Dissonant intimacies: Coloniality and the failures of South–South collaboration

Abstract

North–South research collaborations have come to include both an epistemic and ethical promise – of disrupting hierarchies, inequalities and asymmetries in global knowledge production. In practice, however, these have been ridden with limits, tension and failure. The ‘South–South’ has emerged as a worthy foil: an easy repository of positive affects and of decolonial futurity. This article turns to a feminist collaborative research initiative that seemed primed to fulfil these promises, but in fact, failed to do so. A partnership between African and Indian feminist scholars did not provide meaningful and reciprocal intellectual exchange. On the contrary, it powerfully revealed the coloniality of knowledge and power in higher education and how it manifested, differently, in two distinct locales in the Global South. This partnership constituted less of a shared ground, than one of complex and uneven relationships – a terrain of dissonant intimacies. It is not surprising that these were Southern scholars working in marginalised areas of research, like gender and sexuality. Such a double marginalisation produces specific sets of choices – and ambivalent desires – when it comes to being included in an unequal global epistemic order (and responding to neoliberal demands). This article contributes to larger debates on decolonising higher education, by shifting the scale from the North–South to the complexities of knowledge-making and power within and across the South.

Research collaborations are key indicators of success in the neoliberal university, both for the individual researcher and for the global standing of the institution in question. In recent times, collaborations involving partners from the Global North and the South have come to include an ethical – and not only epistemic – promise, of ‘connection and agreement, connectedness and equality’ (Coetzee, 2019, p. 258). And yet these have been experienced by Southern collaborators as being extractive and unequal, and centring ‘Northern conceptions of what quality scholarship looks like’ (Musila, 2019, p. 288; see also Gunasekara, 2020; Jayawardane, 2019). Set against such tensions, it would seem that a reorientation of economic and epistemic resources – and intellectual energy – from the North–South towards the South–South would act as a necessary corrective and remedy. If North–South links are doomed to failure, then South–South collaborations are primed for success.

Anticipatory narratives of success can obscure much, however. They can mask the coloniality of power at work in non-western academic settings that are themselves highly distinct and differentiated. The hegemony of the western academy structures the dispositions and aspirations – the epistemic habits – of institutions and individual researchers located differently and unevenly in the Global South. For Southern scholars in peripheral areas of research, like gender and sexuality, it also makes it harder to opt out of an unequal global epistemic order (Pereira, 2017). ¹ But alongside constraint, there is choice and agency, as Pereira reminds us, including the choice to participate in the liberatory promises of the South–South – or not.

These issues are of interest and concern to me not least because I am from and live in the South, trained and previously employed in the North. As, moreover, a South Asian studies scholar located in a South African university, the pursuit of the ‘South–South’ has come easily to me. In this article, I reflect on one major South–South research collaboration that I led, which emerged as a space of dissonant intimacies. I take this term from Macharia, who speaks of the uses and failures of ‘blackness to create a shared ground’ (2016, p. 186). Contrary to my assumptions and investments, this collaboration failed to provide shared ground amongst Southern feminist scholars. As opposed to disrupting Northern hegemony, it revealed both the coloniality of power and how it manifested, differently, in two distinct Southern locales. My reflections are speculative, drawing on my own singular and highly subjective experience of leading a research project. They are, however, part of wider conversations on decolonising higher education, the complexities of collaborative practice and exchange, and the operation and implications of an unequal global epistemic order.

The failures of this South–South academic collaboration serve not as a remedy to more successful collaborations and projects in future. Failure charts an alternative path – away from the easy metrics of success and progress that are privileged by the neoliberal academy and global markets of higher education. Feminists are no strangers to failure. They have gained more from failure than they have from success, given the unexpected pleasures of failing at womanhood and of queer possibilities (Halberstam, 2011). Epistemic and institutional failures might similarly afford us more knowing ways of developing intimate and institutional grounds for decolonial thought and praxis. Dissonant intimacies and failure might inform a new ethics and episteme that could even decolonise.

Student movements, decolonial options and tensions in the Global South

Thanks, largely, to student mobilisations across university campuses, the call to decolonise higher education has become an urgent and familiar one. In South Africa, the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movements of 2015–2016 made clear that universities have to change materially but also epistemically – thereby attaching calls for greater access to higher education to ones for epistemic justice. Their demands and struggles, across South African university campuses, made additionally clear only the obvious, that the end of colonisation – decolonisation as a political event – did not mean the end of colonial modes of knowing or being: ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres in Ahmed, 2019, p. 60). ² Latin American decolonial theorists like Maldonado-Torres, Mignolo, Quijano and others stress the epistemic dimensions of this endurance. Similarly, Nigam (2020) has named as ‘epistemic dispossession’ the fact that colonialism rendered non-western languages, vocabularies and ideas inadequate for producing theory, on the one hand, and made, on the other, a dependence on western theory inevitable for understanding non-western predicaments (see also Majumder, 2022; Menon, 2022).

The coloniality of knowledge makes universities obvious sites of contestation and struggle (Bhambra et al., 2018). Student activists in South Africa – ‘Fallists’ as they came to be known locally and globally – exposed the workings of the colonial university at multiple scales, moving quickly beyond the university to call into account the state itself. Within the university, they demanded a decolonised curriculum, the removal of colonial iconography and symbols on campus, and the better representation of black students and staff. Through intersectionality, the women and queer students who sustained these movements critiqued inherited Black consciousness repertoires for their gender blindness and insisted that decolonial futures must also be gender just ones (see, for instance, Ndelu et al., 2017).

