Heading South

Terminology is always a site of politics, and "global South" is no exception. Many of the places proposed as likely areas for discussion in the pages of this new journal are not, in fact, south of the equator. Nor are other areas that are, in fact, south of the border necessarily as appropriate for discussion in this journal. Yet it is appropriate to reach for another terminological alleyway like this one to help us reimagine, yet again, the peoples and topics in question. "Postcolonial," either with or without a hyphen, is contentious; "commonwealth," of course, has been long abandoned (and for starters, is totally Anglocentric). "Non-aligned" is, perhaps, somewhat closer, but a good number of the "southern" peoples are, in fact, aligned. But the spirit of Bandung suggests that there is a general sense among the peoples in question that they recognize each other, and that they share a common destiny of being the industrialized world's underdogs. Can this sixth sense also give hope for a broader and non-eurocentric cosmopolitanism, even a "subaltern" cosmospolitanism. Can a recuperation of the histories of such "other" mercantile and cultural interchanges, such as that of the Indian Ocean world, enliven and empower these groups to render a "flat" world something that is not inevitably one in which they are, once again, those who are pressed beneath the iron?