Keywords

Can we have social theory that does not claim universality for a metropolitan point of view, does not read from only one direction, does not exclude the experience and social thought of most of humanity, and is not constructed on terra nullius? (Connell, 2020b [2007], p. 47)

As a young postgraduate student of Anglo-Irish descent, I wangled a reader’s ticket to the British Museum Reading Room in my native city of London. The room was a beautiful space and, yes, it was steeped in imperial/colonial history (famously it was where Karl Marx wrote most of Capital). It had the kind of settled almost unassailable history which takes its grandeur for granted and has convenient amnesia about its privileges and its contested claims. To get access to the room then you had to walk through the museum itself. The BM, as it is known, holds some astonishingly beautiful objects from many eras and civilisations. It has been obvious for some time that it is also a house of plunder, and the debates about its booty are hotting up. The process of giving back some of its stolen treasure has already begun. Recently other UK museum collections have decided to return some of their artefacts to the countries from which they were stolen.

What cannot be so straightforwardly handed back, however, is the knowledges and social development which accompanied and propelled Britain’s imperial rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is what Connell (2020b [2007]) rightly terms its colonial dividend, and it forms part of a larger argument about the pattern of distribution of both material and immaterial resources historically and globally.

I want to say a few things about other debates (such a post/colonialism and global knowledge flows), but I start with southern theory as an idea and as a book. Southern Theory (2007) could appear overambitious. After all, no one book could single handedly re-map the whole world of theory or re-present all the traditions ignored by the west. It is also important to see the book as part of a larger project in which Connell (and others) strive to de-centre the world map of knowledge production and valorisation. As Connell is very well aware, theorists from non-northern countries and regions had been producing sophisticated theoretical accounts for decades.

Before proceeding to the rest of this chapter, I also need to enter a small caveat. I should declare upfront my connections to Professor Connell. She has helped me over the years, acting as a sometime unofficial mentor and as an academic collaborator. She is also a personal friend. Naturally I worried that this might colour my judgement or affect my ability to comment neutrally on her work. However, given that Raewyn has collaborated for so long with so many scholars I obviously would not be alone in navigating such a consideration.

One could argue that there are two important aspects for the project of southern theory (for reasons outlined in this piece, the term may not be fully stable, but let us go with it in a pragmatic sense). Firstly, there is the problematisation—but not full dismantling of—‘classical’ or northern social theory (Connell, 2006). This means taking on the hegemony of the metropole both at the level of theory and in terms of who is expected to theorise about whom. In an analysis of empires and imperial rule the metropole was the centre or ‘home country’ from which ideas and forms of rule were spread to dependent states. The analogy here is that the Northern hemisphere nations (American but also Britain and parts of Northern Europe) act as an assumed centre which makes nations of the south part of the periphery.

The second aspect relates to the attempt to (re)construct a more inclusive, multi-centred, and even-handed and democratic model of intellectual labour and globalised knowledge production.

This is a set of arguments that Connell had been building up to for some years (Connell, 1997). The discussion of the emergence of sociology/social theory considered as a ‘concrete historical question’ (2020b [2007], p. 7) sets the scene in the early chapters of Southern Theory. It is a very broad target but not a fast moving one. The (western) sociological canon is relatively enduing, if not entirely static. That said, Connell scores several direct hits in terms of conventional sociology’s content and method and the geopolitics of our times. Part of the symbolic violence here is in the flight to abstraction. The reliance on a presumption of the ahistorical universalism of a social science terminology (actors, agents, social structures as many a sociology course would have it). These terms are presumed to be ‘cross applicable’, but they leave out, or sidestep, a lot of concrete detail about how different societies frame their issues.

The whole western tradition is only able to appear universal by downplaying or ignoring what Wiredu (1996) called the questionable cultural universals and particulars. The view from the north assumes a panoptic confidence and ‘arranges’ other knowledges as being peripheral. Further, we have learned from postcolonial studies that the idea of the west as a monolithic and homogenised entity is itself a biased story. As suggested it vitiates its analysis by ignoring or downplaying contributions from the periphery. As Carrington (2008) says, Connell is right that a lot of northern theorists do not feel the need to even read contributions from the south. They can get by without reading them. Again, Connell is aware of the imbalances here and, as a theorist currently residing in the south (see also below), her feeling that the complacency needs to be disrupted provides some of the force of the book.