Ahmed, in a remarkable doctoral dissertation on #RMF, theorises these movements, after Mignolo, as acts of epistemic disobedience, that ‘create a crack in the university’s wall of epistemic coloniality’ (Ahmed, 2019, p. 66). He is quick to stress that student activism cannot be reduced to decolonial theories. On the contrary – and in ways that echo how Mignolo and associates centre the production of decolonial knowledge in social movements and in communities-in-struggle – it was student movements that placed decolonising imperatives into the South African mainstream.

But the mainstreaming of a decolonial framework is not without its tensions or limits. The Bolivian/Aymara feminist sociologist Cusicanqui accuses elite Southern intellectuals like Mignolo of building ‘a small empire within an empire’ (2012, p. 98). ³ New gurus who create new canons can end up ‘neutralising’ practices of decolonisation and their radical or empowering potential (see also Puwar, 2019). To counter this neutralisation, Cusicanqui (2012, p. 107) recommends:

. . . constructing South–South links that will allow us to break the baseless pyramids of the politics and academies of the North and that will enable us to make our own science, in a dialogue among ourselves and with the sciences from our neighboring countries, by affirming our bonds with theoretical currents of Asia and Africa – that is, to confront the hegemonic projects of the North with the renewed strength of our ancestral convictions.

What Cusicanqui notes about the decolonial becoming the new mantra in the North has already materialised, so much so that the decolonial turn appears to have little to no relevance to scholars and activists outside the North. ⁴ In directly responding to this concern, Gopal remarks, in an interview with Shringarpure (2021):

Decolonization is precisely about centering marginalized perspectives, but it’s also about undoing boundaries. And therefore, voices from the Global South have to be brought to a position of equality, but equally, one would need to be attentive to hierarchies within the Global South. It is not then a simple matter of saying, ‘Well, we will bring in a South African or a Brazilian or an Indian intellectual.’ Yes, those voices need to be brought in, but other kinds of hierarchies also need to be thought of.

Gopal’s qualifiers to South–South relations – that they should be non-colonising, given the incommensurability and hierarchies within the South – are significant to think alongside Cusicanqui’s also significant call for constructing South–South solidarities (see also Gopal, 2021). These are not separate or oppositional projects: of demanding inclusion from those marginalised at the (colonial/global) periphery, but also of recognising that the periphery is not a place outside of power. A good example that Gopal mobilises is that of caste in South Asia, a specific instance of the coloniality of power. A decolonial framework can serve to unmask and undo Brahmanical supremacy and caste capitalism – that operate like white supremacy and racial capitalism – by holding to account native hierarchies and tyrannies inflicted by native elites. This offers a more nuanced, albeit a demanding view, as she calls it, of what it might mean to engage the South, in the name of decolonising.

The Fallists too demanded more, and raised, in turn, the stakes of what it means to decolonise. Mbembe (2019, p. 239) writes of their injunction to decolonise as a claim for universities to become spaces of belonging: of ‘radical hospitality’. Musila (2019, p. 287) imagines a different kind of hospitality, which she does not find in research collaborations between Northern and Southern partners:

What would emerge out of these projects if, rather than being encouraged to adopt the registers and theories legitimised by the Northern academic machinery, they were encouraged to pursue the questions they deem relevant, on their own terms and in their own registers? How would the texture of the academy change if it was hospitable to these registers and textures, rather than panel-beating them into adopting the monochromatic registers and accents of thought legitimised by the North?

The South–South exchange that constitutes the grounds for my reflections could well be considered an experiment in the kinds of material and epistemic hospitality that these scholars imagine. It sought to foreground precisely those registers and textures of knowledge production that were not included in or legible to Northern-driven ‘homogenised modes of thought’ (into which African scholars ‘must fit or perish’; Musila, 2019, p. 288). In, moreover, supporting and connecting feminist academics in distinct Southern locales, it foregrounded inclusion and belonging for those marginalised by Northern institutions but also, ironically, less visible to each other. Ultimately, its failures force a more difficult and demanding take on decolonising; one that complicates assumptions that the South–South will ‘break the baseless pyramids of the politics and academies of the North’ (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 107).

Theorising gender from and across the South

Funded by a major US philanthropic foundation, the research project that I was the Principal Investigator of over 2019–2022 was hosted at a highly ranked and well-resourced South African university and intended to support new scholarship on gender and sexuality across Africa and India. The project was organised around particular themes and motivated by specific aspirations. One such aspiration was to promote feminist theory from the South, in a clear move against historical divisions of epistemic labour, where the South provides the raw data for metropolitan feminist theorising. Reading Hountondji’s analysis of this division of labour into the contemporary landscape of producing sociological knowledge of gender, Connell (2014, p. 554) writes:

The global periphery still exports data and imports applied science, the global metropole is still the centre of theory and methodology. An international circulation of knowledge workers accompanies the international flows of data, concepts and techniques. Workers from the periphery travel to the metropole for doctoral training, sabbaticals, conferences or better jobs; workers from the metropole frequently travel to the periphery to collect data, rarely to get advanced training or to learn theory.

