The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics

This book develops a critical intervention in the politics of time and anticolonial aesthetics. Engaging with recent debates on cultural activism and postcolonial and decolonial studies, the main objective of this volume is to examine the ways in which anticolonial cultural analysis and production keeps nurturing contemporary processes of progressive social transformation. The chapters in this volume argue that anticolonialism should not be bounded to a specific historical moment (that of postcolonial nation-building); rather, it should be seen as a fertile, radical tradition going beyond the specific event of decolonization and informing utopian and radical futures. The twelve essays engage with this argument from a wide variety of disciplines, including film studies, art history, literary criticism, and cultural and visual studies. It is intended for scholars, activists, and students across disciplines who are interested in the intersections of culture, politics, and social change. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions.

Carlos Garrido Castellano is Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at University College Cork, where he coordinates the BA programme in Portuguese Studies. He is also Associate Researcher at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (2021) (which became a free open access publication in 2023), Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (Routledge, 2023), Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times (forthcoming 2025), as well as of two other monographs in Spanish and one in Portuguese. He also edited Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia, "Decentring the Genealogies of Art Activism," and The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics. He is also Principal Investigator of the IRC Laureate Consolidator Project "Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds" (ARTFICTIONS). Patrick Crowley is Established Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Galway, Ireland. He writes on aesthetic form, particularly within colonial and postcolonial contexts, and with a special focus on contemporary Algerian cultural production. His publications include the monograph Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (2007) and a range of articles and edited and co-edited volumes including Formless, (2005); Mediterranean Travels, (2011); and Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form, (2011). In 2016, he co-edited an issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies titled 'The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000-2015' and he published a scholarly edition of L'Exotisme: la littérature coloniale (Louis Cario and Charles Régismanset, [1911]). His edited volume Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988-2015 was published in 2017 as was a thematic issue of Studies in Travel Writing titled 'Travel, Colonialism and Encounters with the Maghreb: Algeria'.

Introduction: The Temporal Politics of Anticolonial Aesthetics 1. Discordant Trajectories of the (Post-)Soviet (Post)Colonial Aesthetics 2. Insolence, Indolence, and the Ayitian free Black 3. Futures in the Presents: Decolonial Visions of the Haitian Revolution 4. C.L.R. James and the Genealogies of Socially Transformative Aesthetics 5. Memorializing Masculinity? Gendering the Iconography of French Colonialism and Anticolonial Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe 6. Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition: The Poetic and the Chronopolitics of Bandung 7. Whose Star?: The Ongoing Cultural Present and Futures of Algeria's Revolution(s) 8. Cosmopolitan Repair: Reclaiming and Restoring Cultural Heritage in Postcolonial Nigeria 9. Anticolonial Aesthetics: Towards Eco-Cinema 10. The Limits of the Anthropocene: Anticolonial Humanity in Kidlat Tahimik's Mababangong Bangungot and Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen 11. Clasping Together the Magical and the Menial: Decolonizing Aesthetics