the Global South. Context itself
serves as a register for theorizing, generating generalizable conceptual threads grounded
in the empirically lived negotiations of communication in the Global South. On one
hand, these generalizable concepts dismantle the ontological categories of the North,
making visible the limits to theorizing from the taken-for-granted assumptions in the
metropole. On the other hand, the categories emerging from the South generate robust

theoretical grounds for universals. Mapping the flows of these concepts across spaces, ex-
ploring the mobility of concepts, and proposing overarching theoretical frameworks
emergent from the South form the frontiers of communication theory. These theoreti-
cally salient concepts, reflecting the actual interpretations of communication phenomena
amidst life experiences in the Global South, invite us to imagine communication in radi-
cally different ways and in putting into practice frameworks of communication embed-
ded in the long histories of dissent in the Global South that seek to dismantle the
capitalist and colonial agendas of hegemonic communication work.
The formation of theories from the South is constituted within a meta-theory of
communicative erasure (Dutta, 2004; Luthra, 2015). We offer a framework for theo-
rizing from the Global South, identifying some key features of Southern theory,
depicting the political work of transforming infrastructures of communication theo-
rizing to build spaces for theories from the South, and connecting theorizing to the
politics of resisting neocolonial-neoliberal structures. The article concludes with ex-
ploring entry points for transforming academe, the sort of collective work that we
see as integral to challenging the individualizing effects of neoliberal academia in
the service of neocolonialism.
The erasure of knowledge from the Global South

The South as a space emerges in relational geopolitics, implicated as belonging to
the south of an already existing normative space for knowledge production. This
anchor is the universal located in the metropole (Connell, 2007), the register for
modernization, development, and enlightenment, the basis of colonization as an in-
strument of capitalist expansion. Emerging in Europe and then moving to North
America, the centers of colonial power are also the centers of knowledge produc-
tion, the process of knowledge production intertwined with the colonial project
mapped onto the Global South. Knowledge produced by colonial masters in the
metropole formed the basis of colonial expansionism to the South/periphery, find-
ing and managing new spaces of colonial occupation, and in doing so, incorporat-
ing colonies into the logics of capitalist profiteering. The capitalist quest for raw
materials, cheap labor, and ever-emerging markets for its products was/is legiti-
mized through the establishment of particular forms of colonial knowledge as
universal.
The colonies, projected as primitive and without knowledge, were thus to be in-
corporated into modernization through the project of colonization (Dutta, 2015).
Intrinsic to the production of knowledge is the erasure of knowledge in/from the
Global South/periphery, thus producing the subjects of colonizing education/inter-
vention. Worth noting in the expansion of the capitalist knowledge is the establish-
ment of centers of knowledge production in the Global South (extensions of the
metropole in the South), producing a category of local elite bureaucrats and manag-
ers equipped to run the colonial occupation. The politics of knowledge production
worked through the ongoing relational production of the South within spaces of the

South, with local elites in the South, educated by the instruments of the colonizer
and aligned with the capitalist interests of the colonizer. The peripheries of the
South are materially constituted through: (a) the politics of knowledge production,
(b) communicative inequality serving, and (c) capitalist-neocolonial interests.
Politics of knowledge production

Turning to knowledge from the Global South through theoretical and methodologi-
cal innovations unsettles the knowledge industry concerned with the universal em-
bedded in colonial-capitalist logics, instead putting forth universals imagined by
peoples in the Global South. We recognize that knowledge from the Global South
offers a decolonial moment both by de-linking from the hegemonic universals of
neocolonial capital as well as by inverting the conceptual categories that color the
universals generated at the cosmopolitan centers of knowledge production in the
North. Knowledge claims emerging from within struggles of/in the South interro-
gate coloniality of knowledge embedded in capitalist networks of power.
The culture of knowledge production embedded in Western epistemology and
ontology that began with conquest of territories in the Global South articulated a
universal idea of modernity and rationality, and culminated in constituting a global
system of domination (Bhambra, 2014). A central aspect of the conquest is coloni-
zation of the mind to an extent where the idea of otherness even outside of Europe
stems from the same Eurocentric impulse as seen in the Euro-American Centre. It
is necessary for the Eurocentric ideology to pervade every corner of the world for
enabling imperialism in all spheres—intellectual, political, economic, and cultural
(Dussel & Ibarra-Colado, 2006). In continuation with the ongoing attempts to de-
colonize and de-westernize knowledge, the articulation of theorizing from the
Global South seeks to bring forth frameworks and practices from the perspectives
of those who have always been spoken for, anchoring the politics of knowledge pro-
duction amidst the lived struggles for dignity, voice, political and economic justice
(Guha, 1982).
Much of the European expansion relied on and continues to rely on claims of
modernity positioned around ideals of instrumental reason and technical rational-
ity. Any organizing principle incommensurable with Eurocentric concepts of mo-
dernity is a deviation—a pre-modern world of the other waiting to be developed. It
is no surprise that ideals of development serve the Euro-American empire in domi-
nating contemporary global politics. Development endeavors gained particular sig-
nificance with the establishment of International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and consequently the World
Trade Organization, trans-region blocs such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), the European Union, and Asia Pacific Economic
Corporation (Pal & Dutta, 2013). These arrangements marked the inauguration of
neoliberalism as a hegemonic set of political-economic practices, albeit designed
and implemented in variegated forms. The global adoption of the neoliberal model

