Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South - Paperback

by Dilip M. Menon (Editor)

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines - history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory - this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

Author Biography

Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. He is a historian of South Asia and has recently been working with oceanic histories and questions of epistemology from the Global South. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020) and the forthcoming Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Routledge, 2022).

Professor Menon was recently awarded the 2021 Falling Walls Foundation Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities.