Abstract

This introduction frames the papers in this symposium on concepts of the human from the Global South. While doing so, it offers some thoughts on the ends and significance of theorizing the human, both politically and epistemologically. The papers are introduced by means of two concepts: Man-normality, which names the colonial imposition of Euro-American white norms on other humans, and pluri-humanity (akin to pluri-universality), which names a condition and a common plural ground for liberatory politics. Building on anti-colonial and decolonial philosophers from the Global South, these articles interrogate the philosophical and methodological problems of Eurocentric humanism and offer an alternative praxis of being human. This requires questioning the Euro-modern concept of the human that, in view of its latent presence in literary, cultural, and philosophical productions, can be described as an epistemic racism that saturates global cultural and academic production.