Of course, there are material reasons for the persistence of these dynamics, namely the vast difference in the ‘scale of resources available for scholarship’ (Connell, 2014, p. 558). These material differences not only mean that gender studies – even in more resource-rich and privileged universities – end up being poorly institutionalised, but it also shapes what kind of research is ultimately undertaken, in the name of women, gender or sexuality. ⁵

I will return to these material and ideological dynamics below. For the moment, let me say that none of these – the geopolitics of knowledge production, processes of extraversion, the division between theory and data, and the institutional scarcity and insecurity experienced in the South – was absent from the conceptualisation of this project. While ‘theory’ begs many questions, our mobilisation of the term drew from African feminists. Given, as I detail later in this article, the dominance of statist and developmentalist logics, especially with the intensification of neoliberal globalisation, they urge the strengthening of critical – as opposed to applied – feminist perspectives (Mama, 2011). We thus sought to support staff and student research in areas not conventionally funded, like queer studies, as opposed to fields more closely linked to governance and development, like public health. While we expanded Eurocentric (and masculinist) ideas of theory to emphasise perspectives that were critical and creative, the promise of Southern feminist theory had its own uses and value in the neoliberal academy, such as attracting external funds. South Africa occupies a dominant position in knowledge production on the African continent, which made a top university located here able to access such a grant in the first place, and to produce ‘theory’ in ways that resonated with global trends in knowledge production. ⁶

The project theorised gender in a comparative and connected way, across countries and continents of the South. It was multi-institutional and multi-locational, incorporating universities in East and South Africa and India. Again, this ambition had both intellectual and material grounds (and implications). Intellectually, it came with the promise of understanding gender across distinct colonial and postcolonial contexts, rather than treating gender as a universal category. Shared histories of colonialism and common postcolonial patterns – in which women’s rights were key to newly decolonised state-making practices, for instance – meant that the regions proposed constituted an amenable ground for comparative and connected thinking. Materially, the project made space – actual or virtual – that Southern feminists could together occupy.

Indeed, whether in public-facing events or in actual publications, we prioritised feminist voices from the South, which grew to include Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Audiences routinely commented on the uniqueness of such a space – as constituting a genuine alternative to Northern dominance and for building epistemological infrastructures across the South that were feminist and queer. Even as it was enabled by the ‘Northern academic machinery’ (Musila, 2019, p. 287), the project’s funder did not call the shots, and in the actual life of the research project, Northern voices and players were almost entirely absent. This did not mean, however, that we could fully opt out of ‘global academic hegemonies’ (Pereira, 2017, p. 169), most evident in the choice to publish research outputs in Northern outlets.

The two partners on the project were in India and Uganda respectively. ⁷ One was a gender and sexuality studies research centre in a new private university. The other was an institutionally older school of women and gender studies, which also included a teaching component. With both, however, the collaboration fell far short of expectations of genuinely collaborative and reciprocal intellectual work and was unable to yield a consolidated or synthesised result. There were at least two reasons for this. The Covid-19 pandemic made in-person meetings impossible, which meant the lack of actual, material space to work closely, negotiate, plan and build together. Secondly, the nature and scale of the project meant that it operated almost like a grant-giving body, funding mini-projects that cohered with its broad themes. This made it easier for partners to engage in projects of their own, by making using of available funds but not by combining vision or labour. What thus ended up transpiring were partners working independently or not at all. The latter was the case with the East African institution, and so the collaboration never really took off, except for our engagements with an individual collaborator and student. The Indian collaboration was, on the face of it, a success. We co-organised a research meeting, supported staff projects across the university, and funded a full postdoctoral position. But the collaboration failed in other ways. Besides the one event we co-organised (and which we fully funded), staff worked and produced output independently of us and we were not included in any of their own (many) research or public-facing activities and events. Both partners echoed deeply rooted epistemic dispositions – habits – that were not reducible to individual personalities or institutional pressures but spoke of colonial logics and neoliberal demands. These were the conditions that produced a terrain of complex and uneven relationships amongst feminist collaborators in the South – of dissonant intimacies.

From data to (queer) theory: The Indian Ivy League

. . . rich peripheral countries, which have the economic resources to produce alternatives, but not necessarily the desire. (Connell, 2007, p. 68)

. . . WGFS scholars (in the centre and (semi-)periphery) have complex, ambivalent and not always fully acknowledged investments in the epistemic and material inequalities of global academic relations. (Pereira, 2017, p. 170)

Connell makes her comments in relation to Australia, which she describes as moving from a site of difference to one of similarity with the metropole. While Australian sociology’s original role was to be – like the colonies – a ‘data mine, a source of ethnographic examples of the primitive’ (Connell, 2007, p. 77), it eventually repositioned itself as making theory, through the adoption of metropolitan theory and methods. For those located in the periphery who are also in fringe disciplines, repositioning might be even more dependent on forms of credibility and legitimacy that only the North can provide. In her reading of the ‘epistemic status’ of women, gender and feminist studies in a semi-peripheral country like Portugal, Pereira (2017) shows how what she calls the modern foreign plays a key role in strengthening the field’s claims and legitimacy locally, even as it reproduces the hegemony of Anglo-American feminist theory and limits, in turn, the flourishing of local knowledge. The Indian Ivy (Sreeram, 2021) I consider represents both these dynamics.

