Thinking the Global South: Method, Theory, Strategy

15 October 2022

Keynote Speaker: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, the

Pennsylvania State University and co-director of the digital platform Global South Studies.

If the term ‘Global South’, as Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra has observed, ‘serves as a placeholder or temporary

designation for something that it announces but does not properly describe’, its attention to the ‘global’ offers

us a ‘name for the desire to think expansively and therefore comparatively beyond established national,

regional, or subdisciplinary boundaries’ in literary and cultural studies rather than lodging a ‘claim for worldcovering

totality (as in the “global” of “globalization”)’ (The Dictator Novel [2019], 18). But what does it mean to

think expansively in the current moment, particularly as we look toward increasingly fraught political, social,

and existential futures? As we move further from the turn-of-the-century moment in which current

understandings of ‘World Literature’ (e.g. Casanova [1998], Moretti [2000], Damrosch [2003]) and the

‘Global South’ (e.g. López [2007]) took shape, what work can frameworks such as ‘World Literature’ or the

‘Global South’ continue to do? This one-day colloquium seeks to test the usefulness of methods and theories

that might break us out of debates about definition, and reanimate our agency as thinkers in, with, and about

the Global and the World.

We are thrilled to host Prof. Armillas-Tiseyra in Adelaide to anchor a day of intellectual comradeship,

discussion, and networking, and will be delighted to receive proposals for 15-minute papers on any topic that

speaks to the challenges outlined above.

Please send 250-word abstracts to andrew.vandervlies@adelaide.edu.au by 15 August 2022