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What if the world has changed so drastically as to allow now for almost the first time a new geographical consciousness of a decentered or multiply-centered world, a world no longer sealed with watertight compartments ofart ofculture or history, but mixed, mixed-up, varied, complicated by the new difficult mobility of migrations, the newly independent states, the newly emergent and burgeoning cultures.
Edward Said, "History, Literature, and Geography"
Decoloniality
This special issue evolved from a question about how to read subversion in literary space in ways that decolonize that space. It therefore also came to focus on the logics of power that embed and inhere within state and transnational systems and discourses while affecting the way we encounter and interpret literature. The projected effort was to encourage thinking about how works and systems of thought deemed decolonial could help to subvert the underlying rules of law and corrode the controls and operations of language within empire.
Decoloniality is a blanket term for political efforts on the left to address the global impact of colonial forms and structures pervading our ways of thinking. An underlying assumption of this idea is that colonialism is not limited to forms of governance and administration that instituted oppression and exploitation, but that these forms also imposed a self-replicating ideology, educating colonial subjects on how to think. Even where formal colonialism came to an end, the imagination of the former colonized people would continue to be haunted by the structures of colonialism, ensuring the rise of a seemingly intractable neocolonialism. Decoloniality has recently been popularized by a research collective of Latin American thinkers and scholars led by Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, whose work engages with the World-Systems theories of Immanuel Wallerstein. Yet others who are not usually associated with this group, such as Sylvia Wynter and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, had also forged parallel lines of thinking in earlier efforts to address residual epistemological expressions of colonial logics.
The purported aims of these lines of decolonial thinking do not necessarily address aesthetic forms. They are primarily forms of political analysis that address popular and enduring dependencies on epistemologies imposed during the colonial process-the same process that sought to remove or displace knowledge systems that had been held by colonized subjects prior to...