Paper short abstract:

To champion the ‘southern’ as an epistemological position and divorce its geopolitical connotations obfuscates the scalar nature of the ‘southern’ project. The paper argues that if there is no option to not be ‘southern’ then is it really as enabling as the ‘southernists’ claim to be?

Paper long abstract:

To champion the ‘southern’ as an epistemological position and divorce its geopolitical connotations obfuscates the scalar nature of the ‘southern’ project. A scalar outlook, one which pays heed to evaluations of ‘discreet’ units and the becoming of ‘units’, cannot let ‘southernists’ off the hook even if the claim of being a mere epistemic perspective is made because by doing so the ‘southernists’ are obfuscating the value and nature of their project. Such obfuscation has consequences of delinking a signifier with its affective and material relationalities. ‘Southern’ is not an empty signifier for the ‘southernists’ because the ‘south’ and ‘southern’ is tactically deployed at a particular historical moment when the signifier of ‘Global South’ has accrued value from the World Bank to the United Nations. The ‘southernists’ repeat a set of maneuvers which ignores the political economy of subjectivities by fetishizing the margins as a location for ‘radical’ knowledges, while maintaining a silence on the hegemonic position that the signifier of the ‘south’ has accrued. The paper responds to a concerted attempt to champion a ‘southern’ school in the field of urban studies. It primarily responds to the work of Ananya Roy to demonstrate that the ‘southernists’ engage in evaluating knowledge i.e., they scale knowledge during their fieldwork and when they present their work to the ‘globe’. The paper argues that if there is no option to not be ‘southern’ then is it really as enabling as the ‘southernists’ claim to be?