As implied above, northern theorists can get published in the west and talk to other theorists in the metropole without even referencing the fact that they too are ‘local’. The west sees itself as central/universal, while the south is often shouting from the wings. Things are changing on this front, but there is a long way to go. There are perhaps three stages or stances. One is to not be aware of non-metropolitan sources/theories. The second is to be aware but not really care. And the third is to actively strive to incorporate other views and/or to collaborate. Southern theorists by comparison often have to be twice as smart or to shoulder a double load to join the conversation. They need to know all the ‘northern’ theories first and then they have to educate audiences in the metropole about the way things are understood or theorised in their country or region (the relationship between these debates and postcolonial studies is discussed below).

The Problem of the North

The Southern Theory book was not intended merely as a polemic, although it has a polemical edge. It was certainly a provocation. Fundamentally, it is an attempt to get ‘us’ to turn our heads towards other resources and modes of thinking. There is throughout a sense of exasperation with northern theory, especially when it is unaware (as it often is) of things that have been already well addressed and theorised in situ in countries outside the metropole. However, the book is not some quixotic attempt aimed simply as unseating the likes of Bourdieu or Giddens or Coleman. In stylistic terms, these are often cumbersome writers, but their reputations and place in the canon are safe enough. It would be overstepping to argue that northern theory is bad just because it is northern. We can pick and choose. To ignore the insightful elements in writers like Bourdieu would be an act of mere inversion. Bourdieu is not a fluent writer (and one could read him as being conservative in his implications), but there is nonetheless some useful theorising in his oeuvre. Concepts such as habitus and field and forms of capital have inspired some good research.

Connell tackles the classics as part of the story, but her scope and ambition has always been wider. She knows ‘classical’ sociology (Connell, 1997) in great detail, but she wants to replenish it and upgrade it. One of the aspects of the project is to point out the elisions and forgotten debates with the northern discourse itself. For example, she is adept in using earlier iterations of theory that have fallen into disuse or out of fashion, and she often advocates for those sociologists who had something useful to say (e.g., Karl Mannheim, Georg Lukacs).

Even in this part of the project we run into issues of what is the centre and what is the periphery. Lots of regions (which are not really southern) feel they had to struggle to get noticed in mainstream academic debates. For example, there is the question of whether theorists from Eastern Europe can be counted as ‘southern’ (perhaps on the basis that they are/were ‘excluded’ from the northern hemisphere mainstream (Boatcă, 2010, Boatcă & Costa, 2016, Rosa, 2014)).

As implied above, there are several overlapping problematics (to use an old term). One is related to the fact that the world has always been interconnected, by global capital flows (Appadurai, 1996), or through conquest and colonisation, or via long-term intercultural exchange and hybridisation. Edward Said argued this very specifically some decades back (see also discussion of his work below). The western concept of globalisation, for example, that prompted a rush of publications in the 1990s and 2000s suffered from the illusion that it was a phenomenon that was completely new. Hirst and Thompson (1996) pointed out early on that this was a somewhat ahistorical periodisation. The world has always been global in a sense. The Catholic Church was a global organisation in its way many centuries ago.

Connell continue to promote a series of ongoing interdisciplinary studies using data and theories from different countries. However, Southern Theory Studies is not quite yet a unified field in its own right, but in its formation it overlaps with other emergent traditions Social science has long had globalised elements. Sometimes these resurface as different subdisciplines and have their own growth spurts (Connell, 2011a, 2011b; Connell, 2013). Similarly, postcolonial studies has developed into a large field of scholarship over several decades. For example, there have been periodic attempts to institute postcolonial sociology as a subdiscipline (Go, 2016). Comparative studies also runs in parallel and is therefore an approach that could be aligned with southern theory (see, for instance, Takayama et al., 2017). The main point is that scholars from different or parallel disciplines saw in southern theory a chance to hybridise and productively combine their approaches.

We Were Never Southern—Australia and Where It Is

The question of who narrates the nation (Bhabha, 2013) often gives rise to a contestation. Sociologists nowadays usually describe Australia as a settler-colonial society (thereby overwriting the existing civilisation of course). Alongside that we might ask, can Australia with its still largely Anglophone culture and its strong western (though not monocultural) identity convincingly describe itself as ‘southern’? From another perspective, it might as well be characterised as an Asian country as it is in an ‘Asian’ part of the world. The very idea of Asia is of course quite unstable as a term, and it lumps together very different nation-states. There are the conditions for an identity crisis here. As Connell (2018) points out, Australian identity, at least as seen in the works of its literary intellectuals, has often had elements of displacement and geographic ambivalence. Patrick White—the only Australian author so far to win the Nobel Prize—is both uniquely Australian and quite Anglo/colonial.

