“Galvez eschews the linearity and hierarchies of Western textual analysis, showing how medieval artifacts, modern artisanal work and exploration of media, and Indigenous ontology can form a connected literature across space and time. In a series of rich and highly readable chapters, Before the Global South provides a roadmap to a relational comparative literature.”

Zrinka Stahuljak, University of California, Los Angeles

“Before the Global South breaks new ground in comparative poetics. Galvez’s book is consummately multidisciplinary—bringing into shared time Indigenous poetry, medieval troubadour traditions, postcolonial crises, modernist aesthetics, and even the structural principles of Filipino goldwork to cast anew the collective achievements of a world only apparently made before the Global South. The book’s thrilling conceptions of craft and materiality transform periodization and the possible futures by which we poeticize history and live historically with poetic forms.”

Edgar Garcia, University of Chicago