South-South Dialogues is a virtual speaker series hosted by Global South Studies. It brings together scholars working on South-South exchanges, flows, and comparison across disciplines and from around the world, with the aim of making connections and creating conversations across academic systems. Each session will feature two speakers presenting recent work, followed by conversation with the audience.
Sessions are not recorded, but a reading list for each presentation will be posted online after the event.
Session 1: Laura Efron (National University of Quimes and University of Buenos Aires) and Estefanía Bournot (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Laura Efron, “Radical Thinking in Circulation: South African Translations of Latin American Revolutionary Ideas”
This presentation examines how South African organizations engaged with and reworked Latin American revolutionary history during the apartheid era. From the 1960s to the 1980s, educational and civil organizations in South Africa actively studied Latin American histories of struggle, mobilizing them as comparative frameworks through which to interpret and challenge their own conditions of oppression.
Through the production of educational booklets, seminars, and public events, these organizations taught Latin American revolutionary experiences not as distant models to be replicated, but as resources to be critically reinterpreted. Drawing in particular on Paulo Freire’s perspective of popular education, South African activists translated Latin American ideas into locally meaningful pedagogical practices and political vocabularies.
The presentation argues that this process constituted an active form of intellectual translation rather than passive reception. In translating concepts, strategies, and narratives of resistance, South African organizations redefined key political categories and produced new forms of situated knowledge. By foregrounding these South–South circulations and their re-articulation within a Commonwealth context, this presentation contributes to a connected history of post-Bandung political and intellectual exchanges that challenges linear models of South–North influence.
Estefanía Bournot, “The Specular Gaze: Rethinking Africa and Brazil across the South Atlantic”
What happens when Brazil is read from Africa, and Africa from Brazil? This talk proposes the notion of the “specular gaze” as a way of approaching the South Atlantic through the perspectives that its opposite shores have historically produced of one another. Rather than taking Europe or the North Atlantic as the implicit point of reference, a specular approach asks how African and Latin American writers have used the other side of the South Atlantic as a vantage point from which to reinterpret their own histories, cultures, and diasporic formations.
I explore this dynamic through two writers whose trajectories move in opposite directions across the Atlantic. Brazilian writer and diplomat Antonio Olinto, who lived in Lagos between 1960 and 1962, turned his encounter with newly independent Nigeria into a lens through which to reconsider Brazil’s African past and the historical movements connecting both regions. Several decades later, Togolese writer Kangni Alem approached Brazil from the African side of the Atlantic, devoting a cycle of novels to the memory of Afro-Brazilian returnees and their descendants in West Africa.
Reading Olinto and Alem together reveals a South Atlantic shaped not by a unidirectional history of displacement from Africa to the Americas, but by repeated movements, returns, encounters, and acts of cultural translation. Their works recover commercial, diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural connections that have often disappeared from dominant accounts of Atlantic history, while complicating conventional understandings of diaspora itself. Ultimately, I propose the specular gaze as a decolonial approach to South–South comparison: one that displaces the West as the privileged center of reference and brings different regions of the Global South into direct relation with one another.
Session 2: Noemi Alfieri (NOVA University of Lisbon; Roma Tre University) and Qiyu Chen (University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale)
Noemi Alfieri, “Literary Circulations and Political Cartographies from Leipzig to Turin: Dislocating Transnational Solidarities with Lusophone Africa in the 1960’s”
How can we trace alternative literary cartographies of anticolonial solidarities which do not take place around the former imperial metropoles? What can those cartographies tell us about transnational networks and the circulation of African literatures written in Portuguese, but also about the cities in which they took place? Drawing on archival material, press articles, and literary works, this talk will trace possible routes of transnational solidarities and circulations of Angolan writers, activists and intellectuals between the 1950s and the 1970s, with a special focus on Turin and Leipzig. It does so starting from Costa Andrade’s poems about Turin, published in Tempo Angolano em Itália (Felman-Rêgo, São Paulo 1963), from the letters exchanged between Viriato da Cruz in Conakry and UGEAN and UNTA in Leipzig, preserved in the archives of Associação Tchiweka de Documentação, and newspaper articles from well-known newspapers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) such as Neue Zeit and Berliner Zeitung.
While both cities have a solid history of political commitment and internationalism, allied to a strong cultural action, their role in anticolonial solidarities has not yet received scholarly attention, especially for what concerns the liberation of countries once under Portuguese rule.
Those are starting points to work towards shifting traditional political cartographies, reframing the role of cities that are often absent from official narratives of the struggles, but which nevertheless – with all their contradictions and power dynamics – played significant roles in the dissemination of anti-colonial causes and literature written in Portuguese, highlighting their networks with Conakry, Algiers, São Paulo and Rabat.
Qiyu Chen, “Acceleration and Black Utopian Vision in Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Zulu Heart (1974)”
This talk examines Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Zulu Heart (1974), a fictional rendition of the controversial second heart transplant performed in apartheid South Africa, in which the heart of a Coloured man was transplanted into a white recipient. Blending fantasy, romance, and adventure fiction, the novel follows an Afrikaner doctor who, after receiving the heart of a Black miner, undergoes a political and spiritual transformation that culminates in a revolutionary mission against apartheid. Situating this novel within the Black utopian tradition, I argue that the novel stages both the possibilities and limits of Black utopian imagination through multiple forms of acceleration: narrative acceleration, Graham Du Bois’s publishing strategies, and the aporias produced by both.
Drawing on the novel alongside archival materials and biographical evidence concerning Graham Du Bois’s efforts to publish and circulate the text, I show how narrative and publishing acceleration shape both the form and politics of Zulu Heart. While these accelerations reflect Graham Du Bois’s utopian impulse, they also generate unresolved tensions between the poetics and ethics of the heart transplant, as well as between the novel’s educational and entertainment functions. These tensions surface in the novel’s heteropatriarchal gender structure, reproductive futurity, and Africanist discourses. Yet Zulu Heart’s utopian vision is not a total failure. Kirk’s death marks a moment when the narrative’s ethical self-reflection resurfaces. Ultimately, Zulu Heart reveals how Graham Du Bois’s utopian imagination is both shaped and constrained by the ideological and formal structures through which it seeks to imagine liberation.