Indian higher education is dominated by professionalised degrees, the fetishisation of technical knowledge, and the lack of interest and investment in liberal arts training. Even the better public universities suffer from institutional challenges – corrupt bureaucracies; uneven teaching and a lack of accountability to students; divides between teaching and research and a lack of funding for research; social inequities; and increased government censorship – that are more intensely felt in the poorly funded humanities streams (Loomba, 2016; see also Sinha Roy, 2014). ⁸

The development of women’s studies can be traced to central government support for the setting up of women’s studies research centres in public universities in the 1980s, but with older origins in the Indian women’s movements’ demands from the 1970s. The close links between the women’s movement and women’s studies directed research away from purely cerebral pursuits to those worthy of activist investments and perceived to be productive of tangible social change (see Roy, 2009; Sinha Roy, 2014). These were also teaching-heavy sites – against what the nomenclature of a research centre might suggest – and invariably dominated by faculty with training in the social sciences (economics and sociology). As I go on to explain of the African landscape in researching gender and sexuality – to which these national research centres are highly comparable – the institutional conditions under which women’s studies took root and developed comprised a limited ground for the growth of more theoretical horizons.

A recent crop of private universities – such as the one with which we partnered – emerged from the mid-2000s. Their establishment and (rapid) growth were helped by the dynamics of India’s economic liberalisation, donations from major Indian corporate tycoons, and amendments to laws governing private universities (see Roy Chowdhury, 2018a). Modelled on the liberal arts colleges in the US and acting as a foil to the systemic challenges faced by Indian public universities, they offered major and minor courses; actively recruited foreign faculty, both Indian and white; and built transnational links with top global universities (especially in the US from where trained faculty arrived). As ‘institutions of excellence’, these institutions were geared towards a global higher education landscape (Sreeram, 2021). Even as they charged exorbitant fees – 6 lakhs of Indian rupees compared to 15,000 in a public university – they had little trouble attracting elite Indian students (Roy Chowdhury, 2018b; Sreeram, 2021). Given the lack of affirmative action or ‘reservation’ in private (as opposed to public) universities, the student body is largely homogeneous: as per a 2018 survey, 80% of students came from upper-caste families (Sreeram, 2021).

Quickly establishing themselves as the preferred choice over a liberal arts education in a public university, they also acted as launch pads for further education in the North. The ‘foreign-educated’ faculty helped in this direction. With humanities and social science degrees from top US-UK universities, including Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues, they represent a new migratory trend: of Indian academics trained in the North returning home. Like the Australian researchers who Connell observes, they maintain Northern networks and use metropolitan epistemic tools and infrastructures to ‘offer credible interventions in metropolitan debates’ (2007, p. 83).

Given the precarious life of state-funded women’s studies centres in India, it is not surprising that staff at these new liberal arts institutions would be amenable to the research and teaching of gender and sexuality. They were also freed from a previous era’s worries and took inspiration from new issues and concerns relating to liberalised India. The Indian women’s movement had, for instance, tended to dismiss sexuality, as a site of activist mobilising and of knowledge production, in urgently responding, instead, to women’s violence and victimisation. Public universities were seen to be comfortable with teaching gender, conceived around the stability of the category of ‘woman’ but less so around sexuality, especially through a queer lens. At new private institutions, students demanded a queer curriculum, which also reflected the sensibilities of a public queer rights movement that gained huge popularity amongst the metropolitan middle-classes from the late 1990s.

The centre we partnered with was unique in prioritising sexuality. But there were other ways in which it stood out in a local field of knowledge production. Unlike women’s studies research centres that effectively acted as teaching departments, this centre was free to undertake a range of intellectually capacious research and public-facing activities, like seminars, conferences and film screenings. Over the pandemic years alone (2020–2021), it hosted successive and consecutive seminar series, featuring numerous guest speakers, either singularly or jointly with international partners (this was also the time of our research collaboration). In contrast, the women’s studies centre of the renowned Jawaharlal Nehru University hosted few such events and immediately attracted public ire for an online talk with an overseas feminist scholar on the Indian occupation of Kashmir. At a time when public universities are increasingly targets of repression at the hands of the ruling Party, our partner appeared to be in a moment of expansion – of developing new public spaces, public archives and publics.

If we return to Pereira’s comments, it is unsurprising that this moment of expansion relied fundamentally on the modern foreign: on a local dependence on and demonstration of transnational links; on having the presence of western scholars in local spaces; and on an absolute allegiance to metropolitan theory. The events and activities of our partner operated with a deep orientation towards the US, reinstating the latter’s status as the site and centre of knowledge production around sexuality and queerness. For instance, an extension of their flagship speaker series – hosted online during the pandemic – featured scholars from North American universities, white and Indian, in conversation with a scholar based in India (though not always; in some instances, two US-based academics conversed, one white, one Indian). The series featured, perhaps even for the first time in Indian higher education, celebrity white queer theorists – Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam and Lee Edelman. While speakers were selected as a result of their popularity, the curation seemed directed to what is ‘saleable in a global market’, in an instance of what Nigam calls an export-led model of knowledge production (2020, p. xvii).

