Event

The tendency to spatially displace imaginaries of societies and their specific historical development is not new. The interpretation of a space based on geographical orientation has indeed seldom been based on any natural idea of what the space is (Gregory 1994; Garfield 2013). Recently, though, much attention has been devoted to the discussion of space as a political and historical entity. Critical studies have emerged in the field, being one of the most important of them the post-colonial/de-colonial approaches. In this paper it is argued that the South, understood as an interpretation of historical relations, is a space where also general trans-regional theories and concepts have emerged. Hence, from this point of view, there is not a strong purely intellectual distinction that could split Northern and the Southern thought. However, an important aspect constituting what could be regarded as something that does split a Northern from a Southern intellectual tradition is that the former has departed from the idea of spatial neutrality as a condition for the production of theories, as Mignolo (2011) has shown; and the later, on the contrary, has interpreted itself and its place in the world through what is called here a critical localisation of argument. This critical localisation of discourse is done without any prejudice against for the production of ‘universal’ claims. Henceforth the paper highlights what could be an important difference detected between the ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ intellectual tradition but argues in favour of the existence of also patterns of similar – regarding the controversial topic of universality. The paper will raise some questions related to the problem of modern thought and the experience of space. The paper will explore two stablished lines of argumentation. The first line refers to what could be a sort of essentialisation of spaces that involves a radical dualism and sometimes antagonism between different parts. During much of the early modern period (roughly from the 1500s to the 1800s), Western thought and art portrayed the Orient as an exotic realm to be experienced and explored (Said 1985; Behdad 1994). With a change of focus but retaining the same analytical perspective, in some contemporary approaches the ‘South’ is seen as the place for the exercise of lively alternatives for the future (Santos 2009; Connell 2007). It seems like the South has replaced the Orient as the place in which creative innovations developed and imagined in whatever this socio-spatial category might be is more interesting and effective than modernisation perspectives and allied views could have expected. The difference is that now Southern actors have a voice and play a central role in such representation themselves. In both perspectives, however, the North is still portrayed as a sort of wealthy and powerful old man whose success can be easily attested, and whose examples could elucidate a lot of current problems, but whose uneven trajectory has produced more problems than it has solved. This space became the image of a past and remembered more for its mistakes than its glories. This leads us to the second line of argument against which this paper was developed. Following from the previous representation, it has been wisely attested that the main mistake of this man – the North in this image of world regions to which outstanding structural power has been attributed – was the development of colonial and neo-colonial global capitalism. The works that have recently appeared under the umbrella category of ‘Global South’ highlight the colonial structures of power as that which is responsible for the crystallisation of the North as the site of accumulation of capital and the South as the site of exploitation (for more about this topic, see Pinheiro in this volume). Geo-political relations of power are taken as the focus of these approaches that mainly analyse the historical aspects of political and economic mutual and unequal dependency of centres, peripheries, and semi-peripheries for the development of capitalism (Wallerstein 1974; Quijano 2005). The problem with this perspective does not reside in the assumption that the history of colonialism is the main causal factor in the consolidation of the world system as we find it today. The problem concerns the issue of attributing strong structural powers to places that act as rational actors. The first line of argument above highlights more the aspect of the representation of a space by agents acting in specific cultural and historical scenarios. The second line could be regarded as based on a more empirical conception of global history and of economic development in the era of capitalism. In both accounts, however, the idea of antagonistic interests of spaces as historical entities predominates. In order to show the limitations of the perspectives criticised above, we will develop an argument about the relation between, on the one hand, the specific character of modern displacements and, on the other, the interpretation and the consolidation of universal claims. For that, the focus will move to the discussion of two authors and intellectuals displacement that share what we regard to be a critical localisation of universal discourse: Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854) and the Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904). They lived in different times and moved through different spaces. The exploration of their argument helps us to elucidate the argument about the difficulty of splitting Northern and Southern thought in a very clear way when it comes to the absence of a pretension to universality and the absence of ‘unavoidable’ historical events. However, the argument of these authors do shows how an epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009b) have been exercised by these displaced intellectuals. The discussion concludes with some remarks that summarise the proposal to look at space in the social sciences as conforming to no pre-established cartography in order to overcome the problems of essentialisation and of spatial determination. To understand the critical perspectives from the ones who has suffered epistemic historical injustices demands this previous inquire.
