When the World Went South: The Global South in the Making of Our Times

press release: Pyle Center Room 226. Open to the public

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT. IF YOU LIVE IN MADISON, WISCONSIN, PLEASE ATTEND IN PERSON. TO JOIN ONLINE, FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW.

The rise of powerful voices from the global South in the late twentieth century brought new ideas about democracy, the aims of economic growth, the nature of inequality, the making of restorative justice and the critical place of sustainability in the preserving of the biosphere along with novel ways of seeing the world through literature and the visual arts.

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of the ways in which the cultural politics of the global South are both embedded in and distinct from legacies of empire and notions of the Third World. It does so by foregrounding three interventions that have emerged from the growing presence of artists from South and Southeast Asia in the transnational curatorial circuits that produce long established biennales in Europe and more recent start ups in the Asia Pacific region. Empire and its aftermath are a part of these projects, with some infused by a twenty-first century nostalgia for the postcolonial moment and Third Worldism. Others operate in much more intimate spaces in which the contemporary and the global South come to co-produce one another.

Speaker: Mark Philip Bradley, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of History, faculty director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and deputy dean of the social sciences, University of Chicago

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This event has been organized by the Department of History and the Harvey Goldberg Center at UW-Madison.