We Are the South within the North

In We Are the South within the North, Louisa Yousfi asks what it would mean for the Global Majority to become more than a demographic description and emerge instead as a political relation. Moving through colonial inheritance, assimilation, and diaspora, she argues that solidarity is not guaranteed by identity or shared histories of domination but must be actively produced through political commitments that cross the borders of Empire. Diaspora emerges here as both contradiction and possibility: situated within the North yet bound to struggles beyond it.

Empires have always had a penchant for minorities and are remarkably good at inventing them. They simply need to conquer much of the world, place themselves at the centre of the maps, and embed their laws in local administrations and their values in people’s minds. After a few centuries of such rule, entire peoples can become a ‘minority’ in the very land where they were born. In this respect, the term ‘Global Majority’ serves as a historical corrective. The modest slice of the world accustomed to seeing itself as synonymous with humankind is thereby cut down to a more realistic size. And those to whom the words ‘peripheral’, ‘ethnic’, ‘indigenous’, ‘immigrant’, ‘minority’, and ‘visible’ have long been applied can finally see themselves for what they are: extremely numerous, to the point of being more deserving of that ‘universal’ tag, which the West monopolised so long ago. But there is more to this linguistic turn than a simple performative pleasure – the shift in perspective has tangible consequences. It points to the fact that the concept of a minority is never merely a question of numbers. Yes, we need institutions, borders, armies, and schools, but also – and crucially – an element that is harder to quantify: the even distribution of a sense of inherent importance and dignity.

The history of the descendants of post-colonial immigrants to France could be characterised as a prolonged initiation into the gaze of the Other, a process of learning what they see when they look at us, anticipating their anxieties, smoothing off unseemly rough edges, giving off the right signals, proving that we are respectable company – modern, republican, emancipated, and integrated. We’ve become imperturbably accomplished, astonishingly skilled, at doing this. In my book In Defence of Barbarism (2025), I sought to capture this well-rehearsed routine: fluttering our eyelashes at the Empire, speaking its language, adopting its paradigms, and even its modes of resistance, and forever putting off the hour of our truth, our own hour. In that scenario, integration is an ambivalent force, riven by conflicting interests, rather than a straightforwardly benign process of inclusion – it holds us in orbit around the centre, sufficiently close for us to feel included but without ever quite relieving us of the need to justify our presence. 

The Global Majority may already exist, but the question now concerns the political conditions required to make it count. A majority can only become a political community through what it collectively produces. At the same time, we shouldn’t tell this story with the retrospective disdain of those who know how it ends. Our parents weren’t a bunch of fools bewitched by the West. As Memmi pointed out in Portrait du Colonisé, Portrait du Colonisateur (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1957), assimilation is initially desired by the colonised and resisted by the coloniser. That desire may naturally have contained an element of fascination, but also alienation and a painful urge to resemble the dominant party. And there was a still more fundamental aspiration, which might be expressed to the Empire in these terms: since you imposed your world on mine through colonial expansion, since you completely altered the course of my history, and since your wealth is founded in part on my sweat and even my blood, I demand my rightful share. I want the same rights, the schooling, the salary, the housing, the freedom of movement, and the dignity enshrined in your laws. I’ll take at face value the principles you intended to reserve for yourself. I’m going to carve myself out a niche in the contradictions between your words and your acts, and I’m going to stay put there. Such tenacity had a certain grandeur about it, leading to better lives and material gains. Unlike their parents, children received an education and adults were able to escape some of the more backbreaking manual jobs. There’s no reason to consign all that to the dustbin as if we had somehow sold out. But it’s also true that survival strategies sometimes outlive their usefulness. Initially, we hoped to change the house rules from the inside, but now that we are inside we expend too much energy on proving that we can behave ourselves here. 

This adds a subtle twist to the story of integration, and meanwhile the Empire has also learnt a thing or two. For instance, it has learnt that barbarians can become an asset – it does a system no harm to diversify its outward appearance or to allow some descendants of the colonised into its institutions as proof of its innocence. They can testify to the door being open and even be wheeled out when needed to explain why it’s not always open to everyone. The modern Empire doesn’t always demand that we disappear; sometimes it’s happy to put us on display and even flaunt us. We need to bear this shift in mind whenever we talk about the Global Majority, because becoming a majority without taking power is one of the traps we’re sleepwalking into. Better representation in the institutions of the Empire doesn’t necessarily equate to a change in the balance of power – on the contrary, the challenge is to differentiate between a majority that has become visible and a majority that is politically capable of redistributing power.

