The era we’re still inside.

“The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work… and a form of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives.” — Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 1996

Appadurai (b. 1949), a Mumbai-born anthropologist at New York University, developed some of the most influential frameworks for understanding globalization’s cultural dimensions. He argued that globalization was not simply economic but involved flows of ideas, images, and identities across national borders—and that these flows were not one-directional from West to Rest. His work represents the Global South scholarly perspective on globalization that is typically missing from AP World’s coverage of technology and exchange. Read the source →

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. When the Global South has a pandemic, it is a regional crisis. When the same disease reaches Europe or North America, it becomes a global emergency.” — Dr. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, 2003

Farmer (1959–2022) was an American physician and anthropologist who founded Partners in Health and spent decades providing medical care in Haiti, Rwanda, and other Global South countries. His book documented how health outcomes were determined not by biology or technology but by political economy: who gets treated, at what speed, with what resources, is a function of whose lives are considered worth saving. COVID-19 later demonstrated exactly the vaccine access inequality he had described. Read the source →

“We are not drowning. We are fighting. And we deserve to do more than just survive—we deserve to thrive. But to do that we need the world to stop treating our islands as sacrifice zones for its carbon habit.” — Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Marshall Islands poet and climate activist, address to the United Nations Climate Summit, New York, September 23, 2014 (approximate)

Jetnil-Kijiner (b. 1987) delivered a poem at the 2014 UN Climate Summit that went viral—a letter to her infant daughter promising to fight so the Marshall Islands would not sink beneath rising seas. The Marshall Islands produces less than 0.001% of global greenhouse gas emissions but faces complete disappearance within decades due to sea-level rise caused by the emissions of industrialized nations. Her voice represents the Pacific Island nations that are on the frontline of a crisis they did not cause. Read the source →

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” — Arundhati Roy, speech at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003

Roy (b. 1961), Indian novelist and activist, delivered this address at the World Social Forum—the anti-globalization movement’s annual counter-summit to the World Economic Forum in Davos. She documented how the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) had locked Global South nations into trade agreements that benefited wealthy nations at their expense. Her words became a slogan of the global justice movement. They represent the perspective of those for whom economic globalization has meant dispossession rather than development. Read the source →

“We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing—no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no food, no education, no right to freely and democratically elect our officials, no independence from foreigners, no peace or justice for ourselves and our children.” — EZLN Zapatista Army of National Liberation, First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico, January 1, 1994

The Zapatistas launched their uprising on January 1, 1994—the day NAFTA went into effect—in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state. The timing was deliberate: they argued that the free trade agreement would accelerate the dispossession of Indigenous Mexican communities. Their declaration, written in the name of the Indigenous Maya peoples of Chiapas, drew on five hundred years of colonial history to explain a contemporary uprising. They became one of the defining voices of the anti-globalization movement. Read the source →

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. And the consequence of a single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Talk, Oxford, July 2009

Adichie (b. 1977), a Nigerian novelist, delivered this talk describing how Western media and literature had presented Africa as a single, impoverished, disaster-prone continent—and how that single story had shaped her own early perceptions of Mexico, and of herself. Her argument is directly relevant to globalized culture: the flow of media across borders is not neutral. The stories that dominate global media come from particular places and serve particular interests, and they shape how billions of people understand each other. Read the source →

“Decoloniality is not the same as decolonization. It means de-linking from the colonial matrix of power—from the ways of knowing, being, and governing that were imposed by European colonialism and that continue to structure our world long after the flags came down.” — Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, 2000 (approximate)

Mignolo (b. 1941), an Argentine semiotician and scholar at Duke University, developed the concept of the “colonial matrix of power”—the argument that colonialism did not end with political independence but continues in the structures of knowledge, economics, and governance that former colonial powers established. His work asks: if the AP World History course itself is organized around a periodization and set of categories developed by European and North American scholars, whose “world” does it actually describe? Read the source →