“Changing Theory aims, with intelligence and energy, to engage in the remaking of our
conceptual instrumentarium by recovering, through key-word analyses in sixteen languages,
what capitalism, colonialism, and the rest sought to destroy. The contributors constitute a
galaxy of today’s most innovative and critical thinkers from the Global South, and make this
book an unprecedented—and never more needed—resource for theoretical renovation.”
— Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and South Asian
Studies, Columbia University

“…an impressive array of essays evidencing what today is indisputable: the irreversible
shift of knowledge, understanding, and sensing away from 500 years of the consolidation
of Western knowledge, regulations of knowing, and vocabulary. The book has stellar
reconstitutions of hitherto marginalized praxes of living and knowing…a signal contribution
to the explosion of the North Atlantic Universal and the rise of the Planetary Pluriversal.”
— Walter D. Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance
Studies, Duke University, and author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021)

“…takes aim at the unconcern for linguistic difference in critical vocabularies of the global
public sphere, and introduces a rich selection of keywords…that critique colonial modes of
measurement, logical argument, and physical orientation in the world. The juxtaposition
of terms, each examined from the perspective of the specific language in which its theory
speaks, advances the project of constituting non-universalist epistemologies. A bold
experiment in critical world-building from the Global South, this volume is an indispensable
tool for reimagining concept-geography [and] cultural translation… Changing Theory changes
‘theory’ as we know it.”
— Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University

“This work is a milestone, marking the Global South both as a field and as an epistemological
revolution that is happening around the world. It is not only limited to criticism and
deconstruction of colonial knowledge, Eurocentrism, or the North as intellectual lens, as most
post-colonial theory has done, but re-discovers the contemporary nature of Southern concepts,
and in their singularities and mutually associated global context, reconstructs the world’s
picture and the universe of our knowledge…This book will be remembered as a classic.”
— Wang Hui, Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University

 

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

Keywords: regulations of knowing; linguistic difference; critical vocabularies ; colonial modes of expression; key-word analyses; consolidation of Western knowledge, non-universalist epistemologies; cultural translation; decolonizing critical theory; social theory; race theory; post-colonial theory; Southern concepts; multilingualism.

Table of contents

Chapter 1. Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South

Dilip M. Menon                        

 

Part I: Relation

Chapter 2. Ubuntu/Guanxi

Jay Ke-Schutte

Chapter 3. Tarbiyya

Noha Fikry

 

Part II: Commensuration

Chapter 4. Logic

Edwin Etieyibo

Chapter 5. Andāj

Arjun Appadurai

Chapter 6. Izithunguthu

John Wright and Cynthia Kros

 

 Part III: The Political

Chapter 7. Eddembe

Edgar C. Taylor

Chapter 8. Minzu

Saul Thomas

Chapter 9. Kavi

Shonaleeka Kaul

Chapter 10. Rajo guṇa

William R. Pinch

Part IV: The Social

Chapter 11. Asabiyya

Magid Shihade

Chapter 12. Dadani

Kaveh Yazdani

Chapter 13. Marumakkathāyam

Mahmood Kooria

Part V: Words in Motion

Chapter 14. Rantau

Saarah Jappie

Chapter 15. Musāfir

Mahvish Ahmed

Chapter 16. Feitiço/Umbanda              

Iracema Dulley

 

Part VI: Rooted Words

Chapter 17. Nongqayi/Nongqai

Hlonipha Mokoena

Chapter 18. Naam

Amy Niang

 

Part VII: Indeterminacy

Chapter 19. Pajubā

Caio Simões de Araújo

Chapter 20. Ardhanāriswara

Shalinee Kumari and David Szanton

 

Part VIII: Insurrection

Chapter 21. Awqāt/Aukāt

Francesca Orsini

 

About the Editor
Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. He is a historian of South Asia and has recently been working with oceanic histories and questions of epistemology from the Global South. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020) and the forthcoming Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Routledge, 2022).

 

About the Contributors:

Amy Niang is Associate Professor of Political Science, Africa Institute of Sharjah and Research Associate, Department of International Relations, University of Witwatersrand. She is the author of The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty (2018); co-editor (with Baz Lecocq) of Identités sahèliennes en temps de crise: histoirse, enjeux et perspectives (2019) and (with Ismail Rashid) Researching Peacebuilding in Africa: Reflections on Theory, Fieldwork and Context (2020).

Arjun Appadurai is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Max Weber Global Professor at the Bard Graduate Centre (BGC) in New York. He is a widely cited scholar who works on globalization, cities, design, and social violence. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the UNESCO Commission on the Futures of Education. His most recent book (with Neta Alexander) is Failure (2019).

