Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines the intellectual thought that emerged from India and Latin America, two outposts of the Global South, and seeks to recover the elided reflective traditions of thinkers, writers and activists from these peripheries. It seeks to highlight the distinctive ideas in their works.

Paper long abstract:

Recent events that have followed the outbreak of the Corona pandemic have exposed not only the deep-rooted flaws in global trade and global financial architecture arduously built up over the past four decades but have also laid bare the civilizational fault-lines of our times. Crises such as these are pregnant with possibilities and indeed, the multiple shocks to the neoliberal architecture combined with the pitched battles that are being waged by mass movements outside parliaments, in city squares and in villages across the world, clearly indicate that it will not be easy to go back to business-as-usual now that some semblance of normalcy returns to the post-pandemic world. Neoliberalism has reached a dead end and while the future is still far from certain, in this period where, as Gramsci once put it, “old is dying but the new cannot be born” what is clearly needed is a new hegemonic project. It is in this context that this paper outlines important intellectual themes that have emerged from India and Latin America, two outposts of the Global South, and seeks to recover the elided reflective traditions of thinkers, writers and activists from these peripheries. It seeks to highlight the distinctive ideas, alliances and parallelisms in their works, as well as the manner in which they articulated liberatory paradigms for the colonized and/or erstwhile colonized world. It underscores the contemporary relevance of this body of work as mass movements world over seek civilizational alternatives to capitalist modernity.