It’s the old conundrum faced by all emancipation struggles: how to enter the temple without being swallowed up by it? How, as the writer Kateb Yacine put it in Le Polygone étoilé (1966), to live in the ‘wolf’s jaws’? How to wrest rights from a world without ending up merely wanting a better place within its existing order? I don’t have an easy answer to these questions and would be wary of any such answer, because we are already deeply interconnected with this world. The fantasy of a pristine place outside it leads nowhere. It is not as if, buried beneath the wreckage of history, we possess an original identity simply waiting to be unearthed. In my second book, La Grande Méthode (2022), I write that we are occidenté – Westernised despite ourselves. Colonial history has impacted our languages, our families, our desires, and our conception of success, religion, the lost homeland, and ourselves. It has continually ruptured our genealogies and our old allegiances. And those who try to return to their heritage today find that it has not obligingly retained its form of yesteryear. Arabic has survived but may quietly be speaking the language of the markets. Religion remains omnipresent but may have lost some of its spiritual depth. Algeria might be so perfectly Algerian in our imagination that it cannot accommodate living, breathing Algerians. Even Palestine can be elevated to such a pure moral icon that we cease to pay attention to the complexities of its resolute inhabitants. We have inherited these ruptures in our history – fragments, silences, accents, and body language for which we have no reliable manual. And the disquieting question of what we ourselves will bequeath stops us in our tracks: what can we pass on to the next generation, given our own mutilated heritage? 

That said, this is perhaps not merely a question of what is transmitted from the dead to their children. A heritage can circulate horizontally, too, between those separated by history. The diaspora owes a debt to its homelands precisely because its geographical situation gives it access to resources that remain unequally distributed to an extraordinary degree. This is emphatically not the debt of the guilty migrant who has ‘abandoned’ their family and loved ones; rather, it is a form of responsibility arising from historical circumstances. We happen to be situated within a place that is powerful, and that alters what we are able to do with our heritage.

The political family I belong to in France has a neat way of expressing this idea: we are ‘the South within the North’. It endows the diaspora with a much broader political significance than that of a minority demanding its share under the national contract. The diaspora can instead become a conduit between the struggles unfolding in the centres of empires and the interests of peoples located on the far side of their borders. It is sufficiently close to the centre to be familiar with an empire’s institutions, contradictions, and faultlines, but also sufficiently in touch with other worlds to prevent national politics from completely trumping other loyalties.Though this does of course come with its own contradictions, not least the fact that life in the West can steadily transform proximity into consent – we end up looking at the border from the ‘right’ side. We are on the side where people can leave, return, and cross over, while those on the other side queue up pointlessly outside consulates. That’s why the question of loyalties is so insistently posed within Western democracies – descendants of migrants are constantly asked to prove unreserved allegiance to the nation. This despite the fact that all human beings have to juggle competing obligations, whether moral, religious, political, historical, or familial. How would a national border magically override them all? 

In the case of some post-colonial diasporas, history has, on the contrary, generated loyalties that transcend state borders. The rights we have acquired in a particular place do not erase the worlds to which we remain attached, but serve rather to bolster those attachments, thereby flipping that old charge of ‘divided loyalties’ to our advantage. Our supposed failure to integrate becomes a positive political resource through our enduring loyalty, in the very heart of Empire, to the great emancipation movements of past and present that have made our own lives possible, among them struggles against colonialism, apartheid and segregation, national liberation and independence movements, and resistance to contemporary forms of dispossession.

Not that any of this takes care of itself – one’s origin doesn’t come with a political conscience attached. The South can become mere emotional embroidery on a material, intellectual and political existence recalibrated to the coordinates of the North. It’s precisely for this reason that the Global Majority only acquires substance if it is politicised, and this occurs when the specific circumstances of the diaspora generate a perspective on the world, a sense of solidarity and political interests that transcend the mere desire to improve one’s lot within Western societies. Under such circumstances, the phrase ‘undermining the Empire from within’ acquires a decidedly less quixotic flavour. It entails a form of politics that goes to the heart of the Empire’s contradictions, contesting the narratives that normalise its violence, foregrounding the interests of the South that are generally treated as incidental variables, nurturing transnational solidarity, disseminating resources and knowledge, resisting distant wars being treated as abstractions, and alleviating the isolation of dominated peoples with the help of sympathetic intermediaries situated within the very societies whose governments, economies, and institutions contribute to their domination. The centre of imperial nations is our battleground, and the nature of the battle is now more precisely defined. The diaspora should no longer see itself as the unloved periphery of Western nations but rather as one of the political components of the South within the North. This marks a considerable shift of perspective. If we continue to define ourselves principally in relation to integration, the centre of gravity of our political lives will remain the Western state. But the politicisation of the diaspora depends on the impact that our presence here has on those elsewhere. Our responsibilities do not end at the border. They begin there. 

