How do goverrning elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of this talk, which draws on the forthcoming book Southern Interregnum to explore how political and economic elites across emerging powers in the global South work to reconcile accumulation and legitimation at a moment when significant geoeconomic and geopolitical transformations intersect with deepening precarity and widespread popular protest. Grounded in a Gramscian approach, the argument is developed through a comparative conjunctural analysis of recent political trajectories in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. 

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is the director of the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria, where he also works as a professor in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on the politics and political economy of democracy and development in the global South, with a particular focus on Asia. He is the author and co-author of multiple books, such as Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010), We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014), Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and most recently Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2025).

This reading group is an initiative of the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org/)

The Global Africa reading group aims to facilitate critical discussions and dialogues on topics pertaining to ‘Africa’ and the Global South as a whole. In this, it strives to create a scholarly community that encompasses and accommodates the multitude of studies of and from Africa, and an avenue for keeping abreast with the academic developments pertaining to our theorised notion of ‘multiple Souths’. Combining aspects of a reading group and a seminar, Global Africa aspires to bring together esteemed international guest speakers with the China Africa Fashion Power project team, other African studies, humanities, and social sciences scholars based at  Dutch universities, as well as interested PhD and Master students.

About the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power

Fashion is a significant economic force globally and one of the most poignant indicators of cross-cultural exchange. Thus, the China Africa Fashion Power project uses everyday fashion (clothes, textiles, accessories, hair) as the lens to investigate how China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in Africa (Kenya and Mozambique).This will be studied by critically examining Africa-China networks of everyday fashion production, trade, retail and consumption, using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach. Thereby, the five-year-project aims to theorise how everyday fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains connecting Guangdong, Nairobi, and Maputo.

Time schedule: All Global Africa seminar events for this semester will be held in Room 0.16, BG1 Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, from 3:00-4:30pm on 12^th September 2025 and 21^st  November 2025. In addition to our seminar sessions for this academic semester, we will also be organizing an in-person skills seminar course on turning a dissertation into a  manuscript for publication on 11 September 2025 for all those interested in turning their dissertations into book manuscripts for publications. All speakers will present in person.

Attendance: Online Attendance via Zoom will be possible for most sessions. Drinks and snacks will be served.