History of Knowledge through the Global South

Abstract

In this brief discussion, I reflect on the significance of using the category of the global south for reconfiguring the scope of the history of knowledge. While I see this as a productive paradigm shift that has already given rise to mould-breaking works, I focus here on the cross-hemispheric histories of extractive capitalism and how both colonial violence and anticolonial resistance have shaped knowledge-making. I argue that thinking through ‘entangled ecologies’ can be a tool for countering the existing conceptual order, which has led to the north-south division in the first place. Attending to epistemic and ontological entanglements would enable us to ask better and deeper questions about the increasingly complex interconnections across human and nonhuman worlds, especially given the planetary crises we face today.