From the South Out

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between the Global South and the neoliberal regime imposed on it by the Global North as the latest element in a succession of interrelated historical interventions that include colonization, imperialism and global capitalism, and globalization. It begins by exploring how, while asymmetrical, this relationship is co-constitutive, rather than merely one based on the North's global hegemony over the rest of the planet. At material, financial, and onto-political levels, the existence of the Global North is simply impossible without the Global South, and vice versa. Over time, however, as neoliberalism becomes increasingly pervasive across the world, a horizontal multiplication of relationships has replaced the original North–South distribution of power rooted historically in the colonizer–colonized binary. The chapter then explores the work of Mohsin Hamid and, in particular, his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia for its ability to dismantle via a number of narrative strategies the figure of homo œconomicus, i.e., the model subject at the core of the neoliberal regime, as a horizontal intervention, that is, from the South out. This dismantling, ultimately, results in the creation of a planetary solidarity based on the rejection of globalized neoliberalism's individualism and the development of a relational kind of subjectivity.