A Message from the Editor: Teaching Global South Studies: Bringing a Twentieth-Century Project into the Twenty-First Century

A Message from the EditorTeaching Global South Studies: Bringing a Twentieth-Century Project into the Twenty-First Century Ryan Alexander In 1947, the US government, on the initiative of Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, established the program that to this day bears his name. His proposition was based on the simple premise that if the United States proposed to lead the world, then its policy makers and intellectuals should do so humanely, and with greater sensitivity, knowledge, and understanding than what they had displayed in the past. In his words, "America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world." Context, as always, is important here: World War II had just ended, and the United States found itself at the center of a large but still fragile western alliance. The common view was that this alliance, designed to ensure peace, democracy, security, and freedom, faced the grave threat of incipient communism. Such concerns motivated the containment-oriented foreign policy doctrine of Harry Truman, which would carry into successive administrations and helped draw the geopolitical contours of an emerging cold war. Out of this milieu came the three-world concept. The "first world" consisted of the newly empowered United States and the devastated but rebuilding nations of western Europe, along with a handful of global affiliates (chiefly Canada, Australia, and the also soon-to-be-rebuilt Japan), locked into irresolvable conflict with a "second world" consisting of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies (and, on and off, China). There was no real doubt as to which side had the [End Page xi] advantage in the metaphorical chess game that would play out on the board of global geopolitics over the next four decades. But while western global hegemony was assured, domination was always just out of reach, and thus the United States had to settle for soft power as the approach of first preference. And then there was the "third world"—the nonaligned states of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America—which were, with few exceptions, the products of colonialism and its grim socioeconomic legacies. Nobody, not Fulbright or Truman or anyone else, could have predicted exactly how things were going to go for this part of the world in the decades to come, although the signs were there. We of course know now that in the coming decades this part of the world would convulse with revolutionary fervor—nationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-anything representing the centuries-old system that had robbed their resources, exploited their people, and stymied their political destinies. Truman's containment doctrine was prudent; Fulbright's soft-touch cultural internationalism was prophetic. I don't want to suggest that we locate the origin of the multidisciplinary academic project known today as Global South Studies in the Fulbright Program. But I do want to suggest that first-world preoccupation with third-world conditions at least correlates with it. If Third-World Studies was primarily a projection of the mentalities of the world's socioeconomic core onto its periphery, then its successor, Global South Studies, has the potential to develop a more humane, place-centered perspective of this part of the world.1 But toward what end? Is an organization like the Association of Global South Studies, whose primary function is managing academic conferences and supporting the production of an academic journal, capable of "improving the quality of life" in these areas, as the official foreword to this journal indicates? I believe the answer is yes, as I'll explain. [End Page xii] Let's face an obvious fact: in relative terms, very few people read academic journals. They're not designed for mass consumption. And this also means that they are designed to preach to the choir, so to speak. Few, if any, people will pick up an issue of the Journal of Global South Studies and be instantly converted to a lifetime of interest in a framework of analysis with which they were previously unfamiliar. The same goes for academic conferences—these are designed for the already-initiated. These two...

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