Before Ibraaz Publishing approached me in early 2026 to contribute this essay, I realised I had only encountered the term ‘Global Majority’ a handful of times. As I write and reflect on the many bridges that remain to be built from the accumulated knowledge of Amefrican people, that realisation accompanies me and is why I accepted the invitation with such enthusiasm.1 There is something revealing when a concept arrives to one belatedly, but there is also something distinctive about the way Platform 011 is proposing this conversation: through a multiplying network of relationships and knowledges, elevating debates around the Global Majority into creative and electric possibilities. Ignorance is often a symptom of the geographies of power, and it is precisely these alternative circuits of dialogue that allow what has been buried beneath the weight of history to emerge.
This is why I think it is important to think about and cultivate a form of epistemic humility. Not humility in the performative sense of false modesty – which I find is rather pointless and, in Brazil, exceedingly common – but humility in the sense proposed by Maya Angelou: the recognition that nobody arrives anywhere alone.
For Angelou, ‘modesty is a learned affectation’, something superficial and fragile; humility, by contrast, comes from within and requires an understanding that others who came before opened paths for us and that we must help prepare the way for those who will come after.2
The epistemic humility I am describing does not involve the erasure of one’s achievements. Rather, it requires recognising that our journeys do not begin or end with us. I am the daughter of a dockworker and a domestic worker, and I grew up in a working-class family in Santos, on the coast of São Paulo. The possibilities available to me were profoundly expanded through my encounter with the Casa de Cultura da Mulher Negra and its founder, the writer and activist Alzira Rufino. There, I found a space of political education, intellectual formation, and collective belonging – one that introduced me to the thought and struggles of Black women and enabled me to understand my own experience as part of a much longer history of resistance.
Amanda Tropicana, Foto-diáspora (2025). Courtesy of the artist.
My presence here is therefore also the result of pathways opened by those who came before me – Black women, intellectuals, community leaders, and ancestors. This can only be meaningful if it helps widen the possibilities available to those who will follow.
When I speak of humility, then, I mean something beyond personal modesty. I mean the concrete recognition that, despite the international circulation of my books and my experiences within prestigious academic institutions, I am taking my first steps to engage with the concept of the Global Majority, a critical tradition that is vast, complex, and still unknown in many Brazilian intellectual circles, which I, too, am situated. And it is necessary to cultivate what the Indian scholar Vrinda Dalmiya calls ‘relational humility’, a concept I have been engaging with through the reflections by the Panamanian philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff, whose work I deeply admire.3
Dalmiya develops the concept through lessons drawn from the Mahabharata, one of the great epic poems of the Hindu tradition.4 She compares different understandings of ignorance and knowledge. One model, associated with the classical Socratic notion of humility, begins with the statement ‘I know that I know nothing’, but transforms this admission into a form of epistemic privilege: because I recognise my ignorance, I consider myself superior to those who do not even know they are ignorant. Therefore, I do not need to seek their counsel.
As Dalmiya and Alcoff demonstrate, this self-centred humility naturalises hierarchies and remains compatible with an extractive attitude in which epistemic authority continues to reside with individuals who supposedly ‘know best’. Relational humility, by contrast, directs attention towards others. It says: ‘I do not know – tell me where I am mistaken.’ It shifts the focus to the quality of the relationships that make knowledge possible, recognises one’s limitations, attributes epistemic authority to those who have historically been denied it, and cultivates an active willingness to learn. It is both a cognitive and ethical virtue, indispensable for overcoming extractive modes of knowing and establishing collaborative practices of knowledge production.
It is from this perspective that I wish to engage with the literature surrounding the Global Majority.
To deepen this reflection, I turn to the work of the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (1926–2001). During the year marking the centenary of his birth, I participated in several initiatives celebrating his legacy.5 I identify strongly with Santos, not least because he was not affiliated with any political party and was one of the few Black Brazilian intellectuals to build an international academic career despite being born in the interior of Bahia, in one of Brazil’s poorest regions.
In Por uma outra globalização (Toward an Other Globalization, 2000), Santos proposes that globalisation can be understood in three forms: as fable, as reality, and as utopia.6
As fable, globalisation presents itself as a world of instantaneous information and shrinking distances. It invites us to believe that technological progress has made the world smaller, placing information and global networks in the palm of your hand. Yet this narrative is, according to Santos, a fiction, which lies not in the planet’s technical interconnection, but in presenting its benefits as universal. Information may circulate instantly in certain spaces, but the power to produce, select, and use it remains profoundly unequal. This fable continues over and over when a major finding is announced, such as IA. It is a form of propaganda.
The second perspective requires confronting globalisation as it actually exists: as a factory of perversities in which unemployment becomes chronic; poverty expands; the middle classes experience declining standards of living; hunger and homelessness spread across continents; new diseases emerge while old ones return; infant mortality persists despite medical advances; quality education becomes increasingly inaccessible; and moral and spiritual crises deepen through selfishness, cynicism, and corruption. For Santos, these phenomena are direct consequences of a global order organised around competition and accumulation.
