Cities of the South, Cities of the North

In the wake of the end of the cold-war and the demise of the tripartite conceptual division of the First, Second and Third Worlds, the latter concept has been superseded by the notion of the ‘Global South’. This notion is a flexible one referring to the developing nations of the once-colonized sections of the globe. The concept does not merely register shifts in geopolitics and in the respective affiliations of nations and the economic transformations that have occurred. It also registers an emergent perception of a new set of relationships between nations of the South. It is the task of this project to explore those ‘lateral’ south-south cultural connections by mobilizing a network of prominent Global-South universities (UFF, Brazil; UNAM, Mexico; Wits, South Africa; UCAD, Senegal; JNU, India) with other universities in the southern hemisphere (UWA, Australia; SNU, Korea).

Erich Auerbach is the Visiting Chair of Global Literary Studies at the University of Tübingen