About — Global South Solidarities Anarchive

The Framework

What is Global South Solidarities?

Image of The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas [Photo: Bibhushana Poudyal]

It names communities and peoples everywhere who are living under the ongoing projects of settler colonialism, standing on the frontlines of environmental injustice, targeted by systemic racialized violence, and subjected to the rhetorical and epistemic erasures of empire. Global South is a shared positionality of resistance against interconnected systems of power: colonial, capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and imperial.

“If this is what the Global South is—a political location, a positionality of resistance, a call for alliances—then the question becomes: how do we build theory and practice worthy of that reality? How do we think and act in ways that match the scale and stakes of what the Global South names?

The first thoughts about Global South Solidarities came into being as an intellectual framework, a scholarly attempt to name and theorize the connective tissue between struggles across geographies that colonialism had artificially separated. It began in the academy, in a dissertation project, in graduate seminars and monograph projects, as a way of reading across Dalit archives in South Asia, Zapatista murals in Mexico, Palestinian testimony in occupied territories, and Indigenous water protector maps on Turtle Island.

It started as a method for seeing what empire tries to render invisible: that a police algorithm in one city, a border wall in another region, and a colonial ledger in an archive are all instruments of the same global architecture of power. The framework emerged from the conviction that scholarship must do more than analyze—it must trace solidarities, name connections, and offer a blueprint for thinking otherwise.

But somewhere along the way, the framework stopped being only a scholarly project. This happened not because of anything that happened in the university, but because of who the framework kept encountering.

The Encounters That Changed Everything

These encounters
changed everything.

Meena Keshwar Kamal

Afghanistan

A twenty-year-old Afghan woman who founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and ran underground schools under occupation until she was assassinated at thirty.

Underground Education

Lorena Borjas

Queens, New York

A Mexican American trans activist in Queens whose networks of care—housing, legal support, funerals for the murdered—were rhetorical acts declaring that you matter, you belong, in the face of state violence.

Trans Networks of Care

Berta Cáceres

Honduras

Assassinated in Honduras for defending her land, whose rhetoric emerged from Lenca cosmovision where rivers are living beings with rights.

Lenca Cosmovision

Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz)

Kingdom of Kongo (Angola/DRC) · 1684–2 July 1706

A Kongolese prophet and leader of the Antonian movement who challenged Portuguese colonial Christianity by preaching that Christ was Black and that the saints were Kongolese. She mobilized her people toward unity and resistance against colonial spiritual domination, and was burned at the stake at the age of twenty-two for refusing to renounce her vision of liberation.

Anti-Colonial Prophecy

Claudia Jones

Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago · 21 February 1915–24 December 1964

A Trinidad-born journalist, activist, and intellectual who became one of the most important Black feminist and anti-imperialist thinkers of the twentieth century. Deported from the United States for her communist organizing, she settled in London where she founded the West Indian Gazette and organized the first Caribbean Carnival in Notting Hill—building solidarity infrastructure between displaced Black communities across empires.

Black Feminist Internationalism

Mekatilili wa Menza

Kenya · 1860s–1924

A Giriama woman who led armed resistance against British colonial rule in Kenya, rallying her community through powerful oratory and traditional oaths to refuse forced labor and taxation. Twice exiled by the British, she escaped both times and returned to continue organizing—her body and voice an unbreakable instrument of anti-colonial defiance.

Anti-Colonial Armed Resistance

These encounters changed everything. Global South Solidarities is no longer primarily a scholarly project. It is more accurately described as scholars learning from on-the-ground projects that were already there, already happening, already building the world otherwise. The framework now understands that Meena, Lorena, Berta are not objects of study, not research subjects, not examples to illustrate theories developed in Eurocentric traditions. They are the theorists. They are the epistemes. Their work is not raw data waiting for academic interpretation—it is already theory, already knowledge, already a blueprint for how to live on a planet under the constant threat of extraction, displacement, and erasure.

The role of the scholar within Global South Solidarities is no longer to speak about these communities, but to learn from them, to be accountable to them, to use whatever institutional resources and privileges the university provides to amplify their voices, build infrastructure for their work, and ensure that their knowledge shapes academic discourse rather than being tokenized within it.

What this means is that Global South Solidarities now understands itself as a framework that emerges from the ground up. It is not something the academy gives to communities; it is something communities have always been doing, and the academy must listen. The solidarity networks that the framework names—between Zapatista rebels in Chiapas and Palestinian activists in the West Bank, Gaza, and Occupied Palestine, between Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis or Afghan women running underground schools, between trans activists in Queens or Indigenous water protectors in Honduras—were not created by scholars. They were created by people fighting for their lives and their lands, people who understood long before the academy caught up (or yet to catch up) that no one is free until everyone is free. The scholar’s work within this framework is not to lead, not to interpret, not to give voice to the voiceless—it is to show up, to listen, to be accountable, to use institutional power to build infrastructure for struggles that will continue long after any single academic career ends.