Amanda Tropicana, Foto-diáspora (2025). Courtesy of the artist.
Santos died shortly after the publication of this work. He did not witness the emergence of the world’s first trillionaire, the rise of Big Tech empires, the AI revolution that has further disadvantaged poorer nations, or the Covid-19 pandemic that transformed the world. The distance between the promises and consequences of globalisation has never been wider. According to Oxfam, the fortunes of the world’s five richest men more than doubled between 2020 and 2023, while nearly five billion people became poorer.7 The planet’s technical integration has advanced, but its benefits and governing power remain extraordinarily concentrated. Technologies presented as universal instruments of progress operate within a world divided between those who control their development and those whose labour, territories, resources, and data sustain them.
Between illusion and devastation, a third way of understanding globalisation was proposed by Santos: neither as fable nor solely as perversity, but as the material basis for uma outra globalização, or ‘an other globalisation’. The expression describes the possibility of organising the same planetary interdependence according to different principles. The technical unification of the world, presently subordinated to money and hegemonic information, could instead serve human needs, dignity, solidarity, and social life. In this sense, Santos’s utopia was not the opposite of reality. It arose from possibilities already present within reality but not yet realised.
If we mistakenly consider the global order that has prevailed as the only one that can exist, then an other globalisation will inevitably appear naïve. Yet this perspective is precisely what Santos warns us against: ‘This repetitive view of the world confuses what has already been realised with the prospects for realisation.’ No empire is eternal, and the present contains more possibilities than the hegemonic order allows to become fully visible.
The world defined by the official literature of monolithic thought is merely the set of particular ways of realising only a certain number of those possibilities. However, a true world will be defined by the complete list of possibilities present at a given time, which includes not only what already exists on the face of the Earth, but also what does not yet exist, yet is empirically feasible. Such possibilities, yet unrealised, are already present as a tendency or as a promise of realisation. That is why situations like the one we currently face may seem definitive, but they are not eternal truths.8
History, in Santos’s view, is not merely what we inherit from the past. It is also the reservoir of ‘unrealised possibilities’ in the present. It is essential to situate Santos and the position from which he formulated his ideas: as a geographer. Otherwise, his thinking about a globalisation beyond fable and perversity can itself be appropriated, serving as an appealing preamble to the launch of a new Big Tech venture that promises global solidarity while deepening inequality and colonial domination. His ideas would thereby be reduced to another fable. It is therefore crucial to emphasise that in proposing the construction of an other globalisation, Santos begins with the cultural and social diversity of people and with the forms of knowledge, coexistence, and solidarity produced from below. Historically marginalised populations – the poor, migrants, racialised communities, inhabitants of the world’s peripheries – cease to appear merely as victims. They become producers of alternative rationalities, forms of sociality, and visions of the future.
Amanda Tropicana, Dois de Fevereiro (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
These unrealised possibilities become concrete initiatives of resistance. They form the fabric of an other globalisation in the making, constructed within the interstices of the dominant order. They are present when more than a thousand Indigenous people from fourteen ethnic groups of the Lower Tapajós occupy the entrance to a Cargill terminal for thirty-three days, defending the river and their territories and securing the revocation of a decree adopted without prior consultation.9 They are also present when Black intellectuals – including me – build a publishing movement centred on Black writers, responding to an exclusion documented in a study of novels released by three major Brazilian publishers between 2005 and 2014, in which only 2.5 per cent of the authors were non-white.
I like to imagine unrealised possibilities through a simple image: a moment when my companions and I look at each other, conscious of the world in which we live and of the stories we have been told about it; when we see the tools at our disposal, the paths our ancestors travelled, and the strength we carry. It is then we can begin to imagine creative ways of making another world together. The new does not emerge from nowhere. It begins with a shared recognition that the world we have inherited is not the only world possible, and that our lives need not be confined to its present terms.
The Global Majority is itself an unrealised possibility, gaining force through encounter and communion. Our histories of dispossession and resistance are not identical, but they reveal structures that connect us. By recognising those connections without erasing our differences, we can confront the fable of globalisation and create other forms of solidarity.
When Platform 011 invites us to think about the Global Majority as a dynamic space in which knowledge, affects, and solidarities circulate among people historically shaped by colonialism, we can see another unrealised possibility taking form. In this same spirit of humility, I considered it important to bring a Black Brazilian thinker into a debate, which I am myself still coming to know. Santos offers me a first theoretical compass in this initial engagement with the Global Majority: one that encourages alliances across nationalities and hemispheres and points beyond a totalitarian globalisation towards a world in which difference can flourish without being converted into hierarchy.
This text was originally written in Brazilian Portuguese and subsequently translated into English with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). The final version has been reviewed and adjusted to ensure that the original meaning, tone, and conceptual precision has been retained.