is situated amidst culturalist turns that color the hegemony of the growth-obsessed
monolithic model of capital expansion with culture. Consider for instance the artic-
ulation of “Asian values” by Singapore and the East Asian authoritarianisms to put
forth a culturalist model of neoliberal capitalist expansion, legitimizing the repres-
sion of protests, attacking unions and collectivizing, and aggressively depleting wel-
fare. The erasure of the very spaces to voice poverty under the “Out-of-bound (OB)
markers” is integral to securing control to govern amidst large-scale inequalities.3
The strategic framing of democracy as Western and antithetical to Asian values of
Confucianism is played out to serve neoliberal capital, communicatively inverting
the colonialist roots of capitalism. The “Singapore model” in turn, as a model of
Asian governance, is exported elsewhere across Asia, naturalizing techniques of sur-
veillance, silencing, and repression of dissent as Asian4 (Dutta et al., 2019).
The arrangements of credit lending, manipulation of global monetary exchange,
and liberalization of trade policies have strengthened transnational corporations as
key players in global policies. The market logic has reinforced the modernist em-
phasis of economic growth as the marker of development, with transnational foun-
dations such as the Gates Foundation, knowledge NGOs such as the World
Economic Forum (WEF), and private consulting corporations such as McKinsey ac-
tively working to expand profiteering. The promotion of concepts like capital in-
vestment, greater production, sustainability investment, along with vigorous
applications of modern scientific and technical knowledge are considered central to
undertakings of development. This neoliberal framework has established institu-
tional and organizational forms of power to sustain neocolonial modes of develop-
ment and re-inscribed rules of colonial exploitation in the present global order.
Intrinsic to this working of capitalist power are academic institutions that sustain
the supremacy of the paradigm of techno-extraction, albeit narrated in culturalist
terms.
Communicative inequality
The Global South is constituted in/by communicative inequality, the inequality in
the distribution, ownership, and control over communicative resources (Dutta,
2011, 2016). The politics of knowledge production discussed in the previous section
is reflected in communicative inequality, the unequal opportunities for voice in the
generation and circulation of knowledge. Communicative inequality is depicted in
the large-scale disenfranchisement of communities at the margins from the very
spaces where decisions impacting their livelihoods and futures are made. These era-
sures from spaces of decision-making are the bases for policies and programs, for-
mulated by local–national–global elites networked into the profiteering logics of
transnational capital, resulting in extractive practices that expel subaltern commu-
nities from their livelihoods.
The gargantuan magnitude of this communicative inequality is depicted in the
discursive spaces of the WEF where elite academics and think tanks join policy

makers and transnational capitalists in establishing and articulating the discursive

spheres of knowledge about global challenges. These global challenges then, also
termed as “grand challenges,” “future challenges,” “impact challenges,” set the
agenda for material interventions, captured in the interests of transnational capital.
Consider for instance the paradox of WEF elites articulating the challenge of in-
equality, offering solutions to inequality, simultaneously erasing the voices of those
at the global margins experiencing the onslaught of large-scale inequalities.
Communicative inequality is relational, shaping the differential access to communi-
cative infrastructures for voicing knowledge (Dutta, 2015).
Whiteness, colonialism, capitalism

The production of communication theory is embedded within organizing logics of
whiteness, foreclosing the theoretical constructs and conceptual categories that
make up the disciplinary architectures (Nakayama & Martin, 2007). What makes
up theory is tied to who participates in theorizing, containing the “games” of theo-
rizing within US-centric, white structures. The incorporation of difference is dic-
tated by the organizing logic of whiteness, giving entry to those forms of difference
as cultural other that are market-friendly. The turn to diversity in Communication
theorizing therefore is formulated within the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism,
with culture as difference offering new markets for theorizing communication.
Forms of cultural description, cultural management, and cultural measurement are
put forth as difference, obfuscating the organizing work of cultural knowledge in
upholding and extending the reach of global capital. Whiteness as the normative
framework in the production of communication knowledge is intertwined with the
projects of colonialism and capitalism (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). The anti-colonial
movements across the Global South resist these interplays of both capitalism and
neocolonialism. This explicitly anti-colonial tenor of decolonization movements is
powerfully erased by capitalist co-option of decolonization. Theorizing from the
Global South is resistance work that reinvigorates and re-imagines the anti-colonial
politics of social change.
The nature of theory from the south

The nature of theorizing from the Global South is rooted within the empirical con-
texts of the South, emergent from observations and concepts rooted in the South.
Whereas some forms of theorizing from the peripheries put forth conceptual frame-
works emergent from within the empirical contexts, other forms of theorizing en-
gage dialogically with metropolitan theories. In the realm of Communication
Studies, the politics of the discipline constitutes the dynamics of theorizing from
the South, with pressures for empirical investigations from the South to fit into the
metropolitan, predominantly U.S.-based theories. In other instances, empirical
investigations emerging from the South create openings for “rendering impure”

