Before the Global South: Unthinking Medieval Poetry

A bold approach to the work of contemporary, Indigenous, and other emergent artists as revisionist adaptations of medieval lyric poetry.

In this book, Marisa Galvez gathers an eclectic array of contemporary poets, artists, writers, and translators-from Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos and Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, to Occitanists Gérard Zuchetto and Jean-Louis Séverac, to Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, poet Rosanna Warren, and essayist Eliot Weinberg-to explore how they reimagine medieval European lyric forms. Galvez calls these adaptations unthought medievalism, and in Before the Global South, she argues that we should understand them as a mode of inquiry that is at once scholarly, critical, and creative. In these modern innovations, Galvez finds an expression of the medieval that challenges popular and scholarly dogmas alike, one she believes can inspire us to create a more shared, global world.