Connell herself embodies some of the historic-geographic multifacetedness and nomadic intellectual formation. She was educated initially in the western (northern) tradition. She has also taught in, and had exchanges with, significant sites of teaching and theory production in the metropole as well as reaching out to collaborators in the global south. Although she has not yet written an autobiography or memoir, she is aware of the specificities of her location and formation. That long history and wide engagement with scholars around the globe is of course what partly informed the launching-off point of southern theory. Can people be both ‘southern’ and ‘northern’? Is it a matter of when one is writing or with whom one is collaborating? Is a book or article produced by writers from both hemispheres, northern or southern?

Code Switching—Writing from the North and the South

Following on from the above, there are some further complexities about who is producing what and when. In some cases, it is not a matter of where theorists work, but when in their journey they formed/wrote their ideas. This dilemma had been examined, for example, by leading African intellectuals (Hountondji, 2002). Colonisation affected many southern intellectuals deeply. It can take a psychological toll (Fanon, 1970), and the colonising process gets ‘inside’ the head of the theorist such that the colonising power becomes an intimate enemy in Nandy’s (1989) resonant phrase. Then there is the difficulty of occupying a liminal space, being strung between two worlds and perhaps not fully at home in either of them. Many intellectuals from other regions of the world wrote initially in the country of their birth and then ended up teaching in the institutions and universities of the north. Many have written about feeling both an existential uprootedness and the felt need to fit in or integrate. Some further lamented that shouldering the burden of being charged with somehow resolving these contradictions off their own bat. The role of the diasporic intellectual is not always an easy one, as Said’s (2012) eloquent and plangent biographical reflection testified.

In terms of the north-south axis, this does not invalidate the southerness of their theorising, but it also requires us to recall that to be heard in the west they have had to meet northern theory more than halfway. How could it really be otherwise? Many such intellectuals have to engage in a kind of code switching in order to theorise the south and be heard in the north. The problems of projection and misunderstanding abound. Does the west (or the north) really hear the non-northern theorists as they intended to be heard? Given the current hegemony too, there is the problem of northern intellectuals appropriating the work of southern theorists. This could produce the patronising assumption that the north can situate southern accounts and re-present them and even ‘correct’ their ideas (shall we coin the term ‘northsplaining’?).

British scholar Benedict Anderson (2006) made a useful contribution to studies of the origin and spread of nationalism. His contention that all nation-states rely, to some extent, upon realising themselves as imagined communities is an idea with legs. There were of course already some southern theory elements in that well-known book. Anderson tells us that he is primarily a scholar of South East Asia and he makes light of the would-be global pretensions in expanding the historical arguments. However, the book is more useful and convincing precisely because it does not start from an unexamined and uncontested westo-centric perspective. Other scholars have used his ideas as a launching-off point. It is important not to start with the assumption that non-western countries are a blank slate with no prior theories of their own. However, we are also aware that the invention of tradition is always predicated on the eclipse, if not the ‘abolition’, of what has gone before (Dussel, 1995).

Up, Down, and Across—Geographic Metaphors and Analyses

There have been other attempt to ‘geographise’ the world of thought and culture and they often excite mis/readings and debate. For example, there are some interesting comparisons that could be made between Southern Theory and Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism. Both books were widely read and have been quite influential in their fields. Both could be described as agenda-setting (or resetting). Both are theoretically heterogenous and written largely in non-technical language. Said’s book might adorn more shelves, but that is partly because as a work of literary studies/cultural studies it is more likely to connect more with general readers. That of course is making the (perhaps snobbish) assumption that educated readers, even if they have not studied social science, will have already had a grounding in literature and ‘the classics’. Titles do matter, especially if can be said to express a whole new idea as a sort of gestalt. Orientalism, like Southern Theory, gives us an idea, and a useful linguistic coinage, that encapsulates its central thesis in a metonymic way.

However, there is something else we could say about their projects that relates to both the times in which they were written and some tropes within the global imaginary. The whole concept of the ‘West’, as Said shows, requires some self-defining energy to keep it current. Moreover, it cannot survive without its ‘other’ (the Orient), an entity that it (re)produces discursively partly as a repository of its own repressed desires. But where Said’s analysis divides the world vertically as it were, Connell divides it horizontally. As already implied, borders create the potential for border disputes. Both authors find some heuristic value in their shorthands, but they are also both aware that the entities they sketch in exist only in a cultural and historico-political way. Both ‘north’ and ‘south’ are in their way imagined geographies.