metropolitan theories, depicting their limits and simultaneously creating new con-
ceptual openings.
Theorizing from contexts
The local and global are intertwined in a complex web of power relations, material-
ized in the oppressions and resistance against them in particular contexts. While
the global presents itself predominantly through its domination of the local, the lo-
cal is simultaneously surrendering and resistive to the global. Our special issue aims
to highlight the dialectical tensions between the local and global and its potential to
rupture the framing of neocolonial-capitalism as the universal appeal to reason. We
argue that the knowledge of the local embedded in and generated from lived strug-
gles in the South threatens the foundation of communication as modernization.
The so-called universals of modernization theory are brought to question, depicting
the parochial neocolonial interests served by communication as an instrument of
modernization. Simultaneously, culturalist readings of communication serving neo-
liberal capital are resisted through struggles for communication equality emerging
from struggles in the Global South (Dutta et al., 2019). The local, mostly on the
margins, brings under scrutiny the communicative practices of the global networks
of power (Pal & Dutta, 2008).
Based on parameters of economic rationality, considered as a universal principle
for growth, and, hence, desirable globally, social scientific research standards in the
field of communication categorize spaces of underdevelopment to impose top-
down prescriptive interventions ignoring the histories and cultures of communities
where solutions are being enforced. While a section of scholars has attempted to
uncover the politics of the local embroiled in the global (Basu, 2011; Dutta, 2011,
2013, 2015; Ganesh, 2018; Ganesh et al., 2005; Melkote & Steeves, 2001; Pal, 2015;
Parameswaran, 2008; Wilkins & Mody, 2001), much of the field has remained im-
pervious to the perils of Eurocentric basis of the discipline. Scholarship responding
to these calls has been marginal. It is important we recognize that critical communi-
cation scholarship has not adequately engaged with ideologies, discourses, institu-
tions constituting neoliberalism. We argue that as a discipline we need to extend
our thoughts on present modes of power and domination, deal with widespread dis-
parities wrought by global markets, envision social change, and think of alternatives
to Eurocentric modernity.
The politics of the local, rural, indigenous struggles in the Global South serves as
the basis of theorizing, constructing decolonization as epistemological work in the
South, owned by the peoples of the South, serving the goals of the peoples of the
South. Negotiating and resisting the brunt of neoliberal development, the local
articulates an oppositional politics to dominant policies in North–South elite net-
works. It is important we locate ourselves in the politics and spaces of the local
where peoples who are targeted for large-scale exploitation are speaking and chal-
lenging dominant neoliberal practices. We draw attention to a few examples here.

As mentioned above, development agendas scripted in the monolithic pursuit of

the free market have produced large-scale displacement and dispossession of forest-
dwelling indigenous communities, the rural poor, and the precariat impelled into
the networks of capital. These forms of “expulsion” of the poor from their sources
of livelihood are accomplished through the networks of transnational capital. As a
result, despite decolonization of many nations in the Global South, local communi-
ties at the margins are increasingly engaged in conflicts with their governments
and/or with transnational corporations over land or resources (Banerjee, 2011;
Harvey, 2005).
A classic example is the Mayan rebellion in the state of the Chiapas in Mexico fa-
mously known as the Zapatista movement. The indigenous communities in the
Chiapas erased from neoliberal policy structures revolted, challenged their exclu-
sion, and demanded basic human rights and services. There is an ongoing conflict
in the state of Odisha in India between multinational mining corporation Vedanta
Resources and Dongria Kondh tribal communities that inhabit the Niyamgiri hills
in the region (Padel & Das, 2010). The corporation constructing a bauxite mine is
facing resistance from the communities of Dongria Kondh. Community interpreta-
tions of land, nature, and economy are incommensurable with the neoliberal model
of development that forms the basis of the aggressive land acquisition. The expres-
sion of Dongria Kondh ownership of knowledge is resistant to the state-led neolib-
eral development model enabling corporate extraction, and is simultaneously
distinctly sovereign from the agendas of global non-governmental organizations
such as Survival International and Action Aid that seek to co-opt and colonize this
knowledge through radical posturing to serve the agendas of neoliberal capital
(Padel & Das, 2010). The nature of conflict was similar between farmers of Singur
in West Bengal, India and the multinational Tata Motors Company. Another iden-
tical resistance erupted in the Amazonian jungles of Peru and Ecuador with the
state’s decision to open up rainforest lands to oil drilling. These struggles are prolif-
erating across the world, depicting the organizing power of resistance as anchor to
safeguarding climate and ecological resources against the ravages of predatory
capitalism.
Most of the local organizations of struggle confront different issues at an imme-
diate level, but share the same global problems at a broader level, putting forth re-
sistive threads that voice universal logics. The heterogeneous struggles converge on
their sustained protest against imperial policies masquerading as processes of devel-
opment (Kapoor, 2011). The local struggles use their own cultural codes and lan-
guages rather than any colonial expressions in which our theories are written. This
local–universal connection has led to the formation of transnational SMO, La Via
Campesina, the largest counter-hegemonic network of farmers’ organizations. The
local–global forces have also driven the growth of World Social Forum (WSF) as a
transnational solidarity network resistive to neoliberal politics. Then there are many
victories such as the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay
and Jose Mujica in Uruguay. We draw attention to the local struggles across the

Global South, some of the victories of the Global South, and alternative power blocs
such as WSF representing the Global South because we believe they are emancipa-
tory, and speak to interests of democratic rights and justice. We argue that we need
to theorize from the narratives embedded in experiences of actors who are disen-
franchised from metropolitan/mainstream/Euro–U.S./neoliberal economics and so-
ciety. We mark the local politics of the Global South at the intersections of the local
and global forces as sites of knowledge in this special issue. These are the epistemol-
ogies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2012).
The epistemologies of the South allow us to examine discourses developing from
and in the local spaces of the Global South at the confluence of a very different his-
tory, culture, and politics (de Sousa Santos, 2012; Mignolo, 2007; Spivak, 1988).
Those discourses are entry points to understand social imaginaries that challenge
dominant neoliberal discourses (Escobar, 2008). Because these discourses constitute
core opposition to neoliberal politics, we believe that the epistemologies of the
South are the most important sources of democratic and socialist transformations.
While Eurocentric critical theory came into being in Europe in order to make sense
of the struggles in that part of the world, in recent times, the social organizations of
struggle are occurring in the South in distinct sociopolitical contexts. These move-
ments construct their struggles on the basis of historical and cultural knowledge
that can never be defined by Eurocentric knowledge system (de Sousa Santos,
2012). Their epistemological understanding and ontological ways of living are anti-
thetical to Western ways of living and being. We need to confront the non-Western
worldviews with a deeper translation for a proper understanding of that vision. The
organizations of social struggles of the South indicate epistemological limitations of
Eurocentric theories embedded in modernist and teleological narratives (de Sousa
Santos, 2012). By epistemology of the South we suggest bringing forth knowledges
of communities who suffer and fight neoliberalism. The Global South is not so
much a geographical construct even though these communities mostly live in the
Southern hemisphere. The South here is symbolic of oppression caused by and re-
sistance to neoliberal politics. De Sousa Santos writes:
It is, therefore, an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist South. It is
a South that also exists in the global North, in the form of excluded, silenced and
marginalised populations, such as undocumented immigrants, the unemployed,
ethnic or religious minorities, and victims of sexism, homophobia and racism.
(p. 51)
The epistemology of the South introduces us to knowledges that are not compre-
hensible by Western thinking, including the critical tradition. For instance, the re-
sistance of the Singur farmers fighting land grab challenged wealth accumulation,
market economy, consumerism, trading of capital goods, labor, land, and money
championed in the modernist idea of development (Pal & Dutta, 2013). They pre-
sented an alternative rationality where intimate ties with nature/land, familial col-
lective ownership patterns, kinship ties, and subsistence are central cultural

