Despite the rise in transatlantic, oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies that followed postcolonial and Third World studies in pursuing new frameworks and methods for examining South-South connections, the South Atlantic has not yet emerged as a “site” that captures the general imagination or the scholarly attention it deserves—particularly in literature and cultural studies. The Global South Atlantic traces literary exchanges, socio-historical linkages, networks of communication and exchange, and overlapping investments (financial, political, social, cultural, and libidinal) among Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean that remain largely invisible to an Atlantic Studies still primarily inclined toward the North. Bringing together scholars working in Lusophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone contexts, as well as researchers working across other languages (such as Arabic) that are important components of a Global South Atlantic, the chapters in this volume demonstrate many important ways in which people, governments, political movements, social imaginaries, cultural artefacts, goods, and markets do (and sometimes do not) cross the South Atlantic. Combined, they help to reveal complex and intermeshed webs of cultural, material, and social relations that begin to make visible a multi-textured version of a South Atlantic system that is neither singular nor stable. As a region made up of multiple intersecting regions, as a vision made up of complementary and competing visions, the South Atlantic can only be understood comparatively. Exploring the Atlantic as an effect of structures of power and knowledge that issue from the Global South (as much as from Europe and North America), The Global South Atlantic seeks to rebalance global literary studies by shifting perspectives on transatlantic flows and charting overlooked routes of comparison.
Nikos Papastergiadis: The Cultures Of The South As Cosmos
