Global Souths Faculty Roundtable Notes

30 Mar 2025

Global Souths Roundtable Notes

I was asked to be a part of a faculty roundtable for this year’s Global Souths Conference, a conference hosted by graduate students in UL-Lafayette’s Department of English. This year’s effort was very well done, and I look forward to seeing what they do next year. Here are the questions they gave us in advance that might be discussed (in italics) along with my initial written responses, some of which I said during the roundtable and much of which I did not. (It was a lot of people and not a lot of time.)

How can scholars, educators, and practitioners work collaboratively to address the challenges facing Global Souths communities? What kinds of interdisciplinary approaches do you find promising?

The largest problem facing Global Souths communities is an economic world order where capital and, to some degree information, flow freely but people cannot. (In those places where immigration was policies were developed ostensibly to undo this problem, we have seen disastrous outcomes when nativism emerged and brought about things like Brexit, the closing of borders in Europe, and the election of the current U.S. president.)

I am not an economist, nor a sociologist, so I can make no contribution to the study of capital and people flows, but I can contribute to information flows. The work that excites me the most right now ranges from micro-scale studies of the intertwined emergence rise of colonialist and orientalist discourses, such as we heard about this morning from Yazdan Mahmoud to macro-scale studies that track conspiracy theories and how they transit social networks, localizing as they do so.

In the face of re-emergence of colonialism as we move away from what historian Sarah Paine has described as the maritime-mercantile order back to the imperial-zero-sum order, I fear that the role of the humanities scholar is primarily to document (and analyze) both the mechanisms of power as well as its machinations it works upon its victims. What we can hope for, I think, is those moments where we can protect or save someone from greater harm—but, make no mistake, harm will be done to many, if not all.

In what ways do you see the Global Souths as a conceptual framework rather than a geographic location, and how does this shape your scholarly or pedagogical approach?

The original goal of folklore studies, in conjunction with its cousin anthropology, has always been to find wisdom and beauty in the everyday existence of all the people who don’t normally make it into history. The field has made mistakes, often not crediting individuals who stood in for a larger group (a kind of hidden iconography) and because it often deals with actual people living actual lives in the current moment, it has done damage. It has also contributed real value to the academy and local communities.

I don’t know that I use Global Souths as a conceptual framework for scholarship and pedagogy so much as a way to survive institutionally: I’m a field research oriented folklorist in a department overwhelmingly focused on books and adjacent literary concerns. Majoritarian rule is real for me, and it impacts the evaluation of my work, my ability to win funding, and the seriousness, or lack thereof, with which my approach is taken. Intellectual classism is real.

What contemporary crises—whether political, economic, environmental, or cultural—do you see as defining the Global Souths today? How do these crises intersect with your own area of research?

See my response to the first question for the “nature of the problem.” As to how these things intersect, sometimes in a devastating way. When the 2005 hurricanes hit, I was halfway through a book on gumbo whose subtext was how Africanized so much of all Louisiana folk cultures are. Within a month, half the people I hoped to interview were uprooted, displaced, and relocated in ways that made them difficult to find again.

How can universities better support research and teaching on the Global Souths? What institutional challenges exist in foregrounding these perspectives in curricula? Colonialism has left a lasting mark on the Global Souths. How can scholars avoid colonial research practices in their work? How do colonial legacies continue to shape education?

We can stop doing things that replicate the very structures that reinforce colonialism and capitalism, like venerating celebrity academics and authors or engaging in intellectual classism. And, for goodness sake, stop imagining that the answer we know is either the only answer or the better answer. The whole point of folklore studies, of anthropology, and of decolonization in general was to argue that there is no one answer, that we all must live with partial answers because each of us is always already a partial self, and nothing capitalism or colonialism has to offer is going to fix that part of being human. (Well, to be clear, it works for the capitalist and the colonialist, but it depends upon a one-to-many ratio to work.)

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