The chosen format of the series was also revealing – two speakers responded to a singular question in a polemical style (‘what is sexuality?’; ‘is it a right?’). The format demanded the adoption of a mode of speaking as if from nowhere, in universals or abstractions – the principal way in which Theory, especially western theory, tends to be recognised as such (applicable to everyone, everywhere, at all times). ⁹ White queer theorists spoke consistently in universals while most of the Indian speakers drew on the particularity of context and culture (‘Bollywood’; laws in India). Speakers evoked categories – queerness, queer negativity, normativity, transness – and critical frameworks (besides queer theory) – critical race theory, disability studies, black studies, new indigenous studies – and theorists (Sylvia Winter, Fred Moten, Elizabeth Povinelli) – familiar to those who traffic regularly in and perform ‘high theory’ in the humanities. The series assumed a public who was similarly familiar with the terms of engagement on offer: a public for whom the North/US/whiteness was the default frame of reference when it came to queerness.

African feminists and queer scholars were not invited to speak at these events or future ones, which were slightly more diverse in terms of speakers. They remained behind-the-scenes, invisible funders of projects, the makers of epistemic infrastructures but with little epistemic status of their own. Macharia (2016, p. 185) gestures towards similar asymmetries when it comes to what is now considered ‘queer African studies’ in the US, which does not engage the conceptual frameworks available in African studies:

Reading through this emerging body of work, it is difficult to imagine that African philosophers . . . have ever written anything that conceptualizes personhood, individuality, or community. . . . the work of thinking through queer Africa will be mostly illegible to US and European ears trained by and embedded in LGBTI studies. Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as ‘data’ or ‘evidence,’ not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies.

Macharia makes these remarks in resisting the area studies logics of colonial epistemologies, in which the ‘African’ is also not easily placed in conversation with the ‘Indian/Asian’. And only either the ‘African’ or the ‘Indian/Asian’ can speak from a site of difference or particularity to the universality of Northern theory (one native informant at a time, please!). These geodisciplinary designations – African/Asian – make little sense outside of colonial rubrics and the North (Macharia, 2016, p. 183). ¹⁰

In ways that Macharia notes of US queer theorists, it was easier for our Indian partners to reach for a Judith Butler, Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam than it was for a Zethu Matebeni, Stella Nyazi, Pumla Gqola, Sylvia Tamale or even Keguro Macharia. They had the resources and access, through my project, to shape conversations and publics differently, but perhaps not the desire (to recall Connell). Given the fringe status of certain disciplines (to also recall Pereira), non-western scholars may have ambivalent or contradictory desires, or even desires that they cannot realise. Notwithstanding the causes, these were the grounds for sustaining a mono intellectual culture – one that is epistemologically homogeneous (Musila, 2019) – and of being less hospitable to intellectual traditions from elsewhere. ¹¹

Some theorists from India are currently posing alternatives to colonial epistemology, precisely by ‘thinking across traditions’ (Banerjee in Chattopadhyay, 2018; Banerjee et al., 2016; Nigam, 2020). They make clear that they are not rejecting western theory – or western/Northern-located scholars – in a dangerous and defensive nativism (as in the Hindu-right’s appropriation of decolonial thought). Rather, they insist on treating the west as one amongst many sources of thinking about the non-west (and thus undermining its universality). Their insistence is even more important given how little postcolonial theorising has drawn upon ‘genealogies of intellection from the decolonized world’, preferring to stay ‘within the terrain of Western social theory’ (Menon, 2018 cited in Nigam, 2020, p. xvii). While Indian intellectuals – from the Subaltern Studies school to metropolitan feminists (see Connell, 2007) – have considered the limits and possibilities of deploying Northern concepts to understand Southern realities, they have rarely turned to non-western conceptual resources. In contrast to the critiques developed in postcolonial scholarship that still centre the west, Banerjee et al. (2016, p. 42) propose to ‘move from the position of a critic of Western theory to that of one which composes and assembles new theory from different sources and different histories’. ¹² To reiterate: the point is not whether to engage the western canon or its scholars; it is rather to aspire towards an intellectual capaciousness that must necessarily interrogate the parameters of epistemic inclusion.

If our Indian partner proved somewhat inhospitable to African feminist thought, one needs to ask how hospitable it was to non-elites amongst its own? Given the caste homogeneity of the staff and student body, Sreeram (2021) shows how internal culture at India’s Ivys is geared toward the flourishing of the upper-caste student alone. It is thus easier for these institutions to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter struggles in the US, she notes, than it is for them to take seriously caste discrimination and Dalit resistance in their own midst. ¹³ Coloniality comes in many forms, constituting landscapes of hostility and hospitality that haunt each other.

African data, global supply chains and knowledge asymmetries

While the Indian partners of our South–South project attempted to position themselves as makers of Theory – thus gaining proximity to the centre and establishing distance from the periphery – the Ugandan partners appeared to meet Northern needs in other, historically enduring, and contextually specific ways. They too participated in an asymmetrical geopolitical knowledge system, in which the South functions as the producer and exporter of data, with the North assuming for itself the role of processing data and producing theory – universal, scientific, normative. Both Southern collaborators also exhibited, in their silence or lack of reciprocity or exchange, little will ‘to link with the intellectual projects of other regions of the periphery’ (Connell, 2007, p. 86).

