Global Public Intellectual Personas: A Critical Engagement with Some Recent Contributions to Reconfiguring Social Theory Canons

This paper examines recent attempts at reconfiguring social theory canonicity with a specific, but not exclusive, focus on work that has sought to do so from the global "south" - see for example Connell; Comaroff & Comaroff; Burawoy & Von Hold as well as multicutural readers and social theory introductions - see for example Lemert. Specifically, it examines the implications, possibilities and limitations posed by such endeavours, particularly where such interventions are explicitly framed or implicitly understood as responses to demands for representivity, recognition and reparation, and explores the centrality of intellectual personas to this practice. It is argued that these interventions need to be understood against the background of what arguably is a much wider culture of celebrity and the associated phenomenon of contemporary global public intellectual personas, mediated by visual cultures, social media platforms, database-underpinned indexes, quotation circles and other social practices.