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This chapter describes contemporary Peru, and the highland Andean region, as the wider context in which the residence, Palomitáy, is situated. The chapter first explains the particularities of gender, racial, and class discourses in the postcolonial and neoliberal context of Peru. To recognize the multiple trajectories of inequality at various scales (from local to national and global) that configure this place and young women’s lives, the chapter considers three dimensions of everyday life. Recent historical events, social structures, and individual experiences of migration and mobility, reproductive politics and everyday violence, and humanitarianism and insecurity link the lives of girls in Palomitáy with the lives of girls and women in Peru, more generally.

This chapter illustrates postcolonial cultural politics by drawing upon a few examples from a special issue of the Bulletin of Hong Kong Cultural Studies (BHKCS) published in 1996 — one year before the handover. It notes that these articles emerged as a response to the stifling political and intellectual atmosphere of “1997 politics”, in which Hong Kong people, though excluded from any meaningful negotiation, were bombarded daily by hollow Chinese nationalist rhetoric and British hypocrisy. It further notes that the unreflective transplantations of some critical frameworks onto transitional Hong Kong were taken to task, as those frameworks did not properly deal with Hong Kong colonialities. It observes that although the impact of the critical and dissident young authors cannot compare with that of heads of state and local political leaders, it provided something new to the understanding of Hong Kong's coloniality — not just of its past, but of its changing face.

This afterword argues that the practices of mediation, classification, and demarcation elaborated by trans-imperial subjects in early modern Venice constituted important elements in the genealogy of Enlightenment anthropology and the nascent discipline of Orientalism. In particular, eighteenth-century Orientalists, who articulated taxonomies of Mediterranean peoples based on language, ritual, and custom, relied on the efforts of their trans-imperial forebears in the previous two centuries to institutionalize their specialized knowledge of things Ottoman in several European metropoles. The scientific study of Ottoman culture depended on the development of commercial and diplomatic institutions that facilitated the production and circulation of specific kinds of knowledge across linguistic and political boundaries. The concept of trans-imperial subjects raises important questions about prevailing notions of early modern coloniality, citizenship, and subjecthood.

The essay by Walter Mignolo defines decolonialism and differentiates it from anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles framed within Western civilization. The two pillars of decolonial thinking are geopolitical epistemology, which responds to local needs, habits, and memories that emerge from the Third World, and biographic political epistemology, which works toward building states that are at the service of the people and not vice versa. The chapter highlights the work of Indian historian and political theorist Partha Chatterjee and that of Maori national and anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith in order to provide examples of scholars who make decolonial moves by claiming the right to produce knowledge and advance their own people. Decoloniality is then clarified in terms of what it has in common with de-Westernization.

María Lugones’ essay begins by reasserting the importance of understanding the inseparability of race and gender and the coalitional meaning of Women of Color: a term that reveals the self as well as reality as multiple by indicating a complex social construction that includes how Women of Color are perceived by others as inferior as well as how they reject such a construction. Lugones’ valuing of coalitional understanding and praxis emphasizes how collectivities and communities are the fractured locus from which emerges a subjective/intersubjective understanding of self. The essay then complicates the understanding of racialized gender by introducing the “coloniality of gender,” emphasizing that this is not merely a classification but also refers to the process of dehumanizing people to fit them into this category. To oppose the coloniality of gender, Lugones introduces “decolonial feminism” as a kind of theory which frees subjugated knowledges. The essay ends with a call to coalition building that has a starting point in the fractured locus that oppressing →← resisting peoples have in common.

This chapter explores violence in post-dictatorial Spain. It raises questions about the elements of post-coloniality that extend beyond what is normally considered the postcolonial world, particularly the marginal status within the global political and economic order. The chapter attempts to understand the “incomprehensible logic” of the violence that arose in Spain's now-autonomous Basque Country, perpetrated by guerrilla group ETA against the Basque police. It argues that the madness of violence of the radical nationalists showed a profound ambivalence toward the nation-state, a fear that the unified sense of self as the colonized people stands to be lost in a coming into nationhood.

This chapter discusses how globalization through the mechanism of neoliberalization shapes spaces, places, and identities. It is argued that a “decolonial perspective” on Euro-American psychology provides specific conceptual frameworks to excavate its cultural origins; allows the colonial and postcolonial structure of the discipline to be analyzed through the lens of history, identity, power, and culture; and highlights the ways in which the Euro-American version of psychology is exported, reiterated, and reproduced in the era of neoliberal and global capitalism. The chapter contextualizes and clarifies the larger aims of the book by embedding them within the interrelated theoretical frameworks of culture, narrative, and identity. It explains in detail how globalization as a discourse creates asymmetrical and hybrid narratives among urban Indian youth culture.

“Transatlantic Coloniality” focuses on the work of Wifredo Lam and Virgilio Piñera to explore the construction of a national Cuban cannon in the 40s. From the perspective of Transatlantic Studies, the development of Cuban arts illustrates the dynamic tensions between those seeking to build Cuban national arts emerging from a whitewashed colonial past and those cosmopolitans, such as Lam and Piñera, emphasizing popular and Afro-Caribbean culture. Colonial discourses were, in both cases, at the center of the struggle to establish and consolidate the Cuban arts. Absorbed and integrated in one case as a historical foundation, it was critically questioned by Lam and Piñera.