Caio Simões de Araújo is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), at the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining WiSER, he held a research position at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA). In collaboration with the Gay and Lesbian Archives for Action (GALA) of South Africa, he is currently heading an oral history project, Archives of the Intimate: Queer Histories of Mozambique. His research interests involve the history of Afro-Asian decolonization, transnational histories of race and anti-racism, and gender and sexuality in the Global South.

Cynthia Kros is a historian and heritage specialist who has published widely in the fields of heritage studies and the history of education. She is the author of a monograph, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (2010), and the co-editor of Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (2022). She is currently an Honorary Research Associate with the History Workshop at Wits and an Honorary Research Associate affiliated to the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town.

David Szanton is a social Anthropologist based in Berkeley, California. He was Humanities and Social Science Program Officer with the Ford Foundation in Manila and Bangkok (1970–1975), staffed the interdisciplinary South Asia and Southeast Asia research committees at the Social Science Research Council (1975–1986), and edited The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (1974). Working closely with the Mithila painters since 1977, he co-founded the Ethnic Arts Foundation in 1980, and the Mithila Art Institute in Madhubani, Bihar. He has published widely on Mithila painting, and curated numerous exhibitions in the US and India.

Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. He is a historian of South Asia and has recently been working with oceanic histories and questions of epistemology from the Global South. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020) and the forthcoming Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Routledge, 2022).

Professor Menon was recently awarded the 2021 Falling Walls Foundation Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities.

Edgar C. Taylor is Lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University and a Research Associate of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is writing a book about racial populism and urban governance preceding the Ugandan Asian expulsion of 1972. His research interests are in youth politics and decolonization, legal contestations of racialized citizenship, public heritage, and the history of archival management in Uganda. He is also co-editing a collection about knowledge and decolonization in Uganda’s public life to be published by James Currey in 2022.

Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002) and Print and Pleasure (2009). She is interested in literary multilingualism in the longue durée and has just finished a book on the multilingual literary history of North India. She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures and is an editor of the Journal of World Literature.

Hlonipha Mokoena is Associate Professor and Researcher at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her book Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (2011) is an intellectual biography both of a person and a class of native intellectuals. She is currently working on a book about African men in military and police service in South Africa. She has also written catalogue essays for the South African artists Zanele Muholi, Mohau Modisakeng, Sabelo Mlangeni, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Andrew Tshabangu.

Iracema Dulley is Fellow at the ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany, and Affiliated Professor at the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil. Her research interests lie in the fields of sociocultural and philosophical anthropology, history, and social theory. Drawing on fifteen years of engagement with colonial and post-colonial Angola, her work has addressed interrogations of processes of differentiation, ethnographic writing, translation, naming, witchcraft, and missionization. She is the author of On the Emic Gesture (2019), Os nomes dos outros (2015), and Deus é feiticeiro (2010).

Jay Ke-Schutte is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Zhejiang University in the PRC. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, their published work has been on the semiotic ideologies of non-Western encounters – with particular focus on the political economy of multilingualism, the (an)aesthetic affordances of semiotic technologies, and the intersectional dynamics of interaction in Afro-Asian interactions. Their current book project explores the tensions between contemporary cosmopolitan identity politics and the historical awareness of ‘Third-World’ socialism playing out in raciolinguistic encounters between African students and their Chinese interlocutors in university settings in China.

John Wright is Research Associate in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. He previously lectured in history at the University of Natal/University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. His main field of research is the history of southern Africa before colonial times, with a focus on the KwaZulu-Natal region. He has published widely in this field. He is one of the editors of the James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (6 volumes, in progress), and also of Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (2022). He lives in Johannesburg.

Kaveh Yazdani held a faculty position at the University of Bielefeld before accepting his current appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of India, Modernity, and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat, 17th to 19th c (Brill, 2017) and a co-editor, with Dilip M. Menon, of Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford, 2020).

Magid Shihade is an independent scholar. His research and publications explore social, cultural, and political shifts among Palestinians, modernity and violence, settler colonialism, decolonization, and the work of Ibn Khaldun.

Mahmood Kooria holds research positions at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and University of Bergen (Norway) and is Visiting Faculty of History at Ashoka University (India). He authored Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts Across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean (forthcoming) and co-edited with Sanne Ravensbergen, Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean Worlds: Texts, Ideas and Practices (2021) and with Michael N. Pearson, Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (2018).

Mahvish Ahmad is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her first project, Sovereign Destruction, studies shifting modalities of state violence, with a particular focus on Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan. Her second project, Thought Under Siege, centers the thought of grassroots movements in sites of violence, paying particular attention to anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian archives in the Global South. She has earlier been a journalist covering military and insurgent violence in Pakistan, and co-founded the bilingual English/Urdu magazine, Tanqeed.Org, with Madiha Tahir.