categories. Hence, the organizing principles of social life within the epistemology of
the South encompass a respectful ecological relationship between nature, economy,
and polity (Pal, 2015). The theoretical work on pan-African solidarity offer con-
cepts such as communal organizing in resistance to metropolitan/colonial notions
of private property-owning individuals as the unit of analysis (Mondlane, 1982).
These epistemologies of the South re-orient academic work in theorizing new possi-
bilities in the discipline of communication, foregrounding cognitive resistance as
the basis for dismantling neocolonialism.
South dismantling the north

The articulations of knowledge emerging from the South dismantle the universal
claims of/in Northern knowledge systems, naming and making visible the preju-
diced formations that constitute these knowledge structures deployed in the service
of colonialist extraction and occupation of indigenous land. Consider for instance
the revolutionary transformation in knowledge production brought about by the
Kaupapa Maori movement. Referring to the political work of Kaupapa Maori the-
ory, Graham Smith, the originator of the theory, notes “The phrase ‘Kaupapa Maori
theory’ was my attempt not simply to try and capture the high knowledge status as-
sociated with the word theory; it was a strategic move to open up a powerful space
for Maori in the academy” (1997, pp. 11–12).
The work of theorizing from the South is thus the active political work of open-
ing up spaces, which in turn hold imaginaries that dismantle the utilitarian ideology
based on logics of exchange. In writing in Red pedagogy: Native American social
and political thought, Sandy Grande shares her experience of caregiving for her
mother, voicing through this experience a radical imaginary of care:
Through the frames of settler logic, caregiving is often constructed as a subtrac-
tive experience, “self-less” work riddled with material and spiritual costs for the
giver and the receiver. But, there was nothing about my experience that felt like
an evisceration or lessening of self. Most of the time, I felt only that I was grip-
ping tightly to a shared experience of mutuality, a life of togetherness that I was
unwilling to trade for its absence, its void. Together we pushed back, resisted, re-
fused the indignities of a system intent on consuming and commodifying the
end of life. Such additive experiences are, however, generally foreclosed by a
(capitalist) system where the aged themselves represent a “crisis” of decreased la-
bor power (and therefore worth) and increased expenditure; an amortization of
the body that has only worsened under neoliberalism. (Grande, 2004, pp. i1–iii)
The theorizing of caregiving as the shared experience of mutuality through embod-
ied presence dismantles the colonial construction of care-giving as labor, embedded
in logics of individualistic exchange.
Grande thus goes on to offer “alterNative modes of participation” in the academe
that resist the hegemonic norms of “reconciliation- and recognition-based politics”

(2004, p. 5) by recovering paradigms of connection, mutuality, and collectivity” (p.

4). Similarly, in writing about the politics of reconciliation formulated within
University structures, Byrd (2011) depicts the ways in which reconciliation creates a
celebratory performance of multiculturalism through assimilationist languages of
healing while keeping intact the colonialist structures. Santali theorizing of health,
located amidst ongoing struggles over land rights, places health within the forest
ecosystem, realized in spirits residing in trees (Dutta, 2004).
Voices of activists from the extractive zones in the South offer theoretical regis-
ters that make visible the terrains of expropriation and erasure. For instance, in the
film “Lost World” directed by the Cambodian filmmaker Kalyani Mam (2019)
whose family had been displaced amidst the Khmer Rouge massacres, we hear the
voice of the Cambodian activist Vy Phalla theorizing land as the basis of beliefs,
livelihoods, and imaginations, depicting the destruction (Mam terms this
“ecological massacre”) of Cambodia’s mangrove forests and ecosystems by
Singapore’s practice of sand dredging. Her voice, narrated at the futuristic installa-
tions of” man-made nature” at Singapore’s “Gardens by the Bay” disrupts the
“communicative inversions” of green capitalism, embedded in Singapore’s public
relations exercise aimed at projecting itself as one of the greenest cities globally, as a
model for sustainable and smart futures:
When I see all the people walking, I want to tell them this land is my land. This
land is from my country. But I can’t express this because I don’t speak their lan-
guage and I don’t know what to do so they will understand. I can only grieve for
the land.
The land theft depicted by Phalla is constituted amidst erasure of her voice. Her
sense of not having a voice in ways that matter emerges as a universal register
across subaltern struggles in the Global South.
South–South networks of theory