The chapter calls for a planetary approach to modernist studies through the millennia; adapting cubist multi-perspectivism and Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the chapter offers thirteen ways of approaching the question of modernity/modernism, notes the increasing transnational expansion of the field, and acknowledges the anxiety and institutional questions this expansion creates. It suggests a provisional, relational definition of modernity that recognizes its relation to empire and conquest and its convergence of rapid change and rupture across all domains of society. It argues against the conventional notions of modernity as either progress or dissolution, proposing instead that the contradictory core of all modernities combine both utopian and dystopian dimensions. The chapter also offers four strategies for reading planetary modernisms: re-vision (rethinking the conventional canon from a planetary perspective), archaeology (discovering forgotten or new instances), circulation (tracing the planetary travels and networks of modernities/modernisms), collage (radical juxtaposition of different modernities/modernisms).

The second chapter investigates the link between Christian thought and the historical matrix decolonial thinkers have theorized as the coloniality of power. In light of the historical theory of coloniality and Christian theology’s entanglement in coloniality, this chapter opens up options for what decolonization might look like within theological reflection. This chapter begins with the task of considering the place of Christian theology within the coloniality of power. It then moves to offering possibilities for decolonizing descriptive statements of the human person, ways of knowing, and eschatological imaginations, and introduces the concept of decolonial love by engaging the way Chela Sandoval has used this term. Introducing these options leads to a threshold question for thinking from a Christian theological perspective within a decolonial project: Can members of communities that have been rendered nonpersons through various manifestations of the coloniality of power think and speak theologically on their own terms?

This chapter describes the work of Antonio Cornejo Polar and Néstor García Canclini, outlining an enquiry into the possibility of rethinking time substantively, against the historically fractured backdrop of colonial and postcolonial Peru. It postulates other temporalities which would refuse to adjust to the centralising narratives of the modern, and finds instances of them in the poems of Trilce by César Vallejo. It explains Culturas híbridas by García Canclini. Trilce serves as a workshop for experiments which could reveal associations between time and language. In Vallejo's restitution, coloniality stands exposed as a sedimentation of power, as power over time, in language.

This chapter asks how the examination of American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists' processes of re-imagining Jewishness contributes to the broader study of religion, violence, and the practices of peace. The chapter argues that the case study pushes the boundaries of the field by foregrounding processes of unlearning and critique as sites of research and praxis. This requires disabusing the field of its inclination to abstract "religion" from race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and other realities, an abstraction that is itself a product of coloniality. Accordingly, the chapter illuminates how the arguments threaded throughout the book exemplify the peacebuilding and transformative potential attention to discursive and epistemological violence generate. This constitutes a departure from the conventional focus of the field of religion, conflict, and peace on direct violence. The chapter also places American non- or post-Zionism in tension with settlers' post-Zionism as well as Mizrahi Israeli intersectional re-imagining through its own critical caretaking of the relation of Jews to the Middle East and Palestine/Israel specifically. The Mizrahi-Palestinian intersectional lens offers a challenge to American post- and non-Zionist diasporism's devaluation of Zion. The chapter illuminates narratives, stories and humanistic inquiry as critical for peacebuilding.

This book examines the ways in which modernity and colonialism intersected in the formation of a cultural empire in East Asia. Using an interdisciplinary and multitextual approach, it investigates the social and cultural experiences of individuals living in this cultural sphere that was created by the Japanese imperial enterprise. It explores the intertwined and multifarious relationship between the personal and the national, the private and the public, in the grand scheme of the Japanese colonial project. It asks what the common people gained from the Japanese empire, how they were persuaded to accept the ideology of Japanese imperialism, and what sustained their interest in the project of empire building. The book also considers the potential to reinterpret the political concept of the “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” not as an ideologically rooted term but as a space for cultural interaction and transformation in East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, it analyzes the link between gender and imperialism by focusing on women's experience of (post)coloniality.

This chapter uses Rice v. Cayetano (2000), a Supreme Court case involving a white citizen's challenge to Native Hawaiian representation, as a springboard to explore how race and coloniality are set up as oppositional, anti-intersectional politics. Kanaka Maoli and other indigenous scholars and activists have been quite vocal in critiquing the ways in which the discourse of civil rights and racism serves to obscure and undermine sovereignty claims and critiques of colonialism. The chapter adds to these critiques by demonstrating how the combination of legal and historical discourses sets up a battle between the recognition of racism and the recognition of settler colonialism. It illuminates how discourses of citizenship, law, and history collude to (re)produce the misrecognition and disaggregation of anticolonialist and antiracist endeavors.

How do writers consider the representation of human relations, and particularly between characters with various racial, gender-related, sexual, or national (self)identifications? This chapter will address the theme of “Writing and the Relation” by offering a tour-de-Azania – Azania being the indigenous name of South Africa – of what writing means when inscribing relations of blood, sex, gender and sexuality, inking blood in textual coloniality, under and between apartheid's reign when its tongue was twisted, locked in a tight vaginal grip with the British Empire and its allies, when forced removal of the slave quarter and its people was instituted, when the psyche staged its protest upon the body, when the psyche pierced through traumatised flesh and became the body. This tour-de Azania will be spiked with the memory of Edouard Glissant’s Creole words that spoke the forbidden, Biko’s fisted smile that fought for freedom, Fanon’s fearless fight in bringing the mind into the centre of colonial discourse, Paulette Nardal’s soirées where she hosted discourses of negritude in Paris on dinner plates, Derrida’s determination to reveal White Mythology, Lillian Ngoyi’s march against the militaristic laws of apartheid – these are the relations through which Black Consciousness is revealed.