Immanuel Wallerstein’s Legacy in Southern Europe

Notes for Thinking Andalusia from World-Systems Theory

Authors

  • Javier García Fernández Universidad de Granada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1134

Keywords:

Immanuel Wallerstein, world-systems theory, southern Europe, Andalusia

Abstract

This paper is a farewell and an intellectual tribute to one of the greatest masters of contemporary Marxist thought and one of the major references in contemporary social science. Immanuel Wallerstein died August 31, 2019, leaving a theoretical, historical, and intellectual legacy that is to be read, rethought, and actualized by social scientists in the coming decades. His world-systems theory gave rise to a whole new understanding of the genesis of the capitalist world-system. This contribution reviews the sources that inspired the world-system theory, as well as showing its main contributions and its dialogues with other proposals of critical social theory, such as the epistemologies of the South and decolonial thought. This article is also a new formulation of the perspectives that the world-systems theory opens for the historical and sociological research on Andalusia and southern Europe in the context of the historical genesis of world capitalism.

Author Biography

Javier García Fernández, Universidad de Granada

Javier García Fernández, PhD in Postcolonial Studies, University of Coimbra where he did his doctoral thesis with sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Granada and a visiting scholar at the Latinx Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, for the whole of 2022. García Fernández’s research focus is on the history of the conquest of Al-Andalus from a global perspective, the Spanish Empire, the relationship between fascism and imperialism, postcolonial studies, and decolonial theory. García Fernández is the author of Descolonizar Europa: Ensayos para pensar Históricamente desde el sur (2019), Más allá del Arabismo y el Medievalismo: Al-Ándalus en Perspectiva Poscolonial (2021), and with Ramón Grosfoguel and José Antonio Pérez Tapias editor of Descolonizar las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades. Perspectivas desde Andalucía y el sur de Europa (2021). García Fernández is currently coordinator of the Andalusian Seminar of the Decolonial Thought. https://lrc.berkeley.edu/post-doctoral-fellows/

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Published

2022-08-25

How to Cite

García Fernández, J. (2022). Immanuel Wallerstein’s Legacy in Southern Europe: Notes for Thinking Andalusia from World-Systems Theory. Journal of World-Systems Research, 28(2), 427–437. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1134

Issue

Vol. 28 No. 2 (2022): Special Issue: Anti-State and Anti-Systemic – Exilic Spaces and Societies in Movement in the World-System

Section

Essays

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Copyright (c) 2022 Javier García Fernández

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