Cultural studies and the African Global South

Abstract

Cultural studies exhibits multiple derivations from different historical conjunctures and places. This essay examines three instances of cultural studies emanating from within Africa, in relation to the field in the North Atlantic. What a “Southern” lens offers the North are different ways of making sense and a transnational framework that enables peer-to-peer conversations. This transe/trance quality is explained via a discussion of the scientifically unexplainable, superstition, and the noumenal. The immateriality of money and its associated human performances as reified by New York stock exchanges is the example through which transnational theoretical hybridity is examined.