South–South networks of theory register the many pathways of flows of Southern
theories across spaces in the peripheries, with contextually grounded empirical
observations offering the basis for theoretical movement. The networks of theory
connect conceptual accounts of lived experiences across spaces, negotiations, strug-
gles, and resistance across the South. Consider for instance the possibilities of trans-
formation when Adivasi knowledge systems engage dialogically with the
methodological and theoretical interventions generated by Kaupapa Maori, the re-
search methodology that emerges from the decolonizing struggles of Maori
(Caouette & Kapoor, 2015; Smith, 1997). Voicing the principles of Kaupapa Maori
in relationship with Adivasi theories of health and wellbeing puts forth an ecologi-
cal ontology that connect spirits, trees, land, and imaginaries of wellbeing (Dutta,
2004; Kapoor & Shizha, 2010). Within northern knowledge spaces, Southern acti-
vists and knowledge generators imagine solidarities as transformative registers that

connect peoples in struggles. Consider for instance the anti-racist imaginary offered
by the activist Teanau Tuiono in Aotearoa, New Zealand, based on the Maori con-
cept of whanaungatanga, referring to kinship and familial ties (Tuiono, 2019).
Similarly, connections have historically formed the basis of pan-African anti-colo-
nial struggles, offering pathways of theorizing that examine the interplays of the
effects of colonialism and capitalism across spaces, linking anti-racist, anti-colonial,
and Communist struggles (James, 2012). The narratives of resistance and organiz-
ing among black laborers, slaves, peasants, anti-colonial activists, communist party
members across spaces register inter-connected accounts of black agency that de-
colonize the racist portrayal of blacks as savage and without agency (James, 2012).
The praxis of theory from the south

What then does the praxis of theory look like from the Global South? Whether it is
in the work of the women farmers organized into Sanghams under the umbrella of
the Deccan Development Society (DDS) or in the organizing of farmers under the
collective formations of La Via Campesina, the emergent work of theory is intrinsi-
cally tied to plural practices embedded in community life. For instance, the trans-
formative practices of agrarian communities in the Global South are firmly
anchored in deep theorizing about the organizing of agriculture in relationships
with ecosystems, and the corresponding political and economic logics that consti-
tute agriculture (Pal, 2015). The theory work performed by Dalit women farmers in
DDS creates the transformative scripts for emergent practices that disrupt the neo-
liberal transformation of agriculture (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). The theorizing of
communication sovereignty as the basis of resisting neoliberal agricultural fore-
grounds the ways in which capitalist-neocolonial structures (in this instance of agri-
culture) are resisted through the creation of alternative imaginaries constituted in
sovereign communication infrastructures. The practical work of building epistemic
structures for the articulation of knowledge claims is accomplished through South–
South solidarity, foregrounding indigenous voices, aligning with socialist organiz-
ing, building democratic infrastructures, dismantling academia (at least, its metro-
politan version that perpetuates oppressive ideologies of exclusion and erasure),
and actively creating academic-activist interventions.
South–South solidarity
The networks of South–South theory render visible the openings for South–South
solidarities that seek to transform the Euro-centric ideology of modernity and its
culturalist variants. Solidarity connects the lived experiences in local struggles
against colonial-capitalist expansion, offering resistive anchors to communication
theory from the South. How do bodies in struggles against land occupation in
Eastern India connect with struggles against police violence and murder of blacks
in the Empire? Anticolonial accounts offer exemplars of resistance that forged

solidarity across spaces, connecting the plight of the colonized with the plight of the
subaltern classes within the colony (Gopal, 2019). The struggles against the various
forms of oppressions within the colonial Empire (the U.K. for instance, and the
U.S.A.) were intertwined with the resistance emerging in the colonies, creating a
cognitive register for the agentic struggles of the colonized people of the South in
laying claims to concepts of freedom, democracy, and justice (Dutta et al., 2019).
The Sepoy mutiny of 1857 moved into and shaped articulations of freedom within
the Empire and more specifically critiques of colonialism from within the Empire,
drawing universal lessons on liberty and freedom from the revolutionary struggles
of the Indian rebels that brought the end of the British East India Company (Gopal,
2019). The voices of dissent emerging from black uprising of the Morant Bay in
Jamaica in 1865 against British imperialism find their way into the debates on colo-
nialism in the Empire, forming the conceptual categories of dissent within Empire.
Simultaneously, the claims to liberty voiced by black dissidents in Morant Bay of-
fered conceptual registers of liberty that resisted the colonial notions of liberty tied
to private property and free market. Notes Gopal (2019), “as the Empire expanded
from the slave colonies of the Caribbean to encompass the settler colonies of North
America, Australia and New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent and large swathes of
Africa, it was met with different kinds of resistance, both peaceful and violent,
sometimes taking the form of mutinies, revolts and wars, and at others of civil dis-
obedience and passive resistance” (p. 4). Amidst the non-aligned movement and
the active politics of decolonization, Third Worldist mobilizations connected South
Asians with struggles against apartheid in South Africa, Israeli occupation of
Palestine, and U.S. neo-colonialism across South America, Caribbean, Africa and
Asia (Prashad, 2008).
Indigeneity and voice

In the frontiers of resistance to capitalist-expansion in the form of neocolonial de-
velopment projects, indigenous voices offer revolutionary opportunities for the
work of communication, which in turn forms the basis of material disruptions of
capitalist expansion (Kapoor & Shizha, 2010; Smith, 1997). The very theorizing of
communication, immersed in indigenous worldviews makes possible transformative
openings for the practices of alternative livelihoods, anchoring forms of develop-
ment rooted in indigenous voices (Padel & Das, 2010). Concepts such as commu-
nity knowledge, communal land, and relationship with ecosystems resist the
privatizing property-driven work of capitalist expansion, framed communicatively
as progress. Conceptual frameworks such as the culture-centered approach partici-
pate in co-constructive processes with indigenous communities at the peripheries of
the Global South, generating through the co-constructions symbolic resources that
are key to the struggles against capitalist grab (Dutta, 2015).

