Southern criminology in the post-colony: more than a “derivative discourse”?

The idea of Southern criminology poses a challenge not just to its mainstream parent, which is now asked to contemplate life, crime and social order outside the metropolitan North. Southern criminology also asks those who would work under its name to find new ways of thinking about phenomena so that the South is understood on its own terms. This chapter contemplates such challenges. It draws upon a body of postcolonial thought largely unknown within criminology to help think through Southern criminology’s options for escaping the cultural and epistemological confines of mainstream, Enlightenment thought. It illustrates different ways of building out from these forms of thought, which can never totally be escaped, in order to represent and give voice to other experiences of life and other ways of being human.