When I first moved to South Africa, I was, on occasion, referred to as an “Indian from India,” to distinguish me from Indians who had lived in South Africa for several generations. I was also a South Asian studies scholar in a South African university, which was possibly rarer than being a new migrant. Most of my colleagues in the humanities and social sciences were Africanists, often working exclusively on South Africa. This kind of methodological nationalism permeates higher education in India too, where I was born and grew up. Colonial legacies and postcolonial burdens mean that “we” (typically educated elites) in the global South invariably research and teach our “own” societies, as opposed to others, the custodian of “placeless” white scholars. In contrast to South Africa and India, in the United Kingdom (where I previously studied and taught) there were scholars who both researched their “own” and “others.” In my home discipline of sociology—far less oriented toward the study of others than anthropology—white scholars studied Britain, and natives (like me) their native society or culture. Coloniality shaped this happy mix, affording both possibilities and foreclosures.

Ironically, it was upon my arrival in South African academia, after a decade of being in Britain, that I felt the burden of identity and place. During a probation and promotion meeting, a senior manager asked me when I would research South Africa. Students seemed distinctly uninterested in learning about South Asia, and after the “Fallist” student movements of 2015-2016, the call to decolonize the curriculum effectively translated into one for Africanization. It was also the case that scholars who could not demonstrate how their research spoke directly to the advancement of a national public did poorly on local metrics of performance and success.

At the same time, there were challenges being posed to area studies thinking and a growing scholarly appetite for comparative study. When I first joined Wits University in 2014, there were new books on how India and South Africa together shaped the global South (Hofmeyr and Williams 2011) and new institutional sites. The Centre of Indian Studies in South Africa (CISA) at Wits was one institutional materialization of these possibilities.

By taking advantage of such existing interest and resources—and as a way of securing my own tenure and belonging—I enthusiastically developed a scholarly agenda around the sexual and gender politics of India and South Africa. More than an “Indian from India,” I liked to think of myself as a transnational feminist. After all, I had cut my intellectual teeth on scholars who, like Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Gayatri Spivak, had revealed the silencing of colonial women at the hands of imperial feminists, and therefore the promise of transnational feminist solidarity. Committed to thinking of power relations and of resistance and solidarity as not confined to nations or borders, the pursuit of transnational study—especially in locales connected through historical and transnational flows—came easily to me.

Under the rubric of transnational feminism, I led collaborative research projects, and prioritized Southern conversations. I threw myself into the pursuit of what I considered the building of epistemic infrastructures in and across the global South. Such an agenda also proved attractive to external funders, both local and international. At a local scale, new funding regimes had emerged thanks to the geopolitics of BRICS (a grouping of the world economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Internationally, and especially after the student movements, there was a push to decolonize by disinvesting from Northern theories and promoting, amongst other things, theory-making from the South. The promise of Southern feminist theory also had its uses and value in the neoliberal academy.

In practice, however, I found the “doing” of transnational feminism to be a difficult, even fraught, affair. It emerged less amenable to comparison and commensurability, than a terrain of “dissonant intimacies.” I develop this term from Keguro Macharia, who speaks of the uses and failures of “blackness to create a shared ground” (2016, 186). Macharia makes these remarks in resisting the area studies logics of colonial epistemologies. The “African” is also not easily placed in conversation with the “Indian/Asian.” These geodisciplinary designations—African/Asian—make little sense outside of colonial rubrics.¹

Let me turn to the experience of a large-scale, multi-institutional, and multi-sited research project that I recently led. The project theorized gender in a comparative and connected way, across countries, continents, and feminist perspectives from the global South. The two partners on the project were in India and Uganda respectively. One partner was a gender and sexuality studies research center in a new private university. The other was an institutionally older, teaching-intensive school of women and gender studies. With both, however, the collaboration fell far short of expectations of genuinely collaborative and reciprocal intellectual work, and the project was unable to yield a consolidated or synthesized result. For various reasons—material, historic, and epistemic—each partner ended up engaging in projects of their own, by making use of available funds but without combining vision or labor. Instead of producing collaborative forms of knowledge, they resorted to established epistemic habits. For the Indian partner, this meant an overreliance on Northern (queer) theory, with little interest in engaging in ideas or epistemologies emanating from elsewhere (i.e. from the African continent). The African partner, in turn, seemed to prioritize their collaborations with government and development agencies, for which they produced applied, empirical research.

