How would the world appear if we realized its margins as connected centers? For centuries, academic theory has rated the elite, settled, capitalist North Atlantic as the world’s core. And the rest as its satellites. The Southern diasporas in the Global North, the communities of the working class planet-wide, the peoples of the Fourth World, the Gao-Mecca corridor, the Afro-Caribbean zone, Oceania and the Pacific Rim, the Bengal-to-Balkans complex…these and more have been consigned to the fringes. Thus such theory treats the upper-crust, Euro-focused centers of global power as the norms; their margins as exceptions. Usually, it theorizes from the viewpoint of those centers. And when it does theorize from their margins, it models them as locked in dualistic struggle with the mighty. The North and the South, The Oppressed and their Oppressors, The Poor and the Rich, The Wretched and their Capitalist Exploiters, The Core and the Periphery… Seen this way, each margin looks the same as all the others, or as isolated from the rest. That those margins resemble and differ from each other, that they have interconnected since the dawn of history, that they were–indeed, are–entangled centers of power and influence–these prospects have long escaped the purview of academic theory.

But change approaches. For everyone living on “the margins” sees the world from their vantage point. For each of us, experience differs, and our view point forms the eye of the world. So there is no one center. Humankind has built a myriad of entangled centers, each with its own margins. True, the pull of the mighty often obscures all these centers. The world is wracked by injustices that benefit the privileged in those Euro-focused hubs. And these iniquities depend on keeping the margins-cum-centers cloaked in shadows and in half-truths. Such injustices demand further study. Even so, each community’s experience offers a center that puts and interprets its own problems. Each features its own people, its own goals, its own expectations. Each interconnects with all the others. And now, more than ever, each refuses further obscurity.

Hence more and more theorists reject this order of things. They increasingly decline to portray the elite North Atlantic as the norm and its margins as exceptions. Instead, they present the ideas and institutions of the so-called margins as interlinked axes of thought and organization. So they seek to re-connect theory. They gradually undo its soldering to elite North Atlantic frames and assumptions, rewiring it to trace the network of hubs and switches that “the margins” have always composed. This website, and its associated events, amplifies these efforts.

To learn more, e-mail the site administrator, Tom Donahue-Ochoa, at tjdonahueAThaverfordDOTedu. If these themes intrigue you, and you are a political/legal theorist or intellectual historian based in the Global South, or at a minority-serving/working-class institution in the Global North, we especially hope to hear from you!