Noha Fikry is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is interested in human–animal relations and the anthropology of food, with a particular focus on Egypt. In her current doctoral research, she explores multispecies relations of food in rural and urban spaces in contemporary Egypt, to develop theory, concepts, lexicon, and ethnographic insights of various interactions and bonds with animals in the Global South.

Saarah Jappie is Program Officer for the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean and is an Associate Member of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South Initiative and a research associate of the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) Center at University of Johannesburg. She is a scholar and a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Trained formally in history, her interests lie in interdisciplinary approaches to histories of the Indian Ocean world with a focus on cultural mobilities across islands of Southeast Asia and Southern Africa in the aftermath of early modern slavery and exile.

Saul Thomas teaches modern Chinese History and Anthropology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Editor of China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality by Wang Hui (2016).

Shalinee Kumari is a contemporary artist drawing on the aesthetics and iconography of the ancient Mithila painting tradition to express personal struggles, women’s liberation, and visions of a better world, as well as feminist critiques of capitalism, global warming, patriarchy, and dowry. She has exhibited widely in India, the U.S., and France. Initially trained at the Mithila Art Institute in Madhubani, Bihar, she has co-authored two essays with anthropologists about her paintings dealing with gender relations, marriage, and the social exploitation of women. She lives in Hyderabad with her daughter and teaches Mithila painting to engineering students at IIT Hyderabad and IIT Bhilai, Chhattisgarh.

Shonaleeka Kaul is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an intellectual and cultural historian of early India, specializing in Sanskrit literature. She is the author of The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (2010). She has also edited four volumes on representations of space, time, and consciousness in early Indian literature and the arts.

William R. Pinch is Professor of History at Wesleyan University and a historian of the Indian subcontinent, particularly the Indo-Gangetic region over the past five centuries. His books include Peasants and Monks in British India (1996) based on caste and religious asceticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006), contextualizing the life and career of the eighteenth-century Saiva warlord Anupgiri Gosain (‘Himmat Bahadur’). Pinch’s current writing revisits the ‘Mutiny’ violence at Meerut in May of 1857. He is also finishing a joint translation of two eighteenth-century early Hindi ballads from Bundelkhand, with an eye on their historical and historiographical registers. Pinch is a consulting editor for History and Theory.

Regards

“Changing Theory aims, with intelligence and energy, to engage in the remaking of our
conceptual instrumentarium by recovering, through key-word analyses in sixteen languages,
what capitalism, colonialism, and the rest sought to destroy. The contributors constitute a
galaxy of today’s most innovative and critical thinkers from the Global South, and make this
book an unprecedented—and never more needed—resource for theoretical renovation.”
— Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and South Asian
Studies, Columbia University

“…an impressive array of essays evidencing what today is indisputable: the irreversible
shift of knowledge, understanding, and sensing away from 500 years of the consolidation
of Western knowledge, regulations of knowing, and vocabulary. The book has stellar
reconstitutions of hitherto marginalized praxes of living and knowing…a signal contribution
to the explosion of the North Atlantic Universal and the rise of the Planetary Pluriversal.”
— Walter D. Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance
Studies, Duke University, and author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021)

“…takes aim at the unconcern for linguistic difference in critical vocabularies of the global
public sphere, and introduces a rich selection of keywords…that critique colonial modes of
measurement, logical argument, and physical orientation in the world. The juxtaposition
of terms, each examined from the perspective of the specific language in which its theory
speaks, advances the project of constituting non-universalist epistemologies. A bold
experiment in critical world-building from the Global South, this volume is an indispensable
tool for reimagining concept-geography [and] cultural translation… Changing Theory changes
‘theory’ as we know it.”
— Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University

“This work is a milestone, marking the Global South both as a field and as an epistemological
revolution that is happening around the world. It is not only limited to criticism and
deconstruction of colonial knowledge, Eurocentrism, or the North as intellectual lens, as most
post-colonial theory has done, but re-discovers the contemporary nature of Southern concepts,
and in their singularities and mutually associated global context, reconstructs the world’s
picture and the universe of our knowledge…This book will be remembered as a classic.”
— Wang Hui, Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences
everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

Keywords: regulations of knowing; linguistic difference; critical vocabularies ; colonial modes of expression; key-word analyses; consolidation of Western knowledge, non-universalist epistemologies; cultural translation; decolonizing critical theory; social theory; race theory; post-colonial theory; Southern concepts; multilingualism.