It is not without irony that feminist researchers located in India and Uganda felt they had little to meaningfully share. As newly decolonised ‘Third World’ countries, they have, in fact, much in common when it comes to institutional histories of women’s studies. The origins of women’s or gender studies – though obviously beyond my scope here – can be traced to the entangled logics of state developmentalism, women’s movement organising, and the compulsions to rely on bilateral development aid, especially with structural adjustment interventions from the 1990s that reduced government subventions to universities (see Tamale, 2020). These national and transnational forces produced a coherent and lasting knowledge project when it came to knowing women/gender (and belatedly, sexuality).

African feminists have been especially attuned to the implications, both material and epistemic, of the yoking of gender research to the women in development (WID) paradigm (see also Mitra, 2023). With origins in the 1970s, WID, with its assumptions around African underdevelopment, patriarchy and African women, continues to exercise the imagination of important publics, namely states and international donors. It equally informs graduate research, university curricula, workshops and conferences, besides policy-making and advocacy around women’s rights. Mama (2011, p. 6) shows how the WID approach squashes ‘a critical feminist perspective’, while Lewis (2005) argues how a pervasive developmentalism, enabled by conservative postcolonial states and neoliberal market reforms, severely limits the development of more expansive epistemic horizons. Instead, it fuels: an instrumentalisation of gender research towards narrow, technocratic agendas and interests; forms of depoliticisation and deradicalisation (and a break with earlier links between women’s studies and women’s movements); an essentialising of ‘woman’ as a stable category and subject of knowledge; the prioritisation of certain ‘safe’ areas of investigation – such as sexuality as it pertains to reproductive health and population control – and the marginalisation of others – sexual orientation and same-sex desire; and the foreclosure not only of more theoretically attuned, critical or innovative thought, but of knowledge which would in fact respond to the material challenges faced by African women in more robust ways (see also Ampofo et al., 2004; Lewis, 2008; Mama, 1996). Even as African feminists have offered alternative, critical and radical epistemologies of gender, Lewis (2005, p. 382) shows the persistence of ‘conservative traditions’ that ‘obstruct progress in African gender research and advocacy’. ¹⁴

International development played a direct role in the establishment of women’s studies in Uganda; the catalytic event being the Third UN Women’s conference in Nairobi in 1985. It was, for instance, at this conference that the ground was laid for the establishment of a department of women’s studies at Makerere University, the first of its kind in Uganda and in East Africa and one of the oldest programmes on the continent (see Ernstberger, 2020; Mwaka, 1996; Ssewakiryanga, 2002). For its early emergence and eventual institutionalisation, women’s studies in this East African university was dependent on international donors and state support, and it reflected the needs and concerns of these key patrons. When it was first set up, in the early 1990s, both research and pedagogy were directed ‘to provide reference material for development agencies, donors, researchers, and NGOs within and outside Uganda’ (Mwaka, 1996, p. 460). Ernstberger observes, in an article published in 2020, similar trends. If anything, NGOs appear to have come to play a greater role in determining the field of feminist knowledge production, not least through the promise of providing employment to those graduating with degrees in women’s studies. ¹⁵ Some of the postgraduate students that Ernstberger spoke to saw in women’s studies the potential of a stable, secure job in the public or non-profit sector; they also actively eschewed labels like feminism (the replacement of women’s studies with gender studies was also about marketability and employability; see Lewis, 2005, 2008).

Given these entrenched (colonial) traditions of development-driven and donor-funded research that continue to haunt African (and Indian) public institutions, our South–South collaboration envisioned the materialisation of different epistemic possibilities. Over the collection of data that fed governmental and non-governmental needs, it supported intellectual pursuits that were critical of and freed from these demands. Moving, for instance, beyond the spectre of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, one graduate project deftly (re)inserted love, sex and mobile phones into the organisation of intimacies in Johannesburg. But our women’s studies partner in Uganda seemed less responsive to this intellectual remit. Staff responded either in silence or asked us what to research. While speculative, given that this collaboration failed to even take off, my sense is that staff were more comfortable with collaborating with knowledge projects that spoke more directly to embedded epistemic habits.

Our partner’s public website suggested that the bulk of research, whether being undertaken individually or collaboratively and funded externally or internally, was of a highly applied and empirical nature, around familiar themes like health, population, economic development, and cohered with the goals of ‘national transformation’. The teaching programme of the department echoed WID logics, offering undergraduate and graduate courses – and even trainings and diplomas – in gender and development, envisioned as directly ‘capacitating’ local government, various ministries and community development leaders. It was not surprising, then, that much of the funded research they were undertaking was around HIV/AIDS, and later, Covid-19. These large-scale, multi-player projects would obviously provide greater and more lasting forms of capital and resources than what we might have offered, as a relatively smaller-scale and primarily scholarly-oriented research project. ¹⁶

