advance praise for Marxist Theory and Social History of the Global South

“With this important collection of essays, Kristin Plys establishes herself as a leading voice in Marxist political economy. Ranging from anti-fascist movements and café culture in the shadow of India’s Emergency to labor history, experimental art, and methodology, Plys’s writing urges an alternative agenda for the humanities and social sciences:  to analyze the historical trajectory of global capitalism from the perspective of working class and anticolonial movements in the Global South. This is a must-read.”

- Cedric de Leon, Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Kristin Plys achieves the remarkable feat of offering a fresh perspective on the political dynamics of emancipation in the Global South during the 20th century, successfully undertaking an ambitious comparative analysis. By immersing us in a multitude of worlds of anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Europe, and Africa, she offers readers not only the discovery of fascinating social and political realities, but also new insights into the anti-authoritarian movements underlying these diverse national and international struggles. Plys does not simply present such a rich and varied array of these political and cultural universes; she derives from them a genuine reshaping of Marxist political economy, making her work an indispensable tool for contemporary materialist thought."

- Maxime Quijoux, research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

"How can we think beyond narrow disciplines to capture the interconnected nature of social phenomena, structures of domination and exploitation, and the creative forms of resistance and movements that have shaped the modern world across the Global South? This inspiring collection of Marxist writings by Plys offers us just such a template, and it provides much-needed fuel for contemporary radical analysis. Putting the historical back into historical materialism, this book argues that we need not choose between theories of national liberation and working class struggles at the point of production, between postcolonial theory and Marxist dialectics. Rather, by tracking the actually existing history of these intersecting movements across the Global South, as well as the spaces of everyday life that profoundly shaped the world views of revolutionary actors, we can develop a more capacious radical imagination, one that better comprehends the past in order to intervene in our fascist present. Beginning from the long-neglected Dar es Salaam School of History, and branching out to Lahore, New Delhi, Algiers, and the broader Mediterranean world, Plys shows us how to think at the intersections of everyday life, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascist struggles. Along the way, she elaborates a singular practice of historical method that theorizes temporality, subalternity, and imperialism through a world-systems lens. There is something for everyone in this fascinating volume. Please read this book!"

- Yousuf Al-Bulushi, University of California, Irvine, author of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

"In this important volume of essays, Plys critiques dominant Marxist frames, interrogates Eurocentric assumptions through a focus on the Global South. She asks searching questions about time and history and Marxist political economy and engages with the gendered politics of art, romance and everyday life, the coffee house, the public sphere and spaces of subversion and movements for worker’s control. These issues have a powerful resonance with the concerns of scholars across the globe."

- Chitra Joshi, Independent historian and founding member Association of Indian Labour Historians, formerly Professor of History at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi

“Through a magnificent and cultivated compilation of empirical essays that traverse the globe and the Longue Durée; pedagogical chapters that untangle theoretical debates on anti-imperialism and methods that expose local agency; as well as new social and political histories of the working class, Kristin Plys gives us the book we have all been waiting for! Both students and critics of such thought, as well as those searching for a praxis for global social change, will do well to read this book.”

-Rina Agarwala, Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University

"This is a sculptural work, carved from an urgent and delicate material, at a time when global capitalism is unmasked once again for embracing its bloodthirsty fanaticism. Kristin Plys' work doesn't speak about our histories from the comfort of the academic infrastructures of the Global North; it learns with and from our narratives. Chapter after chapter, this book reads like a critical and decolonial archive, unlearning empire and reintegrating our resistances into the global conversation."

- Abdourahmane Seck, Chairperson, Group for Action and Critical Study (GAEC) – Africa

"Theoretically versatile, Marxist Theory and Social History of the Global South delivers a bold, center-turned retelling of the universal from the Global South. Using a triangulated historical method of archives, memories, and oral histories, it electrifies the studies of capitalism and anticolonial struggle, expanding from labor movements to cafés, poetry, visual art, and film. Revolutionary theory and antifascist praxis in India, Pakistan, Peru, and beyond are made coeval with insurgent politics in the Global North, from Gramsci and Maoism in Europe to the Black Panther Party. Anchored in an unflinching commitment to Marxism and world-systems analysis, it repositions the Global South as the launching pad for decolonized knowledge and radical global and temporal connections.”

- Hyun Ok Park, Professor, Department of Sociology, York University

"Professor Plys’ work brings together a unique set of themes and cases in pursuit of Immanuel Wallerstein’s goal of moving past disciplinary silos that constrain our understanding of long-term social change.  Plys’ analytic framework integrates Marxist political economy, world-systems analysis, and decolonial analysis to interrogate the historical evolution of the capitalist world-economy from the perspective of the Global South, rather than privileging the experiences of the U.S. and Europe.  Case studies of working class and anti-colonial movements emphasize these groups’ agency in challenging the global order, building on the tradition of the Dar es Salaam school of critical political economy and historical analysis. 

This book, “Marxist Theory and Social History of the Global South: Collected Essays, 2012-2025”, includes several key essays that expand our understanding of global political economy.  In addition to engaging in debates challenging Eurocentric Marxist analyses and the role of financialization in long term change in the capitalist world-economy, other essays critically expand on anti-imperialist analysis first put forward by Walter Rodney and others of the Dar es Salaam school in the 1960s and 1970s.  Another aspect of Dr. Plys’ work examines how Global South movements develop in particular times and places, focusing on café culture in India, Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria and Italy in the development of labor, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist movements and praxis. 

Of particular interest and uniqueness, Plys’ work examines issues not typically considered in critical political economic analyses.  Art, for example, can play a critical role in shaping how people understand and react to their political circumstances and the potential for social change.  Several essays in the book discuss anti-colonial and feminist artistic movements that challenged imperial and patriarchal power in Pakistan.

Although most of the essays in the volume examine earlier time periods, one dimension of Dr. Plys’ work across the various themes is highly relevant to understanding today’s global political economy.  Plys examines anti-fascist movements in the 1970s in a variety of places in the Global South, a very timely topic in the 2020s context of resurgent fascism around the world."

- Paul S. Ciccantell, Professor of Sociology, Western Michigan University