Feminist assemblages in the Global South: notes from contemporary graphic narratives from South Africa and India

While the late twentieth century disrupted literary studies by challenging entrenched textual hierarchies, the opening decades of the twenty-first century have expanded these critical horizons. Decolonising strategies have focussed chiefly on rethinking marginal identities and geographies. Despite these movements, scholarship in and about the global South still struggles to analyse literary practices’ formulaic identity matrices routed through the global North. This paper argues that expressive forms women have adopted over the last decade in the global South, particularly the graphic narrative form, actively resist simplistic identity formulations. These narratives do more than expose the uneven faultlines of gendered locatedness; they reorient feminist struggle by foregrounding the layered architecture of everyday resistance. These narratives from South Africa and India serve as vital entry points for imagining the possibilities of doing feminist politics within a South–South framework.