South by Chance: Southern Questions on the Global South

This paper looks at the epistemic and practical possibilities that the notion of a "Global South" may open. Drawing from works on the subject such as Anibal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America" (2000), Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos's Conocer desde el Sur (2006) but also from a long Italian Marxist tradition that goes from Antonio Gramsci's "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" (1926) through Franco Cassano's Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (1996) to Franco Piperno's workerist Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale [Praise of the Southern Public Spirit] (1997), this essay considers the Global South as a possible commonplace where European Marxism and global post-colonial and de-colonial movements may meet.