ANTH 579 - WHAT IS THE GLOBAL SOUTH?
Long Title: WHAT IS THE GLOBAL SOUTH?
Department: Anthropology
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Language of Instruction: Taught in English
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Description: Is the Global South a place or an ideological project? This seminar introduces students to key debates and intellectual interventions in anthropology and Area Studies concerning the politics of knowledge production, geopolitical formation, and regional imaginaries. In many ways, the Global South and North are new names for old lines, such as the civilized and primitive; the West and the Orient/Other; colonizer and colonized; First/Second world versus the Third World; the developed and developing/underdeveloped world. This course will explore the varied and interlinked histories of these conceptual binaries. By critically examining how social categories – such as culture, religion, race, economy, and ideology – have been mapped onto different parts of the world, the course traces how legacies of colonialism and imperialism continue to inform contemporary perspectives on economic development, capitalism, globalization, and modernity. The course will foreground perspectives of people who mobilized to transform them, from anti-colonial fighters and postcolonial scholars to the Third World solidarity movement and contemporary artists. Lastly, the course explores the complexity of the “Global South” through various south-south engagements, and how the Global South potentially signals a shift in our current geopolitical world order. Graduate/Undergraduate Equivalency: ANTH 379. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for ANTH 579 if student has credit for ANTH 379.