ABSTRACT
Over the last two years, at least in the academic circles of postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa in which I move, the expression theory from the South has started to echo increasingly more frequently and more loudly in a variety of intellectual spaces, from anthropology to urban studies, and from politics to sociolinguistics. For example, at a symposium titled Language Practices, Migration, and Labour organized at the University of the Western Cape in October 2012, several South Africa-based scholars raised reservations about the applicability and relevance of the notion of ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007) to the multilingual and multi-semiotic conditions in contemporary South Africa (see also Deumert 2014). In a similar vein, the question of how cities from the South should be theorized from a non-western perspective loomed large over an inter-disciplinary workshop on urban spaces held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in April 2013. Far from being isolated instances deployed to set the scene for this chapter, these examples are historical materializations of more long-standing discursive formations that have revolved around the question of developing theoretical tools through which to capture phenomena in postcolonial conditions. Such discussions have received renewed impetus as a result of, and in response to, the relatively recent publication of Raewyn Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory as well as Jean and John Comaroff’s (2012) Theory from the South.
