Contemporary History | When the World Went South, Oct. 17

Dr. Mark Philip Bradley

The Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University presents Mark Philip Bradley discussing “When the World Went South” on Thursday, Oct. 17, at 4:30 p.m. in the Baker Multicultural Center 219.

Bradley offers the first major history of the transformative rise of the Global South in the late 20th century and its central presence in the making of the contemporary world. The Global South has often been seen merely as a descriptor, a handy cartographic imaginary after the passing of the era of the “Third World” and a marker of persisting economic inequalities between North and South. Bradley’s book makes a more capacious set of claims for what constitutes the Global South, the forces that set it in motion and the work the South does in the world. It moves between the arenas of international politics and the global art world to ask how new vocabularies in the South began to remake the very meanings of the political, the social and the cultural in our times.

In this talk Bradley will introduce the conceptual scaffolding that informs his work and discuss the roles of the digital humanities and the place of the visual arts in 1990s Southeast Asia in the architecture of the project.

Bradley is the Bernadotte E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as the faculty director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences Division. He is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009) and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the general editor of the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World and the coeditor of Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.