Before it is a coordinate, the South is a cartographic operation and a produced condition. Modernity transformed cardinal divisions into hierarchies, loading them with moral, political and epistemic meaning. Within that framework, the North arrogated to itself universality, rationality and centrality, whilst the South became associated with the periphery, with particularity, with backwardness — or with a reservoir of alterity. These directions became, at the same time, political and economic positions: the South was converted into available nature, into territory awaiting exploitation by the North. The compass thus ceased to be an instrument of spatial orientation and became a technology of cultural classification; the map became a programme of economic and political domination.
To think the South is to interrogate these cartographies and to expose their violences. It is not simply a matter of inverting the map — of placing the South at the top — but of examining the matrix that converted these directions into destiny. Beyond geographical location, the South is a bundle of socioeconomic relations structured by indebtedness, uneven development and the expansion of extractive and financial capital. In this sense, it designates a historical form of experience traversed by colonialisms — external and internal —, by political violence and by successive processes of capitalist accumulation.
Colonialism altered ancestral territories and transformed them conceptually. It fixed regions as archetypes of alterity or as zones of extraction — of minerals, oil, gas, forests, waters, bodies and knowledges —, converting them into energy reserves, into dumping grounds, into open frontiers for projects that promise progress whilst destroying landscapes and lives. To think the South today is, then, to interrogate the unequal distribution of modernity's ecological costs. Global warming, ocean acidification, the expansion of monocultures, salmon farms, and terrestrial and marine aquaculture operations, or the routes carved through indigenous territories — all are effects of a geopolitics that converted certain latitudes into sacrifice zones.
This condition produced a division of the world in which the "centre" monopolises theoretical production whilst the periphery supplies "cases". Yet the South also emerged, in counterpoint, as a critical category and as a cartography of resistance against the power of the North and its geopolitics of knowledge. "Thinking from the South" has meant decentring the universal subject — white, European, Anglophone — and recovering the force of situated knowledges. The formula, however, is not without its tensions. As Juan Obarrio (2013) noted, speaking "from" the South can imply addressing the North as the privileged audience. Hence the necessity of thinking "to the South" — understanding it as, simultaneously, a historical condition of elaboration and an object of thought, where theory is generated in dialogue with public demands, social movements and territorial struggles. In that vein, "beyond the South", as Pablo Wright (2021) suggests, calls for the opening of other orientations that overflow binary oppositions.
The critique of universalism does not consist solely in disputing who produces theory. It consists in questioning the assumption that the Earth is an inert object available for calculation. Where the modern map sees resources, worlds persist that understand territory as relation. Read through their historical and cosmological experiences, the South destabilises that premise and reveals that what presents itself as development is, more often than not, dispossession. To conceptualise the South is not, then, to fix a stable geographical identity, but to dismantle inherited compasses and examine the historical conditions that produced the hierarchies. From this standpoint, the South is a form of life and, at the same time, an epistemological orientation — a critical position from which the ontological limits of the modern project become legible: its separation of nature from culture, its abstraction of territory, its faith in infinite growth.
In the Anthropocene — or, more precisely, in the historical regime that made it possible to name it — the South becomes a mirror. What unfolds here — melting, extractivism, contamination — anticipates global processes. But here, too, other ways of inhabiting collapse are being rehearsed: experiences anchored in practices of care, in the memories of landscape, and in territorial resistances that recall that the Earth is a shared condition. The South is not a destination; it reveals from where — and with whom — to think and to act in times of planetary crisis.
Ana Cecilia Gerrard