Praxis in the Global South: The Worldliness of Literature and Theory

Antonette Arogo

There is a proliferation of works on the Global South and decoloniality in contemporary scholarship, signaling an extension of Third World and postcolonial studies. What theoretical investments are at stake in the choice of terminology deployed in the study of colonial history, identity and nation formation, and globalization? In parsing these conceptual categories, the paper makes a case for Caroline S. Hau’s Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation: 1946-1980 and Neferti Xina M. Tadiar’s Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization as Philippine interventions in this burgeoning field. These critical works advance what Boaventura de Sousa Santos asserts is the Global South’s rejoinder to Marx’s eleventh thesis: “we must change the world while constantly reinterpreting it” (2018, viii). Hau’s examination of the creative function of literature, both as artform and poiêsis, and Tadiar’s inquiry into the supplementarity of literature as representation in imagining alternatives to the political generate a decolonial praxis in the Global South. The topoi of “excess” in Hau and “experience” in Tadiar serve as bases for the worldliness of literature, enabling the translation of theory into practice that is the persistent challenge to theory as critical-creative work.