If we turn, further, to an international conference on gender that the department hosted – at the end of our collaboration – we see even more clearly the epistemic assumptions, habits and infrastructures in place. Like the flagship seminar series that our Indian partner hosted online, this large-scale, three-day, hybrid conference is a good indicator of the constitution of local knowledge and publics, especially as it was meant to act as a timely review of gender studies in Africa. Showcasing nearly 500 abstracts from mostly African researchers from the continent and some from the diaspora (available online, alongside the programme), the conference showed the enduring impact of colonial epistemologies – of anthropology and economic development, in particular – in shaping scholarly and public discourse on gender in Africa. Abstracts proposing to study African religious and cultural practices, customary laws and nuptial rituals sat alongside those seeking to support women’s empowerment – in line with sustainable development goals –in areas like health, violence against women, development, agriculture and so on. The book of abstracts constitutes, in fact, a test case of some of Lewis’s critical observations – suggestive of epistemological trends that are highly applied, empirical and positivist, on the one hand, or culturalist and nativist, on the other. ¹⁷ Through the establishment of causal relations between social phenomena (gender and voters’ choices, or links between climate change and sustainable development), they displayed a commitment towards clear policy imperatives and outcomes. Most of the abstracts were of a social science bent, with few representing traditional humanities disciplines, like philosophy or history (there was little evidence of inter- or transdisciplinary scholarship, even as it is hard to assess from an abstract alone). Papers proposed also appeared to draw on research overwhelmingly undertaken within the rubric of the nation-state, be it Uganda, Nigeria or South Africa. Notwithstanding robust regional networks for gender research on the continent, this conference articulated with a methodological nationalism that is common to area studies. In writing about the limits of Ugandan feminist scholarship, Hundle (2019, p. 49) draws attention to both a methodological nationalism and what she calls ‘postcolonial patriarchal nativism’, that together:

. . . limi[t] its subjects of study to indigenous Ugandan women and excludes Indian women. In doing so, it avoids the possibilities of analysing women’s experiences of heteropatriarchal violence relationally, thereby reproducing nativist nationalist tendencies. In addition, unlike in South Africa, intersectional feminist frameworks for understanding multiple race-, class-, gender-, religious-, community- and caste-based oppressions may exist in East Africa, but they have yet to be more fully incorporated into feminist research methodologies and scholarly analyses.

With just these words, Hundle powerfully undermines notions of – and affective investments in – a singular and stable ‘feminist Africa’, as well as in Afro-Asian solidarities. There are obviously epistemic differences in East African and South African feminist assumptions and approaches, which were scarcely anticipated by a project like mine. On the contrary, it anticipated sameness and solidarity. In the current conjuncture of global neoliberalism and political polarity, there is, in fact, a sharp waning of Southern solidarity (Sud & Sanchez-Ancochea, 2022) and a resurgent nationalism, methodological and otherwise.

If the women’s studies department that we partnered with seemed inhospitable to critical and transnationally informed epistemologies, then this was not true of the entire institution. In a simple reminder of how internally differentiated – and even unequal – university spaces can be, the same Ugandan university housed a globally well-known research centre, which produced high theory, with many Northern-trained scholars who circulated in Northern and Southern academic and publishing spaces alike. The centre described its mandate in clear contrast to dominant cultures of consultancy and developmentalism in higher education. It is also worth noting that our only meaningful collaboration with the university took place with an individual scholar and a student located here, in the North in the South.

To put it differently, the same Southern institution provided a range of services to the global academic market, albeit of differing and differential value: raw data which would be typically provided by researchers and field staff, who would also work as consultants and gender trainers in the development industry, for the consumption of state and bilateral aid agencies; and a high value commodity – Theory – that can be consumed globally, because of its legibility to and status in the academic North. In this way, the research centre was comparable to our Indian partner, who employed white queer theorists and the performance of US theory to accrue for itself forms of symbolic capital, local credibility and public visibility. Its collaboration with a South African university brought capital and resources but not legitimacy or status. And in ways that again confounded easy expectations of decolonising and solidarity, our African partner was less inclined to break away from the ‘development servicing’ (Mama, 2011) that many African feminists have been shoehorned into doing, at least since neoliberal structural reforms, as a way of sustaining their activities and ensuring their relevance. But let us be clear that in its own ambitions to produce ‘theory’ from the South, my project also participated in a shared dynamic of consolidating global knowledge asymmetries and the coloniality of global epistemic value chains.

Conclusion: Nobody said it would be easy

The failures of this collaboration – to provide meaningful and reciprocal intellectual exchange – are its own. My collaborators will no doubt have their own explanations for it (and experiences of it). Research collaborations tend to emerge out of and align closely with the temporalities and demands of the neoliberal university; they have little time and space to develop organically or to come into their own. Our choices of partners were partly rooted in convenience. A private university was easier to partner with than a public one in India, while an existing memorandum of understanding and prior collaborations with the Ugandan institution made it an obvious choice. My own location in this project, as Principal Investigator, was also a convenient one. As an Indian (passport holder), living and working in South Africa (with considerable Northern links and connections), I was an ideal native to lead this project.

As someone invested in transnational feminist goals, for scholarship and community, I also operated with a distinct set of desires, even fantasies. Of all the distinct components of the project, I was most invested in African and South Asian knowledge and political intimacies. After all, I had cut my intellectual teeth on those like Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander and Gayatri Spivak who revealed the silencing of colonial women at the hands of imperial feminists, and the promise of transnational feminist solidarity. At a time of rising calls to decolonise the university and undo its colonial-imperial lineages, these postcolonial and transnational feminist legacies seemed more relevant than ever. But they also led me to anticipate sameness, to underestimate difference and inequality, and ultimately, to consider certain things to be failures and others to be a success.

