Imagining a more egalitarian global cultureIn our globalized world, writers and scholars from the Global South increasingly engage with one another through their mutual relationship to the West. This obscures South-South relationships, both past and present. Cultures of the Global South — which includes the Third World and minority groups in the West — have a great deal to learn from one another by engaging in direct relationships and establishing direct lines of cultural and intellectual communication.
The goal of the Global South Cultural Dialogue Project, initiated by scholars of color at Cornell University together with writers and scholars based in the Third World, is to facilitate conversation among writers and scholars from Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as minority groups in the West. Through such a dialogue, we can learn how our different societies have responded to questions of language, identity, and the role of culture in the work of decolonization. This project seeks to encourage an honest discussion about the ties that bind the South to the South and to help imagine and create a more democratic and egalitarian global culture. Contributors to the GSP forums write essays in response to a theme chosen by the Global South Project that in turn appear in different media in different parts of the world. GSP essays have appeared or will appear in the following media: World Literature Today, Frontline, Sunday Nation, National Mirror, Wasafiri, Journal of Contemporary Thought; Kwani?, Africa Review, St. Petersburg Review, Pambazuka News, Chimurenga, China Review International (for more information see participating journals and magazines). For more background on the GSP, please see Ezra Magazine’s “Enthusiasm for professor’s ideas sparks new organization” and the introduction to the first forum, “Rethinking the Global South.” Download printable PDF of "Rethinking the Global South"
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GSP Directors:
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Duncan McEachern Yoon and Pashmina Murthy Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an
Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of the
novels Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and a book of poems titled Hurling Words at Consciousness. A novel, Mrs. Shaw (Ohio University/Swallow Press) and a collection of poems, Hunting Words with my Father (Africa Poetry Fund/University of Nebraska Press) are forthcoming in 2015. He is the co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and co-director of the Global South Project - Cornell. In 2013, New African magazine named him one of the 100 most Influential Africans. In 2015 he will be a juror for the Writivism Short Story Prize and the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Rise of the African Novel and the English Metaphysical Empire: Language, Politics and Identity that looks at the African literary tradition.
Website: www.mukomawangugi.com Duncan McEachern Yoon is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He has an MA from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He served as a Fulbright Scholar in 2004. His research interests include Africa and China cultural relations, the Cold War, postcolonialism, diaspora, and world literature.
Pashmina Murthy is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. She joined the English department in 2012 after having taught in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota for several years. She is currently working on a book project on female infanticide in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.
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