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 disciplines and systems. Each session will feature two speakers presenting recent work, followed by conversation with the audience.
Sessions will take place on Zoom. They will not be recorded, but a reading list for each presentation will follow after the event. Registration for each session is required, after which you will receive the link to access the event.
Register for Session 1 here and for Session 2 here.
Once you have registered, you should receive an email confirmation with the Zoom information for the session for which you registered. If you do not receive the email within 24 hours, please contact our Editorial Assistant, Cleo Li-Schwartz (cjl7050[at]psu.edu), for assistance.
Session 1: Africa and Latin America
Friday, 2 October 2026, 12:00 (EST / GMT -4)
Laura Efron (National University of Quilmes, University of Buenos Aires), “Radical Thinking in Circulation: South African Translations of Latin American Revolutionary Ideas”
How is political knowledge produced through South–South encounters? This presentation explores this question through the circulation and reworking of Latin American revolutionary thought in apartheid South Africa. From the 1960s to the 1980s, South African educational and civil society organizations engaged closely with histories and political experiences from Latin America, drawing on them to interpret and contest their own conditions of oppression.
Through educational booklets, seminars, study groups, and public events, Latin American revolutionary experiences were transformed into resources for political education and collective reflection. Rather than treating them as models to be simply adopted, South African activists selectively translated, reinterpreted, and adapted concepts, histories, and strategies of struggle to their own political and social contexts. Paulo Freire’s work and the broader tradition of popular education were particularly important in this process.
The presentation argues that these encounters were not simply instances of the circulation or reception of ideas, but sites of knowledge production. Intellectual translation involved selecting, transforming, and re-signifying political concepts, generating forms of theory that were simultaneously transnational and locally situated. By tracing these processes across the South Atlantic, the presentation explores the Global South not merely as a space through which ideas circulate, but as a constitutive site of intellectual and political theorizing. It thus asks how South–South encounters can reshape our understanding of where political knowledge is produced, whose experiences become sources of theory, and how radical concepts acquire meaning across different historical contexts.
Laura Efron is an Associate Professor in African and Asian history at National University of Quilmes and University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She leads the project “Historias posicionadas desde el Sur Global. Prácticas de investigación situadas en África y América del Sur.” She is an editorial member of the South African Historical Journal and editor of the Special Issue “(in)Between Africa and Latin America: Circulation of Experiences, Activism and Ideas”, South African Review of Sociology, 54 (3).
Estefanía Bournot (Austrian Academy of Sciences), “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.
Estefanía Bournot is APART Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where she leads the research project “Forgotten Routes across the Atlantic (1960-1990)”. She is Associate Editor of the Global South Literary Studies Journal, co-editor of the collected volume World Literatures from Below (Bloomsbury), and author of Giros Topográficos, a monograph on contemporary Latin American Literature.
Session 2: Transnational Solidarities
Friday, 6 November 2026, 12:00 (EST / GMT -5)
Noemi Alfieri (NOVA University of Lisbon, Roma Tre University), “Literary Circulations and Political Cartographies from Leipzig to Turin: Dislocating Transnational Solidarities with Lusophone Africa in the 1960s”
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.
Noemi Alfieri is an Assistant Researcher in History of the Press and Intellectual Networks at NOVA-FCSH (NOVA University of Lisbon) and Visiting Researcher in the Agostinho Neto Chair at Roma Tre University; she also serves as Deputy Director for Research Team Dynamics in the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) at NOVA. She is a member of the Editorial Board of African Diaspora, Cultura and Práticas da História.
Qiyu Chen (University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale), “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.
Qiyu Chen is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). She received her dual-title PhD in Comparative Literature and African Studies from Pennsylvania State University in 2024.