What I read as failure – the lack of reciprocity, solidarity and exchange – reveals much about my own desires for but also wider investments in the South–South as being intrinsically positive, even liberatory, given its status as remedy to Northern epistemic hegemony. The desire for intimacy, symmetry or commensurability can, however, elide – even obscure – the frictions, asymmetries, hierarchies and differences that exist within the South. They also mask certain obvious truths. We know, for instance, that Southern theorists are not always in conversation with each other; on the contrary, the coloniality of knowledge means that they will engage decolonial theory from the North rather than from elsewhere in the South (Moosavi, 2020). We also know that without material redistribution – a change in funding streams for feminist scholarship, for instance – decolonisation is a mere metaphor. Finally, we know that rubrics like the North–South and west/non-west can end up flattening the complexities of academic work in unequal geopolitical conditions – even in one and the same setting – given their tendency to traffic in homogenisations and generalisations. ¹⁸

My institutional home, in South Africa, can be described as the North in the South, but internally uneven, as many of these institutions are. We have academics trained in the North who speak in globally legible academic vocabularies, and colleagues whose epistemic dispositions are oriented far more locally than globally. Institutional politics and practices tend to reward Northern-facing academics and research in matters of probation and promotion. Compared to our partners, my home institution was in an obviously stronger position, holding the purse strings of a generous Northern grant, which afforded me, as PI, distinct forms of advantage and power. It meant that I could curate public events with Southern speakers alone, while choosing to publish in Northern channels (like this journal). As a recognition of these contradictions and inequalities, I made minimal demands around publications when it came to project partners, but still acted transactionally in expecting Southern scholars to be in conversation with one another.

Against easy celebrations of Southern exchanges and romanticised visions of Afro-Asian feminist solidarity, the South–South emerged a terrain of dissonant intimacies; it was not merely infused with nativist and nationalist biases but also with forms of coloniality. The absence of western institutions and players did not amount to anything straightforwardly decolonial in practice. On the contrary, the asymmetries amongst the institutional players on the project – and internally within institutions themselves – played out in recognisably colonial ways, stabilising a global division of knowledge production in which theory-making is the custodian of the North, for which raw data are provided by the South. In this global supply chain, actors were differently, unevenly and unequally positioned. Some provided, in ways that Southern locales have always meant to, raw data for feeding the theory mills of the North, while others transformed data into globally legible (queer) theory. There were constraints and gains to these dynamics, as well as in the desire – fulfilled or not – to shift them.

What might be an alternative to top-down imperatives to decolonise, through the ‘South–South’? Social movements have comprised organic sites of decolonising and transnationalism. As Ahmad, for instance, says (2022, p. 58):

Decolonial theorists – from outside disciplinary sociology – have been more insistent on centring the worlds of colonised subjects and the knowledge of their movements. . . . Perhaps that is why student movements, more than institutional academics, were central to placing decolonisation at the centre of university agendas.

Indeed, the transformations that took place in South African higher education would not have happened without the violent rupture wrought by student activists. When I first arrived at my university in South Africa, just before these movements broke, US-based scholars – from decolonial theorists like Mignolo and Maldonado-Torres to feminists like Butler – were regular presences on campus. In the afterlife of the movements, African scholars became far more visible on these platforms. This was merely one way of recognising the epistemic status of African knowledge and of responding to student demands for greater and more radical hospitality – such that the African student might say (of the university): ‘This is my home. I am not a foreigner. I belong here’ (Mbembe, 2016, p. 30; see Nuttall, 2019 on the ‘redistributed university’). Fallism also travelled – from the South to the North, most prominently as #RMFOxford – but also within the South, in ways that are less recognised. Indian students took up the hashtag to reveal the Indian state as a colonising power and to materialise more intersectional protest cultures (see Sumati, 2016).

To be sure, these movements failed – at least, in their primary goal of ensuring free, decolonial higher education for all. But failure chartered an alternative path, in exposing the limits of post-Apartheid interventions as well as their coloniality and inhospitality to the black African. Failures – and losers – in academic worlds can also offer an alternative route to knowledge production, away from ‘market economies and the demand for narrow expertise’ (Halberstam, 2011, p. 7). The failures of this project reveal enduring institutional logics and histories – colonial and neoliberal – which shape the directions, possibilities and limits of decolonising initiatives, but also the desires and aspirations – the affective economies – that drive them. This account of failure makes visible what is otherwise hidden in narratives of institutional and personal success.

At the very least, the failures of a South–South research collaboration caution against any simplistic celebration of South–South connections as being intrinsically decolonising, especially outside of or delinked from social movements. Failure raises the stakes – it requires a more demanding relation to decolonisation – by showing that the universities of the South are not straightforwardly hospitable to decolonial thinking and practice, or that achieving decolonial aspirations here too will not be met without frustration or struggle. It reveals liberatory pedagogies that are feminist and queer to be hospitable to the reproduction rather than the disruption of coloniality, whether out of compulsion or choice. And finally, it shows that the ‘South–South’ cannot constitute remedy without a material redistribution of the global knowledge economy. Recognising these tensions and limits is not hard, but chartering what is to be done is harder. Nobody said it would be easy.