Poetics of Diversity
Today, the adjective ‘postcolonial’ and its counterpart ‘decolonial’ remain subjects of debate among scholars, which is why AA has chosen to adopt the term ‘coloniality’, borrowed from Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, as the title of its Autumn 2025 issue.
Clémentine Roland et Anastasia de Villepin
‘Act in your place, think with the world.’
Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, 1995
Emerging in the late 1980s, postcolonial studies have offered a clearer understanding of how societies, nations, and communities – whether colonised or colonising – were shaped by centuries of power relations, and how these legacies continue to affect their contemporary functioning. These studies demonstrate that colonisation is not a closed chapter of history, but a structural force shaping our thinking, our spaces, and our cultures. Although scholars have yet to agree on a precise definition of ‘post-colonial,’ the mechanisms of domination are well understood, and the lively debates among intellectuals and researchers attest to the enduring relevance of the subject.
To avoid misnaming the practices explored in this dossier, we opted for the term ‘coloniality’. As the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano explained, it refers to the matrix of power that arose with colonisation and the advent of capitalism, and which continues to shape the global order today.1 It denotes not only a state of affairs but also the multiple inequalities that a mere treaty of independence could never undo. Yet, when cloaked in the guise of universalism, coloniality sometimes performs polyphony – ‘I speak on behalf of everyone’ – and at other times becomes miraculously oblivious – ‘I don’t see colour.’ It is precisely to confront these contradictions and blind spots that we have chosen to highlight testimonies – whether memorial or identity-based – from those who are active agents of their own histories. In so doing, we trace what the academic Mame-Fatou Niang and the writer Julien Suaudeau describe as a ‘postcolonial universalism’2 – a ‘humanism commensurate with the world,’ in contrast to classical universalism, ‘at once a forgery and an instrument of conquest, the weapon of crime and the river into which it is cast.’
Read: the editorial of AA 466th issue – ‘Colonialities’
The practices presented in this dossier demonstrate that while challenging colonialism has always involved ‘red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives’,3 encounters with alterity need not unfold through violence or omission. Moving beyond coloniality is not merely revisiting a past that refuses to pass: it requires choosing new forms of relation, in which power no longer flows from a centre to its margins, but where knowledge circulates, is negotiated, shared, and interwoven. Architect and researcher Paulo Tavares describes these emerging connections, which recognise the non-human living as dignified subjects rather than resources (p.40). In art and architecture, examples abound: Palestinian artist Dima Srouji examines the intimate mechanisms of cultural dispossession (p.61), while Vikramāditya Prakāsh lifts the modernist carpet laid by the bulldozers of Chandigarh (p.52); in Uganda, the collective Buzigahill redirects the flows of globalised fashion (p.46); in Hanoi, a museum by Nguyên Hà intertwines the profane and the sacred under the watchful gaze of the Mother Goddesses (p.76). Language itself becomes a site of invention: researcher Mylène Danglades recounts the possibility of a joyful syncretism embodied in creolised languages (p.92). Meanwhile, Yolŋu art, through its narrative cartographies, asserts that a landscape is not an empty space to exploit but a symbolic fabric of spiritual, political, and ecological relations (p.110). These gestures, whether expansive or measured, form the components of a movement; they do not bring closure, but open the path to what follows.
1. Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology, 15(2), 2000, p.215-232.
2. Mame-Fatou Niang, Julien Suaudeau, Universalisme, anamosa, 2022
3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 2001 (1961)
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