States Of Post Coloniality Decolonial Aesthetics

Sensing otherwise -- The poetics of sensing: decolonial verses in antipoetry and conversational poetry -- Decolonial sounds: redolent echoes of nueva canción -- Decolonial visuality and new Latin American cinema -- Decolonial aesthetics in Latin America -- Conclusion: Sensing the irresolute past in the present

This book features writing by 17 authors from Germany and from African and Latin American countries on highly diverse aesthetic phenomena as seen from their own different points of view. The texts in this volume all deal with the imperative of ‘decolonization’: they try to highlight aesthetic strategies for the (re)discovery of unthematized, misappropriated, transcultural and even transcontinental histories and memories and aesthetic practices that are absent from or too little perceived within national consciousnesses. Novels, poems and musical performances from the East African region are analysed as intertwined histories of the Indian Ocean and its different languages. Artworks of the Black Atlantic and perceptions of Africa are discussed from, for example, Brazilian perspectives. Within the German context, decolonisation strategies in exhibition practices in ethnological or art museums developed by Nigerian artists are evaluated; new terms such as ‘dividuation’ are proposed to describe these contemporary composite-cultural entanglements, and so on. A stimulating, wide-ranging and heterogeneous portrait of contemporary interwoven world cultures!

Decolonial Pluriversalism offers a unique, powerful, and crucial perspective on decolonial theories, political thoughts, aesthetics, and activisms. In going beyond a postcolonial critique of eurocentrism, it provides some of the most original interventions in the field of decolonial theory. Drawing from the Francophone worlds, Latin American and Caribbean philosophies, it explores concepts of creolization, racialization, Afropean aesthetics, arts and cultural productions, feminisms, fashion, education, and architecture. Contributors: Zahra Ali, Luis Martínez Andrade, Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Jane Anna Gordon, Mariem Guellouz, Léopold Lambert, Alanna Lockward, Fátima Hurtado López, Olivier Marboeuf, Donna Edmonds Mitchell, Corinna Mullin, Marine Bachelot Nguyen, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Françoise Vergès, Patrice Yengo

This dissertation explores how U.S. literature of the 1980s and 1990s recalibrates the tropes, figures, and theories of decolonization to examine the meanings of statelessness-of not being considered as a national by any State-in the post-Civil Rights, post-Cold War context. I discuss how writers Kathy Acker, Gayl Jones, Francisco Goldman, Ammiel Alcalay, and Sinan Antoon use literary techniques to reveal statelessness as part of a colonial legacy that still shapes Western social organization. This literary treatment of statelessness is integral to the aims of a decolonial aesthetic practice that reveals and then challenges the political notions that underwrite traditional aesthetic projects, as well as projects to ostensibly counter them (such as the 1960s and 70s project of redefining a Black Aesthetic). Because statelessness is the absent center to definitions of the individual, belonging, and authority, these writers also adapt their treatment of statelessness to reconceptualize the terms of literary authority, including the concept of individual authorship and of a decolonial, authorial practice. Chapter One of this dissertation is a theoretical discussion of statelessness, decoloniality, and aesthetics within the context of this project. Chapter Two explores how decolonial tropes in Goldman's 1997 novel, The Ordinary Seaman, revise literary conventions of immigration and globalization narratives. In Chapter Three, I consider how Acker's anti-conventional practice of conflation in Empire of the Senseless (1988) critically engages with ideologies of neoliberalism and national citizenship. I discuss how Acker conflates C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins with other texts of anti-colonial revolution to create a zombi(e) figure of political statelessness. The next chapter analyzes the interplay between the Sanctuary movement and a decolonization of the authorial "self" in Gayl Jones' 1999 novel, Mosquito, and in her essay on a "Third World Aesthetics." The epilogue, "Ghostwriting Iraq," extends Jones' redefinition of authorship as a feature of a decolonial practice. In it, I consider how Alcalay's book-length poem, from the warring factions (2002), and Antoon's novella, I'Jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (2007, English translation), elaborate tropes of ghostwriting and linguistic ambiguity as part of their challenge to models of sovereign authority and individual authorship.

How can Western Modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? The volume maps out answers to this question from the fields of Postcolonial, Decolonial, and Black Studies, delineating converging and diverging positions, approaches, and trajectories. It assembles contributions by renowned scholars of the respective fields, intervening in History, Sociology, Political Sciences, Gender Studies, Cultural and Literary Studies, and Philosophy."

Decolonial aesthetics of Blackness in contemporary art challenge and redefine traditional narratives, offering a profound critique of historical and ongoing injustices. This approach emphasizes the reclamation and celebration of Black cultural identities through innovative artistic expressions that resist colonialist frameworks and oppressive stereotypes. By emphasizing the experiences and perspectives of Black artists, decolonial aesthetics challenge the power structures presented in art history and highlight the significance of autonomy, representation, and authenticity. To advance this dialogue, it is crucial to support and engage with Black artists and their work, ensuring that their voices are amplified, and their contributions are recognized within art discourse. Decolonial Aesthetics of Blackness in Contemporary Art focuses on the generative audio and visual inscription of blackness as an offering of life and beauty in contemporary art. It discusses the concept of blackness related to modernity, decolonial aesthetics, and ontology of black life and beauty. This book covers topics such as decolonization, visual art, and sociology, and is a useful resource for art historians, visual artists, sociologists, academicians, scientists, and researchers.

This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema. After the defeat of the Socialist modernity the postsocialist space and its people have found themselves in the void. Many elements of the former Second world experience, echo the postcolonial situations, including subalternization, epistemic racism, mimicry, unhomedness and transit, the revival of ethnic nationalisms and neo-imperial narratives, neo-Orientalist and mutant Eurocentric tendencies, indirect forms of resistance and life-asserting modes of re-existence. Yet there are also untranslatable differences between the postcolonial and the postsocialist human conditions. The monograph focuses on the aesthetic principles and mechanisms of sublime, the postsocialist/postcolonial decolonization of museums, the perception and representation of space and time through the tempolocalities of post-dependence, the anatomy of characters-tricksters with shifting multiple identities, the memory politics of the post-traumatic conditions and ways of their overcoming.

Bringing Latin American popular art out of the margins and into the center of serious scholarship, this book rethinks the cultural canon and recovers previously undervalued cultural forms as art. Juan Ramos uses "decolonial aesthetics," a theory that frees the idea of art from Eurocentric forms of expression and philosophies of the beautiful, to examine the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America--a time of cultural production that has not been studied extensively from a decolonial perspective. Ramos looks at examples of "antipoetry," unconventional verse that challenges canonical poets and often addresses urgent social concerns. He analyzes the militant popular songs of nueva canción by musicians such as Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra. He discusses films that use visually shocking images and melodramatic effects to tell the stories of Latin American nations. He asserts that these different art forms should not be studied in isolation but rather brought together as a network of contributions to decolonial art. These art forms, he argues, appeal to an aesthetic that involves all the senses. Instead of being outdated byproducts of their historical moments, they continue to influence Latin American cultural production today.