Both partners echoed deeply rooted epistemic dispositions that were not reducible to individual personalities or institutional pressures but spoke of colonial legacies and neoliberal demands. They were either exclusively oriented toward the North—in positioning themselves as makers of theory rather than data, for instance—or echoed with nationalist and nativist tendencies, methodological and otherwise, in focusing inward. In showing little interest in connecting or conversing with each other, a transnational feminist research agenda seemed to have little appeal to these Indian and Ugandan feminist researchers.²

As an Indian (passport holder), living and working in South Africa (with considerable Northern links and connections), I was an ideal native to lead this project. As someone invested in transnational feminist goals, for scholarship and community, I also operated with a distinct set of desires, even fantasies. These led me to anticipate sameness, to underestimate difference and inequality, and ultimately, to consider certain things to be failures and others to be successes. What I read as failure—the lack of reciprocity, solidarity, and exchange amongst African and Asian feminists—reveals as much about my own desires as it does about wider investments in the South-South as being intrinsically positive, even a liberatory paradigm that promises to remedy Northern epistemic hegemony. The desire for intimacy, symmetry, or commensurability can elide—even obscure—the frictions, asymmetries, hierarchies, and differences that exist within the South. Part of the problem here is the category of the “Global South” itself, which tends to flatten as well as essentialize distinct geographical spaces. These spaces, in turn, often map directly onto discrete knowledge formations, in what Go (2023) has termed “geoepistemic essentialism.”

The global South is neither an automatic site of coloniality or for that matter, of decolonization. Rubrics like the North-South and west/rest can end up flattening the complexities of academic work in unequal geopolitical conditions—even in one and the same setting—given their tendency to traffic in homogenizations and generalizations. We also know that Southern theorists are not always in conversation with each other; on the contrary, they tend to engage more with decolonial theory from the North than from elsewhere in the South (Moosavi 2020). Moreover, without material redistribution, decolonization is a mere metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2012).

In trying to practice transnational feminism in a South African university, I embarked on a project of belonging, both materially and epistemically. I occupied an invented identity category—“Indian from India”—in ways that would make me legible to the available “grids of intelligibility” (Zhang and Colón 2021). But this category met its limits in several ways and failed to materialize robust challenges to colonial legacies and nationalist and nativist tendencies. For instance, under South Africa’s current populist turn, “xenophobic” and “Afrophobic” rhetoric informs the direction of mainstream political parties and materializes in everyday attacks against fellow Africans, the bulk of whom are poor and precarious workers. Universities have also hardened agendas of diversity—“transformation”—in ways that feed into wider anti-foreign sentiments, when it comes to scholarships and jobs. International staff—even if black or of color—do not “count” toward equity goals. South African institutions thus end up facing peculiar paradoxes, where hiring a white South African counts more than a black African does. Even as the student movements embraced a broad definition of what was meant by “black,” as per Black Consciousness traditions, this was not always the case on the ground. As against “Biko blacks,” coloreds and South African Indians were at times excluded from the definition of black. Transnational flows and connections—across the Indian Ocean and in ways that connect India and South Africa—trouble these definitions and how they seek to legitimate claims to “ ‘authentic’ local belonging” (Waetjen 2013).

These failures gesture to a wider waning of Afro-Asian solidarities, as (right-wing) nationalisms surge and internationalist agendas and politics decline. They also risk misrecognition—or even going unnoticed—within epistemic and political paradigms that, in seeking to upset dominant binaries of the west and the rest/non-native and native/white and Other, still center the North. The question thus remains: what does it mean to denaturalize ethnographic epistemology—with its moorings in identity and belonging—from the perspective of the global South, as both place and relation of power?

Notes

1. Macharia’s intervention is part of recent drives, in queer studies, to take seriously questions of geopolitics, the global, transnational and the regional, and to, concurrently, decenter the United States. See also, Arondekar (2022) and Arondekar and Patel (2016).

2. This argument comprises a journal article from Srila Roy (2023) for The Sociological Review.