Events

Globalised Regionalism: Shared Patterns and Distinctive Histories of the Southern Hemisphere?

The last two decades have seen a new wave of scholarly interest in patterns of connection and mobility across developing colonial states, and closer attention to the material ways in which people, policies, institutions, laws, and print travelled across the increasingly global space of empires. But while colonial knowledges and practices traversed the globe, they also took root in specifically regional ways, and their histories—with dual roots in common patterns and local distinctiveness—have ongoing inheritances in the twenty-first century. The recent interest in regional and inter-regional spaces, such as the Pacific Rim, the Indian Ocean, and the ‘Global South’, has not only prompted a new critical focus on the dialectics between centralism and regionalism, but has also seen inter-regionalism presented as a theoretical alternative to globalism. A parallel movement in scholarship has sought to disengage the notion of southern-ness from the implicit spatial and cultural hierarchies it carries in both colonial and global-capitalist modes of thought, and to reconceptualise it less as a region or world space in a global field than as an orientation, perspective, or conceptual space. This workshop will address the relationship between globalism and regionalism in the migration of ideas, institutions, print cultures and knowledge around the southern hemisphere. In doing so, it aims to engage current debates about the idea of the south as a conceptual space and/or as a space of inter-regionalism, and the question of how the interconnected histories of the south endure in an unresolved postcolonial condition.

Workshop Organisers: Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide and UCD) and Porscha Fermanis (UCD)

Participants: Lara Atkin (UCD); Tony Ballantyne (Otago); Elleke Boehmer (Oxford); Edward Cavanagh (Cambridge); Sarah Comyn (UCD); Sharon Crozier de Rosa (Wollongong); Porscha Fermanis (UCD); Lisa Ford (UNSW); Gail Jones (Western Sydney); Alan Lester (Sussex); Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide and UCD); Susie Protschky (Monash); Fariha Shaikh (Birmingham).

Image: ‘Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere’ by T. G. Bradford, 1838. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.