Keywords: Spatial experiences, North and South Thinking, Critical studies, Historical Criticism
Some biography and references
Abdel-Jaouad, H. (1993) ‘Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the artist as a young nomad’, Yale French Studies, Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadism, 83: 2, 93–117.
Appadurai, A. (1988) ‘Putting hierarchy in its place’, Cultural Anthropology, 3:1.
Behdad, A. (1994) Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the age of colonial dissolution, Cork: Cork University Press.
Burawoy, M. (2009) ‘The Global Turn: Lessons From Southern Labor Scholars and Their Labor Movements’, Work and Occupations, 36: 2, 87–95.
Connell, R. (2006) ‘Northern Theory: The political geography of general social theory’, Theory and Society, 35: 2, 237–64.
Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social sciences, Cambridge: Polity.
Eberhardt, I. (2000) País de Arena: Relatos Argelinos, Madrid: Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo.
Eberhardt, I. (2008) Los Diarios de una Nómada Apasionada, Barcelona: BackList. Garfield, S. (2013) On the Map: Why the world looks the way it does, London: Profile Books.
Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005) For Space, London: Sage
Mbembe, A. (2000) ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12: 1, 259–84.
Mignolo, W. (2002) ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101: 1.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global futures, decolonial options, Durham: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W.D. (2009) Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom, Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181.
Mota, A. (2018) ‘On Spaces and Experiences: Modern Displacements, Interpretations and Universal Claims’, in African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity of the Annual of European and Global Studies, vol. 4, Peter Wagner (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pratt, M. L. (2008) Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation, London: Routledge.
Quijano, A. (1998) ‘La colonialidad del Poder y la Experiencia Cultural Latinoamericana’, in R. Briceño-León and H. Sonntag (eds.), Pueblo, Época y Desarrollo: la sociología de América Latina, Venezuela: Editorial Nueva Sociedad.
Quijano, A. (2005) ‘Colonialidade do poder, eurocentrismo e América Latina’, in Edgardo Lander (ed.) A Colonialidade do Saber: eurocentrismo e ciências sociais, Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Rodríguez, S [1830] (1971) El Libertador del Mediodía de América y sus compañeros de armas, defendidos por un amigo de la causa social, Caracas: Cromotip.
Rodríguez, S (1840) Las sociedades Americanas, Luces y Virtudes Sociales, facsimile of the Valparaíso edition. Said, E. (1985) Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin.
Santos, B. S (2009) Una Epistemologia del Sur: la reinvención del Conocimiento y la Emancipación Social, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, CLACSO.
Wallerstein, I (1974) The Modern World System, vol. 1, New York: Academic Press.

A conscious effort has been underway in geography to break off from the colonial baggage riddled in the history of the discipline; the disciplinary boundaries are no longer water- tight and there are newer considerations of what geography could be. In India several power structures like caste, religion and gender decide the course of knowledge production. Any theory that professes to be “Southern” has to also be conscious of the existing power structures in their domain. This paper is an attempt to address these internal power structures in Southern theory by looking at the place-making process within Muslim localities. It tries to place knowledge production ‘from’ a Muslim locality to counter the power structures in Southern theory and inform the conceptualization of located-ness of the Global South. A place-based understanding would move beyond mere spatial patterning of religion and necessitate a careful reading of the power structures. While place had been a central concept in geography with long individual conceptual history, the paper here uses the lens of place to understand meanings attached to locality with religion-based identity. Using In-depth interviews with elderly people, carried out during 2018, in Vattapally, a Muslim locality in the Indian state of Kerala’s Alappuzha district, the paper attempts to understand the historic creation of the place with a Muslim identity. The place-making process in Vattapally can be seen packed with erasures, newer boundaries that do not fit neatly into the cartesian understanding of place. While there is a spatial concentration of Muslims in Vattapally, the study moved further ahead of this fact. For people who have lived their lives in the place the meanings and attachments would be entirely different as they are but actively and passively engaging in bringing Muslimness to the place and also retaining it. Many intricate Place-making strategies make up the focus of study here. Vattapally also did not get its Muslim tag overnight but through certain place-making activities that are understood as Muslim. The continued process of creation of places and related formation of identities can be used here to understand the shaping of Muslimness in the Muslim localities. Identity formation outside already established political boundaries can obscure the located-ness of the Global South. With the conceptualization ‘from’ the locality the paper expects to engage with the idea of Global South and the little hegemonies in Southern theory. Earlier ethnographic works have established the existence of Muslim localities as distinct entities within the city spaces while discussing the marginalization of these localities in India; understanding place-making processes can speak to the power structures that feed the idea of marginalization of these Muslim localities. Thinking from Vattapally, the paper would raise the following critical questions: Who benefits from Southern theory? Is a theory which was formed as a counter to the northern hegemony becoming hegemonic in itself. If so, how and why?
