Changing Theory – Concepts from the Global South

Blurb

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual. With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines - history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory - this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

This book ist part of the alternative reading list 2022 by Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ). The editors comment has been provided by D-Econ and can also be found on the list, which was compiled by Devika Dutt, Danielle Guizzo, and Ingrid Kvangraven.

Comment from our editors:

This edited volume offers an impressive array of essays aiming to profoundly change the Euro-American episteme of postcolonial theory and the politics of Western academy. It discusses eight main themes (relation; commensuration; the political; the social; language; rooted words; indeterminacy; insurrection) to drastically change social theory from the ground up, putting the theories and frameworks that emerged from the Global South as the main point of departure. Rather than arguing for a geographical South, it discusses the emergence of an “epistemological South”, and how it has been marginalised under centuries of exclusion. By arguing that colonialism and modernity has made us suffer from “intellectual amnesia” from regional knowledge/practices, the volume presents concepts from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab World, and Latin America to reorient how social theory is (and should be) made. By putting a rich collection of chapters at the availability of the reader, this volume is a must read for social scientists, educationalists, developmentalists, economists, and the general public interested in finding out more about the variety of regional theories and interpretations about modes of living.