The socialist project

In response to the capitalist extractions of the North, the projects of knowledge pro-
duction in the South formulate actual forms of socialisms through lived struggles
for voice (Prashad, 2019). While many of these socialist formations in the Global
South are explicit, having become visible in the organized struggles of the Left par-
ties, in other instances, they remain in the subterranean zones. For instance, the re-
sistance to the state-based authoritarian capitalism of Singapore is voiced in the
protest poetry of Bangladeshi migrant workers, composing socialist imaginaries of
revolution. The resistance finds expression on the surface amidst occasional crises,
such as when Chinese bus drivers go on strike after months of not receiving their
pay. The actual socialism of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the practical
politics of land reforms and panchayats (village level governance) in the states of
West Bengal and Kerala form the narrative anchors to Left politics within the over-
arching framework of democratic governance (Löfgren, 2016).
In the work of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and
Evaluation (CARE) earlier in Singapore and currently in Aotearoa New Zealand,
the struggles for communicative equality are embedded amidst practical possibilities
for imagining socialist futures. In the work of the Tricontinental Institute led by the
Marxist historian Vijay Prashad, the work of imagining knowledge production
from the South is constituted amidst the politics of producing socialist futures
within the unruly spaces of the South (Tricontinental working document, 2018).
The global centers of neoliberal capital prop up culture as an economic resource,
as the basis of neoliberal transformations, simultaneously launching a plethora of
disinformation campaigns targeting social science scholarship on topics that
threaten the neoliberal status quo (Connell, 2007; Dutta et al., 2019). Corporate-
funded think tanks and governments actively produce and circulate lies that natu-
ralize capitalist formations. In communication scholarship, the location of the disci-
pline within the capitalist infrastructures of the Empire has actively produced the
erasure of socialist imaginaries. In opposition to the postcolonial posturing among
elite academics located in the metropole referring to the South as an apolitical cul-
tural project narrated in corporate-speak (terms such as hybrid, glocal, cosmopoli-
tan), the theorizing done by the subaltern classes in the actual struggles of the South
specifically voice a socialist future, one firmly anchored in visions for radical com-
municative equality and democracy.
Democratic imaginaries
The traditions of the social sciences, including that of communication scholarship,
have been embedded within the anti-democratic ideology of Empire, being mobi-
lized to support wars, carry out cold war propaganda, and establish the hegemony
of technocratic rule by expertise at the heart of the neoliberal reforms propelled
globally since the 1970s (Centeno & Silva, 2016). The production of spin through

combination of academic knowledge and multi-million dollar communication cam-

paigns, accompanied by the collaborations of academics with the state-military-
corporate nexus often through the deployment of violence (consider for instance
the complicity of the Chicago Boys with the brutal military dictatorship of Pinochet
in Chile), make up the matrix on which the neoliberal experiment is established. In
writing about theories from the South, Raewyn Connell (2007) highlights the im-
portant work of building democratic spaces where voices from the peripheries are
present as theorists.
Dismantling academia
The recognition that the infrastructures of academia propel colonization and in
turn, are, legitimized by neo-colonizing agendas, constitutes the basis for the praxis
of dismantling academia while inhabiting it. Opposite to the call for institutionaliz-
ing specific formations within the structures of academia, the recognition that the-
ory emerges from within subaltern struggles in the Global South, often in resistance
to the very expert-driven development pronouncements generated in the metro-
pole, shapes a politics of resistance that seeks to decolonize academic habits. Such
habits of decolonization include critically interrogating and disrupting hegemonic
forms of knowledge production and evaluation that maintain and reproduce
Northern hegemony. Radical openings for alternative imaginaries are built on the
work of dismantling hegemonic concepts of academia and its role. Consider for in-
stance the decolonizing imaginary of the open spaces of learning embodied in
Indian poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan, built on a praxis that
places theory work amid ecosystems, communities, and symbiotic relationships
(Ghosh et al., 2012). Similarly, consider the imaginary for dismantling academia of-
fered by the Maori activist Tame Iti when he offers a praxis of situating academia in
the marae, the traditional spaces of Maori gatherings (Tame, 2019). In these decolo-
nizing imaginations of academia, the constitutive role of communication forms the
thread that weaves together and materializes possibilities.
Academic–activist interventions
In decolonizing contexts, the generation of knowledge in university spaces has been
intertwined with protest actions by academics and student activists on university
campuses across spaces, creating an active politics of trans-border and trans-
regional solidarity. The articulations of resistance in local struggles were continu-
ously connected with international mobilizations against capitalism and occupation.
What then are the possibilities for solidarity in ongoing struggles, continually antic-
ipating the Souths/peripheries that are actively produced through communicative
erasure and disenfranchisement? Whereas hegemonic structures of capital silence
activist praxis within academia by marking such praxis as irrational/anti-national,
the work of activism-in-academia seeds numerous sites of implosions within

