DECOLONIZING THEORY AND CONCEPTS

PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Margrit Pernau

Review article on Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip M. Menon (London: Routledge, 2022)

History and Theory 64, no. 2 (2025)

Until recently, most concepts and theories used in social sciences and the humanities were developed in the West. They were both provincial, as they were based on Western experience and designed to interpret these local experiences, and presumed universal. If they did not fit developments in the Global South, this was due not to the inadequacy of the concept but to a “history of lack.” Dilip M. Menon's edited volume Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South can be situated within the broader movement to not only challenge these concepts and theories but also offer alternatives developed from the Global South. This review article lays out the larger intellectual framework of the volume. The history of concepts offers the possibility to distinguish more precisely between concepts used by the historical actors (hardly anyone challenges the need to base research on their careful investigation) and the analytical concepts. Especially in a global context, using analytical concepts from one of the languages of the Global South raises many questions that need to be addressed; the question of which language academics are to communicate with in the future is not the least important. Paracoloniality, the notion that there are areas of continuity beyond the “tired triad” of the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, in turn, needs to be brought into conversation with the central assumption of decoloniality, which argues for an epistemic rupture between the precolonial and the colonial.

Credit: Shubham Dhage, @theshubhamdhage