By Raewyn Connell
Raewyn Connell is an Australian feminist sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, best known for co-founding masculinity studies and developing the influential concept of hegemonic masculinity. Her work spans gender, class, education and global social theory, including the notable book Southern Theory. Connell has published extensively and is widely recognised for reshaping how sociologists understand gender and power.
‘Southern theory’ refers to the critical knowledge projects generated specifically in the colonial and post-colonial world, before, during and after the time these regions were formally colonised. The conquerors from the North Atlantic encountered indigenous knowledges all over the world. Some were blotted out, some survived or were re-created in texts like the Maya Popol Vuh. In Australia, the millennia-long Aboriginal engagement with the land – its soils, rocks, plants, animals, seasons and climates, seas and rivers – generated deep knowledge which was sometimes used, though often ignored, by the colonisers.
Colonialism also encountered alternative universalisms – bodies of knowledge and methodologies that, like imperial science, applied beyond a particular community or society. Islamic philosophy, scholarship and science, including Islamic jurisprudence, is the best-known. Contemporary universities in the Muslim world, such as al-Azhar in Egypt (a centre of higher learning older than any university in Europe), are engaged in an interplay between knowledge formations that should be of great interest to anti-colonial scholarship.
Within the colonies, new forms of knowledge were created that addressed the great issues of colonial societies, such as land theft, economic exploitation, disruptions of kinship and culture, racial hierarchies, mass migration, and independence struggles in culture as well as politics. This is the main source of what I have called ‘Southern theory’, the critical knowledge projects generated specifically in the colonial and post-colonial world. The knowledge work of Solomon Tshekishe Plaatje in South Africa, or Ali Shariati in Iran, are notable examples.
Knowledge projects with anti-colonial purposes also exist within the institutions of the mainstream knowledge economy. Examples are histories of imperialism, sociology of racism, and research on international relations and security. There is an active debate as to how effective this strategy is, but it does offer resources for anti-colonial thought.
References
There is a very large literature on these subjects. Here are some valuable collections of research and theory, in several fields, that will provide ways into the debates.
- Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Wendy Harcourt, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave, 2016.
- Eric Macé, ed. An Invitation to Non-Hegemonic World Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.
- Leandro Rodriguez Medina and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency. Duke University Press, 2025.