The Global Majority creates the conditions of its own existence, and the very fragility of those conditions is in my view preferable to our contemporary appetite for off-the-shelf identities. Peoples appear, sometimes suddenly, like forgotten entities, emerging more often than not through the cracks of Empire and the wounds of nation-states. I searched long and hard for an image that would convey this kind of emergence, and I finally found it in the Simurgh. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s allegorical poem, the birds set out across the world in search of their king. The few who finally reach their destination experience a dizzying realisation: that they themselves constitute the sovereign they have been seeking. The quest has not merely led them to their goal but transformed them in the process, making them capable of seeing what they were looking for. This story has stayed with me because it chimes more closely with my own political experience than abstract definitions of peoples and diasporas, though the Simurgh takes on another meaning when I think of the diaspora. It’s not merely that the birds recognise themselves in each other, but that the crossing they’ve made has changed them. It has afforded them an experience that is not fully contained in either their point of departure or arrival. And that is ultimately the essential truth – the soul, if you will – of the Global Majority: a politics born out of the crossing itself. In other words, a political community only comes into being when people come together – it is born out of relationships, solidarity, a crossing, and political engagement. 

In this respect, the Global Majority refers less to what we already were than to what we can become politically if we pull together. It is an awareness formed in the fractures between spaces that are unequally situated in relation to the world order. Diasporas experience this geography in brutally personal terms since the global frontier runs down the middle of our families. It separates siblings, cousins, and generations; it assigns different values to the same lives depending on the travel document presented at the airport. For us, the imperial order is not an abstract theory of international relations but something tangible: a plane ticket, a visa application refused, monthly money transfers, a telephone call to a city being bombed, or a body to be repatriated for burial. This is why the relative privilege of living in the North can be seen as a historical responsibility rather than the happy endpoint of migration. Our parents didn’t make the crossing with the idea that our material comfort would mark the end of history. The rights they fought for and won have enhanced our capacity to act, and the inevitable question is: how do we capitalise on that capacity? Our heritage is no longer solely a question of what we should salvage from the past, but also of what our current position enables us to give back to those from whom our life paths have diverged. 

From this perspective, belonging to the decolonisation camp is not like being an honorary member of a club. The word ‘camp’ denotes a political orientation, with all its attendant conflicts, choices, disagreements, and consequences. It establishes a continuity between memories of independence struggles and current forms of domination, without claiming that they are identical. Somebody might eat what their grandparents ate, speak their language, celebrate their festivals, and know the family village like the back of their hand, and yet have profoundly internalised the geopolitics of Empire. Conversely, somebody who no longer speaks the language, is unfamiliar with their parents’ homeland, and has an entirely Western lifestyle may still feel a deep political bond with peoples whose history has made their presence here possible. The decisive factor is not authenticity but loyalty and political engagement. To whom do our privileges bind us? For whom does our presence in the centre constitute a resource? Whose lives continue to matter to us? These questions are probably the litmus test of how deeply people identify with the diaspora. 

The diaspora has a mission, in the least comfortable sense of the word – a Fanonian mission to keep open, in the heart of the North, political channels for those whom the Empire’s borders would shut out. In other words, to ensure safe passage for their interests, not merely their raw materials, their labour, their wealth, their dead, and the consequences of decisions taken far away from them. Our own advancement cannot come at the price of them being forgotten. We have entered, and our children will enter even further. Some of us will occupy positions that our parents imagined were forever off-limits for us. There’s nothing pyrrhic about this victory, but the important question is who enters with us. If we arrive all alone, the Empire will gain a new and incredibly diverse generation of servants. If we enter bearing our dead, our histories, the peoples to whom we are indebted, the wars it would have us forget, and the borders our passports now allow us to cross, then our integration might recover the subversive edge it perhaps had at the outset. We are no longer asking the Empire to make space for us but turning the space we have already won into a breach – a breach through which the light of the South can enter.