(Pihama & Lee-Morgan, 2019). In the Global South, the active work of resisting the
capitalist-colonialist project is tied to locating knowledge in the lifeworld of the
community, decolonizing the distance between community life and knowledge gen-
eration that forms the infrastructure of the neocolonial project (de Sousa Santos,
2012), performed as objectivity (Dutta, 2015).
The frontlines of activism are located in articulations of democratic possibilities
anchored in communicative equality, in ethical acts of standing up to authoritarian
repression (Dutta et al., 2019). This everyday work of activist interventions amid vi-
olence or its threat does not always erupt into mass movements on the streets that
can be captured and circulated in Facebook feeds and Twitter posts. The work for
instance of dissenting activists Jolovan Wham and Seelan Palay in authoritarian
Singapore, placing their bodies against the repressive excesses of the state, offers
powerful anchors to theorizing communication as resistance. The active resistance
offered by students across India to the fascist regime of Hindutva politics forms the
frontlines of democracy work (Mahaprashasta, 2019). Similarly, consider the orga-
nizing work of indigenous activists in resisting the violent frontiers of land grab,
centering knowledge as the basis of resistance (Padel & Das, 2010). Knowledge is
transformed through activism in the Global South, centering resistive movements
of collectives at the margins in the South.
In sum, the academic work of generating theories from the Global South offers
an invitation to transforming the very nature of theorizing. Through activism, resis-
tive politics tied to democratic and socialist imaginaries, centering of indigenous
infrastructures for knowledge generation, and South–South solidarity, theory from
the Global South fosters dialogic openings for reworking new universals from the
South, creating new registers for practice.
Notes
1. The concept of the Global South is not new, its discursive registers finding continuity
from the anticolonial liberation movements and the resistive articulations of decoloniz-
ing theory emergent from the 1950s to 1970s. More specifically, the formation of the
Global South can be traced to two different and interconnected strands of theorizing
that engaged with each other in a dialectical–dialogic relationship. In the context of
anti-colonial struggles and the newly emergent nations in largely the hemispheric
South, Global South refers to non-aligned formations that forged a sovereign space. The
articulations projected by these nations (leaders, movements, participants in the public
sphere) forged a decolonizing struggle, seeking to create a space independent of the
cold war camps. Referred to as the Third World, the space was constructed as both a
discursive and a material site of resistance to the monetary, financial, and trade regimes
serving the neocolonial interests of the U.S.A. and Western Europe, formulated in the
Bretton Woods Allied Conference of 1944. The political and economic resistance articu-
lated in Third World sovereignty corresponded with the rise of theoretical articulations
of sovereignty narrated in relationship with international connections. In the wake of
the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences (1958–79) and

the non-aligned Tricontinental journal offered visions for decolonizing Third World
knowledge. Similarly, economists from the global South actively participated in articu-
lating the vision for a New International Economic Order. In the hegemonic develop-
ment context, the term global South later emerged formally as an ontological reference
in the Brandt Commission Report in 1980, “North–South: A Programme for Survival”
to refer to nations in the Southern hemisphere that in the earlier decades were referred
to as the “Third World.” The term South then appeared in the discussions of the global
welfare policies in the 1981 Cancun Summit. For the purposes of this manuscript, the
South is a space constituted geographically and communicatively amidst inequalities in
the distribution of power.
2. Consider the number of indigenous environmental activists that have been murdered in
the most recent timeframe of 2019–2020.
3. In the report published by Oxfam, Singapore is ranked in the bottom of the rankings of
countries in terms of “commitment to addressing inequality.”
4. Consider the Chinese bureaucrats that come to Singapore. Consider more recently the
Indian bureaucrats and politicians that come to Singapore to learn its techniques.
References
Banerjee, B. S. (2011). Voices of the governed: Towards a theory of the translocal.
Organization, 18(3), 323–344. doi:10.1177/1350508411398729
Basu, A. (2011). HIV/AIDS and subaltern autonomous rationality: A call to re-center health
communication in marginalized sex worker spaces. Communication Monographs, 78(3),
391–408. doi:10.1080/03637751.2011.589457
Bhambra, K. G. (2014). Introduction: Knowledge production in global context: Power and
coloniality, Current Sociology, 62(4), 451–456. doi:10.1177/0011392114524506
Byrd, J. A. (2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Caouette, D., & Kapoor, D. (Eds.) (2015). Beyond colonialism, development and globalization:
Social movements and critical perspectives. London, England: Zed Books Ltd.
Centeno, M. A., & Silva, P. (Eds.). (2016). The politics of expertise in Latin America. London:
Macmillan.
Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science.
Planning Theory, 13(2), 210–223. doi:10.1177/1473095213499216
de Sousa Santos, B. (2012). Public sphere and epistemologies of the South. Africa
Development, XXXVII(1), 43–67.
Dussel, E., & Ibarra-Colado, E. (2006). Globalization, organization and the ethics of libera-
tion. Organization, 13(4), 489–508. doi:10.1177/1350508406065852.
Dutta, M. J. (2015). Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture-centered ap-
proach. Communication Theory 25 (2), 123–143. doi:10.1111/comt.12067
Dutta, M. J. (2004). The unheard voices of Santalis: Communicating about health from the mar-
gins of India. Communication Theory, 14(3), 237–263. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00313.x
Dutta, M. J. (2011). Communicating social change: Structure, culture, and agency. New York:
Routledge.
Dutta, M. J. (2013). Voices of resistance: Communication and social change. West Lafayette,
IN: Purdue University Press.

Dutta, M. J. (2016). Neoliberal health organizing: Communication, meaning, and politics.