They are not literal or strictly geographic. Still, people need to understand the central idea and not just nit-pick at the edges. Said (in his 1995 Afterword) spends a considerable number of words fending off what he sees as misconstructions of his arguments (see also Said, 2013). Connell could do very much the same with Southern Theory, but she has taken a different tack. In fact, a lot of the thinking that comes indirectly out of pondering reactions to her original starting point can be found in the Good University (2019) (see Chaps. 3 and 4) (see also Bhambra et al., 2020).

What both of these ‘spatial metaphors’ share is a sense that knowledge production and circulation is not naturally occurring and is never value-neutral. It is complexly indexed to relations of history power and hegemony. The politics of knowledge is an ongoing one. Both books, in their gentle and insistent way, take the west to task and suggest that growth lies in further self-criticism and in opening up to non-western views and arguments.

Reading or Applying—Actually Using Southern Theory

In relation to its legacy, we could predict that southern theory might evoke different reactions in different world regions. For the north, one could say there was partly a feeling of being both admonished and corrected. In the south, the reaction was more likely to be one of critical approval and even a sense of ‘about time’ (Arjomand, 2008). Of course, even a timely book can only do so much. It would be unfair to hold the book to account solely on the basis of whether or not it has made a dint in northern theory. Rather, we should acknowledge as did many supportive reviews (Boatcă, 2010; Lundström, 2009; Muller, 2009) that the book needs to be seen as part of a project of mobilising attention to what has been excluded or downplayed. One of the hopes for the Southern Theory book is that it would inspire further work in that vein (and not just be skimmed and placed on a shelf). Southern theory was a mapping exercise, but people need to actually use that map to explore new terrains.

Here I would like to make two quick points, both of which grow out of an engagement with the larger southern theory project. They relate to the ideas of collectivism and activism. Connell has been critical of the over-attention to ‘star’ intellectuals because that can mask the efforts of those less noticed or less heralded (often, not so incidentally, women). For example, as feminist scholars have shown, the history of science is littered with women co-workers who did not get the recognition for their part in collaborative research (one thinks of Rosalind Franklin whose work on DNA sequencing is much less well known than that of her Nobel-prize-winning colleagues Watson and Crick).

Further, focussing on great individual thinkers can mislead us into idealist model of how really useful knowledge grows and how we can employ it to make things better. Knowledge is not ‘produced’ just inside theorists’ heads, but through actual intellectual labour and long-term collaborations. Similarly, we need to think about knowledge production in a globalised world in a globalised way (Connell & Crawford, 2007; Connell 2019). Importantly, there is a global intellectual workforce which underpins individual careers. This is an aspect that is often overlooked, but it has been central to Connell’s project for many years (Connell et al., 2005). Great thinkers are useful (and fun to read), but they are the prow of the ship and not the whole vessel. In that sense the attachment to solo intellectual knowledge production is a distraction. Real advances are always made through collective efforts. This has always been true of science, and we should recall that when we attempt to think about social theorising.

Secondly, there is the grounded theory that comes out of knowledge-informed activism. In this sense Connell was ‘walking the walk’ for some years on either side of the publication of the book. For example, her research in areas such as HIV prevention (Connell, 2012; Connell et al., 2013), gendered violence initiatives, and global peace studies (Connell, 2017) involved collaborations with other individuals or organisations, often in the global south. Connell has also considered how fields such as the sociology of gender would look if due consideration was given to southern contributions (Connell 2014a, 2014b, 2020a; Connell & Pearse 2015).

This is also theory valorised through activism which is joined to progressive social action and participatory campaigns. It is not just a matter of raiding the south for ‘examples’ of social life to take back and theorise at home. In this connected world we can trade ideas and insights without ever getting on a plane. It also utilises contemporary technological developments such as the de-territorialising elements of online global communications.

Crucially, collaborations are better when they flow both ways. Scholars such as Morrell (Connell et al., 2016; Morrell, 2016) have taken the southern theory framework (creatively combining it with Connell’s gender theory work) and have made advances by applying it concretely in a Southern African context. This work has potential global significance. It is also very much in the spirit of the book to use the southern theory framework as a spur to activism around gender justice and human rights, which is why Serrano Amaya’s account of the dialogue between theory and activism is so relevant and welcome.

If we want to make theory in a world worth living in, we have to look beyond both the ivory tower and the blinkers of western assumptions.