Introduction: The (Post)global South

This essay introduces the journal The Global South by proposing that its object of study comprises three areas: globalization, its aftermath, and how those on the bottom survive it. As the aftermath of each of the global cataclysms of the last decade—the Asian, Russian, and Brazilian economic crises of 1997-8; the end of the U.S. market boom in 2000; the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11,2001; the exposed multibillion-dollar scams of Enron and other major corporations, culminating in their collapse; the Argentine fiscal crisis; and the current crises and infrastructural meltdowns in Iraq and New Orleans—have amply demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering. Thus the essay argues that what defines the global South is the recognition by peoples across the planet that globalization's promised bounties have not materialized, that it has failed as a global master narrative. The global South also marks the mutual recognition among the world's subalterns of their shared condition at the margins of the brave new neoliberal world of globalization. The global South diverges from the postcolonial, and emerges as a postglobal discourse, in that it is best glimpsed at those moments where globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles, where the latter experiences a crisis or setback.