Cultural Studies and the African Global South

Abstract: Cultural studies is not a single discipline with a single derivation from a single paradigm or common epistemological community. The field 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 as it developed in the North Atlantic. What a ‘Southern’ cultural studies offers the North are different ways of making sense and a transnational framework which enables peer-to-peer conversations that continue to elude much Northern theorizing. 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 prime example through which transnational theoretical hybridity is examined