The Anarchive

What is GSS Anarchive?

Let us be clear from the start: this is an anarchive, not an archive in the traditional colonial and bourgeois sense—not a monument to power, not a hoard assembled through extraction, not a site where the elite preserve their version of history while the rest of the world is rendered silent. We reject that model entirely.

And we also want to be honest: even with all our privileges, all our institutional resources, all our commitments, we will not be able to do even a tiny fragment of what this work requires. The stories are too many, the erasures too vast, the struggles too ongoing for any single project to capture. We will fail at comprehensiveness. We will miss things. We will make mistakes.

But yes—definitely, absolutely yes—we want to provoke. We want every anti-oppressive force, every movement, every community fighting on the frontlines of the empire to take up this work, to build their own anarchives, to refuse the gatekeeping that says only institutions get to decide what is preserved and what is forgotten.

Protester at El Paso for Palestine demonstration

A protester at the 'El Paso for Palestine' demonstration at San Jacinto Plaza in El Paso, Texas, May 22, 2021. [Photo: Bibhushana Poudyal]

Digital Solidarity Space

The Global South Solidarities anarchive website aims to build exactly the kind of infrastructure that the framework’s evolution demands—a platform that does not speak about communities but instead puts institutional resources at their service. It exists to ensure that the knowledge Meena, Lorena, and Berta produced, along with countless others fighting on the frontlines of empire, reaches audiences beyond their immediate contexts and outlasts any single struggle or lifetime.

Making Solidarity Visible

The anarchive is designed to make visible the solidarity networks that have always connected movements across colonially drawn borders, providing digital space where Zapatista visual rhetoric can speak to Palestinian sumud, where Afghan women’s underground teaching can inform Indigenous water protection, where Black liberation struggles in Minneapolis can remain in conversation with resistance under occupation.

Living Theory, Not Academic Consumption

It aims to circulate these knowledges not as exotic examples for academic consumption but as living theory, as blueprints for survival and world-making that other communities facing displacement, extraction, and erasure can learn from and build upon.

Accountability Infrastructure

The website functions as accountability infrastructure—a mechanism through which scholars doing work on and with Global South communities can ensure their research remains answerable to those communities rather than to disciplinary expectations alone.

Failing Usefully

Its ultimate purpose is to use the university’s resources to amplify voices the university has historically silenced, to build durable infrastructure for struggles that will continue long after any grant cycle ends, to fail usefully and visibly so that others can do better, and to prove that the academy can sometimes be useful to the liberation movements that have always known what the academy is only beginning to learn.

Our Team

Built by those who refuse
conventional constraints

Bibhushana Poudyal

Researcher and Assistant Professor · WSU

Bibhushana Poudyal is a Nepali Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University (WSU). Her scholarship has been recognized and supported through some of the prestigious institutional honors at WSU. In consecutive years—2024 and 2025—she has been honored to receive the Buchanan Distinguished Assistant Professorship. In 2025, she also received the highly competitive New Faculty Seed Grant for her project, Digital Storytelling and Global South Solidarities: Justice-Driven Open Scholarship in Humanities, which is a part of this larger project, GSS Anarchive. Her research and teaching emerge from the intervening philosophies and praxes of Internationalism and Global South Solidarities (GSS). She has a monograph publication titled, Gendering South Asia: Rhetorical Non-Phallic Bodies in the Global Capital, with Routledge (2025). She is also a co-editor of Emergency Archives: Investigating Rhetorical (Im) Possibility, Action, and the Impact of Precarious “Preservation” Under Crisis. (Rhetoric Review Symposium, 2026).

Rhetoric Global South Feminism South Asia Routledge

Rahul Malik

Independent researcher and AI and Full Stack Developer

Rahul Malik is an India-based independent researcher, self-taught physicist, freelancer, AI developer, AI interrogator, and AI interrupter whose work lives at the intersection of code, science, and power. With deep geopolitical awareness and unapologetic anti-imperialist, feminist convictions, Rahul operates entirely outside the ivory tower with no institutional credentials, no academic gatekeepers but just sustained curiosity and a commitment to knowledge that seeks and serves liberation. Trained in the quiet discipline of self-inquiry, he moves between quantum mechanics and the work of dismantling oppressive AI systems, equally interested in the behavior of atoms and the ways algorithms enforce empires. Rahul is the technical backbone behind the GSS architecture, the one who built the systems that make the anarchive possible. GSS is not a lab project or a thesis. It is a living platform, built by someone who learns by doing, builds through breaking, and refuses to work within conventional constraints and credentials.

AI Systems Physics Anti-Imperialism Architecture Independent

What is Global SouthSolidarities?