Key words: Place-making, Muslim localities, hegemony

Key words: Adaptation, local knowledge(s), intersectionality, feminist epistemologies, Southern theory.
Abstract
As the world hurtles towards 2 degrees Celsius warming, large parts of the world are already facing the brunt of climatic changes in the form of erratic weather patterns, sea level rise, floods, droughts which intersect with interlocking patterns of oppressions, exclusions, and marginalization (Adger et al., 2003; Wisner et. al., 2004). Adapting to these climatic changes is crucial for people at the brink of or in-the-line of these hazards that impact livelihoods, dwellings, and people’s way of being. As climatic hazards come knocking, communities on the ground engage in adaptive practices. However, these practices are largely absent from or do not fit the categories of adaptive actions as conceived in adaptation programs developed by policymakers and planners (Adger, 2006). Enmeshed with global discourse on adaptation, these programs not only regurgitate concepts and methods developed in and by the Global North but also work on an imaginative Global South of ‘vulnerable’ people (Mikulewicz, 2020). While countries most impacted by climatic changes have emphasized the role of context-specific solutions and importance of local knowledge(s) (UNFCC, 2003; Berkes, 2005), the extent to which this has been incorporated in global programing and translates to action on ground is debatable (Ford et al., 2015). Communities-at-risk continue to face climate coloniality (Sultana, 2022) at the hands of both international development aid and adaptation programs, as well as national and sub- national development plans. The erasure of local knowledge(s) characterizes the ongoing climate coloniality. Drawing on theories from the South that call for South epistemologies (Roy, 2009; de Santos, 2014; Bahn, 2019), and intersectional feminist scholarship that emphasize the importance of knowledge co-production (Jacobs, 2019) and plural epistemologies in climate adaptation research (Nightingale, 2015), I explicate how grassroots flood relief efforts in Pakistan are engaging in knowledge and meaning making from their position in the peripheries. Invoking the concept of solidarity, these actors are rethinking the material and discursive dimensions of relief to foster a decolonized climate justice praxis. I combine a review of grassroots actors’ social media narratives and documentation of on-ground activities with interviews of grassroots actors involved in both on-ground activities and advocacy. I find that grassroots actors work in situated, intersectional ways to provide contextually specific relief goods and services to communities excluded by formal relief efforts. Concurrently, these actors are challenging narratives of flood relief as short-term charity and building counternarratives of solidarity with affectees, while also pushing for climate reparations and debt cancellation from the international community. Their praxis invokes the concept of solidarity with those impacted by the floods; it is used as both a discursive device to build alternative discourses around relief, recovery and resilience, as well as a guidepost for activities on ground. Through these resistances and alternative practices, grassroots actors are engaged in a praxis that dares to imagine decolonized climate future(s). My research findings have implications for how we understand climate adaptation from the South and who gets to be a part of adaptation planning and policymaking. As climate change manifests in situated and variegated ways, it is increasingly important to look to these fringes (and peripheries) as places for co-production of knowledge on adaptation. Who controls adaptation processes and what and whose knowledge is centered in these processes will be crucial in determining the transformative potential within adaptation processes.