New York: Routledge.
Dutta, M. J., Pandi, A. R., Zapata, D., Mahtani, R., Falnikar, A., Tan, N., . . . Sun, K. (2019).
Critical health communication method as embodied practice of resistance: Culturally cen-
tering structural transformation through struggle for voice. Frontiers in Communication,
4, 67. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00067
Dutta, M. J., & Thaker, J. (2019). “Communication sovereignty” as resistance: strategies
adopted by women farmers amid the agrarian crisis in India. Journal of Applied
Communication Research, 47(1), 24–46. doi:10.1080/00909882.2018.1547917
Escobar, A. (2008) Territories of difference. Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Ganesh, S. (2018). Logics of mobility: Social movements and their networked others.
International Journal of Communication, 12, 3997–4010.
Ganesh, S., Zoller, H., & Cheney, G. (2005) Transforming resistance, broadening our bound-
aries: critical organizational communication meets globalization from below.
Communication Monographs, 72(2), 169–191. doi:10.1080/03637750500111872
Ghosh, R., Naseem, M. A., & Vijh, A. (2012). Tagore and education: Gazing beyond the colo-
nial cage. In A. A. Abdi (Ed.), Decolonizing philosophies of education (pp. 59–71). Leiden,
The Netherlands: Brill Sense.
Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gopal, P. (2019). Insurgent empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent. Brooklyn, NY:
Verso Books.
Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American and political thought. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Guha, R. (1982). Preface. In R. Guha (Ed.), Subaltern Studies I (pp. vii–viii). Delhi, India:
Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Hura, N. A. (2019). How to centre indigenous people in climate conversations. The Spinoff.
Retrieved from https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/01-11-2019/how-to-centre-indigenous-peo
ple-in-climate-conversations/.
James, C. L. R. (2012). A history of pan-African revolt. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Kapoor, D. (2011) Subaltern social movement (SSM) Post-mortems of development in India:
Locating trans-local activism and radicalism. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46(2),
130–148. doi:10.1177/0021909610395889
Kapoor, D., & Shizha, E. (Eds.). (2010). Indigenous knowledge and learning in Asia/Pacific
and Africa: Perspectives on development, education, and culture. Berlin, Germany:
Springer.
Löfgren, H. (2016). The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Left Government in
West Bengal, 1977–2011: Strains of governance and socialist imagination. Studies in
Indian Politics, 4(1), 102–115.
Luthra, R. (2015). Transforming global communication research with a view to the margins.
Communication Research and Practice, 1(3), 251–257. doi:10.1080/22041451.2015.1079156
Mahaprashasta, A. A. (2019). As BJP plays with fire, Campus Crackdown Gives Divided India
Cause to Fight For. The Wire. Retrieved from https://thewire.in/politics/citizenship-act-
university-protests.

Melkote, R. S., & Steeves, L. H. (2001). Communication for development in the third world.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Mignolo, W. D. (2007). The idea of Latin America. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing.
Mondlane, E. (1982). Development of nationalism in Mocambique. In A. de Braganca & I.
Wallerstein (Eds.), The African liberation reader (pp. 15–20). London, England: Zed Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2004). Whiteness, epistemology and Indigenous representation. In
A. Moreton-Robinson (Ed.), Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism (pp.
75–88). Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Nakayama, T. K., & Martin, J. N. (2007). The “white problem” in intercultural communication
research and pedagogy. In L. M. Cooks & J. S. Simpson (Eds.), Whiteness, pedagogy, perfor-
mance: Dis/placing race (pp. 111–137). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Padel, F., & Das, S. (2010). Out of this earth: East India Adivasis and the aluminium cartel.
New Delhi, India: Orient BlackSwan.
Pal, M. (2015). Organization at the margins: Subaltern resistance of Singur. Human
Relations, 69(2), 419–438. doi:10.1177/0018726715589797
Pal, M., & Dutta, M. (2008). Public relations in a global context: The relevance of critical
modernism as a theoretical lens. Journal of Public Relations Research, 20(2), 159–179. doi:
10.1080/10627260801894280
Pal, M., & Dutta, M. J. (2013). “Land is our mother”: Alternative meanings of development in
subaltern organizing. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 6,
203–220. doi:10.1080/17513057.2013.765954
Parameswaran, R. (2008). The other sides of globalization: Communication, culture, and
postcolonial critique. Communication, Culture & Critique, 1, 116–125. doi:
10.1111/j.1753-9137.2007.00012.x
Pihama, L., & Lee-Morgan, J. (2019). Colonization, education, and indigenous peoples. In E.
A. McKinley & L. T. Smith (Ed.), Handbook of indigenous education (pp. 19–27). Berlin,
Germany: Springer.
Prashad, V. (2008). The darker nations: A people’s history of the third world. New York: The
New Press.
Prashad, V. (2019). Red star over the third world. London, England: Pluto Press.
Smith, G. H. (1997). The development of Kaupapa Maori: Theory and praxis. Doctoral disser-
tation, University of Auckland.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism
and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). London, England: Macmillan.
Iti Tame, (2019). Interview with Mohan Dutta. Center for Culture-centered Approach to
Research and Evaluation.
Tricontinental working document. (2018). In the ruins of the present. Tricontinental Institute
retrieved from https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/180918_
Tricon_Working-Document-1_EN_Web.pdf
Tuiono, T. (2019). Interview with Mohan Dutta. Center for Culture-centered Approach to
Research and Evaluation.
Wilkins, G. K., & Mody, B. (2001). Reshaping development communication: Developing
communication and communicating development. Communication Theory, 11, 385–396.

Dutta - Theorizing From The Global South

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dutta - Theorizing From The Global South

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Communication Theory ISSN 1050–3293

Theorizing From the Global South:

Keywords: Global South, neoliberal, subaltern, decolonize, imaginaries, solidarity, resistance

Corresponding author: Mahuya Pal; e-mail: mpal@usf.edu

350 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 351

In his piece, “The imperialism of categories: Concepts and contexts in communi-

352 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

The erasure of knowledge from the Global South

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 353

Politics of knowledge production

354 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 355

makers and transnational capitalists in establishing and articulating the discursive

Whiteness, colonialism, capitalism

The nature of theory from the south

356 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 357

As mentioned above, development agendas scripted in the monolithic pursuit of

358 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 359

South dismantling the north

360 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

(2004, p. 5) by recovering paradigms of connection, mutuality, and collectivity” (p.

South–South networks of theory

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 361

The praxis of theory from the south

362 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Indigeneity and voice

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 363

The socialist project

364 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

combination of academic knowledge and multi-million dollar communication cam-

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 365

366 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 367

Dutta, M. J. (2016). Neoliberal health organizing: Communication, meaning, and politics.

368 Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369

Communication Theory 30 (2020) 349–369 369

You might also like