On Knowledge Production in the Global South

Abstract

This chapter highlights the challenges of ‘knowledge production’ in what is now known as the Global South. It analyzes how mighty global parameters shape the queries and practices in a given location, and thus limit the investigation long before a scholar starts her work. Authorship and agency are crucial areas of discussion in recent decades that pointed at many tendencies, as well as opened up many possibilities of knowledge production across the national borders. However, the interlocutors of these concepts often assumed texts and other expressions to be the testimony of their authors’ agency. Thus, agency was reduced to an act of creating (or co-creating) texts or (artistic) expressions, dissociating from the realm of meanings this production could be read within. However, authorship has not appeared to pose critical understanding of, or radical alternatives to, the system of meanings and the ways they are perceived in a certain historical structure. Without reconfiguring the concepts, categories, and premises, co-authorship or co-creation can only aid the cultural project of pluralism or ‘melting-pot’. It may end up as the feminist poet Jo Carrillo once wrote ‘Our white sisters/radical friends/love to own pictures of us’.