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Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces engage with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, the Cape Verde Islands, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.

Remixing and reexamining art of and after the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this book brings to light new insights about artists, their cultural production, and the exhibitions that feature their work, but also collectors, curators, critics, and advocates. Using an interdisciplinary method that combines decolonial and feminist theory, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos explores how narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics have limited debates over Chicana/o art. This comprehensive art history employs vernacular concepts, such as the errata exhibition and the remix, which emerge out of art practice itself, to drive the analysis of over three dozen artists. It rejects familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in binary terms: political versus commercial, realist versus conceptual, and so on. Each chapter explores undocumented or previously ignored information, such as European aesthetic influences on Chicana/o art or commercial ventures of community-based arts organizations, which are made invisible by conventions of art history or Chicana/o studies. The book illuminates the transnational, borderlands, feminist, and decolonial aesthetic processes and social conditions that expand, not contract, how we consider Chicana/o art. Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production in a major metropolitan area.

Creolizing Europe aims to interrogate creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the social and cultural transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. It explores the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking through post/coloniality, raciality, and othering as both historical legacies and constitutive of European societies and epistemologies as it develops interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on ‘hybridity’, ‘mixed race’, and the ‘Black Atlantic’ with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant’s creolization. Further, through a comparative methodology the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe’s colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. ‘Europe’ becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. Although not all the contributions explicitly address Glissant’s approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking in terms of the usefulness, transferability and limitations of creolization to the European context. This volume offers a significant contribution to European Studies, Post/Colonial Studies, Decolonial Studies and Cultural Studies by emphasizing that ‘race’ and ‘cultural mixing’ are central to theorizing Europe and by applying Glissantian perspectives to empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, racism, nation, gender, sexuality, representations and memory.

This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.

This anthology gathers the work of three generations of Latina/o theologians and philosopher who have taken up the task of transforming their respective disciplines from the standpoint of liberation and what has been called the “decolonial turn” in social theory, theology, and philosophy. This collection is focuses on the different ways in which Latina/o thinkers, activists, and public intellectuals are producing knowledge that addresses the unique social location of Latinas/os in the US. Instead of continuing to be represented, this group of scholars show the unsuspecting and original ways in which Latina/o locations in the US can be generative places for the development of new matrixes of knowledge. The book, thus, articulates a new point of departure for the self-understanding of not simply Latina/os, but also US citizens in this new age of post-colonialism and globalization.

This volume stages an intergenerational dialogue among a number of prominent scholars to introduce and deepen engagement with Latinx and Latin American feminist philosophy. The collection includes a series of essays analyzing decolonial approaches within Latinx and Latin American feminist philosophy, including studies of the functions of gender within feminist theory, everyday modes of resistance, and methodological questions regarding the scope and breadth of decolonization as a critical praxis. Additionally, the authors include examine theoretical contributions to feminist discussions of selfhood, narrativity, and genealogy, as well as novel epistemic and hermeneutical approaches within the field. Lastly, a number of contributors in the book address themes of aesthetics and embodiment, including issues of visual representation, queer desire, and disability within Latin American and US Latinx feminisms.

Decolonizing Universalism develops a way forward for genuinely anti-imperialist feminisms. Against ways of thinking that suggest feminists must either reject normativity altogether or bite the bullet and treat feminism as a product of Western chauvinism, the book offers a universalist conception of feminism that is not grounded in imperialism-causing values. Insisting that transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms criticize imperialism rather than valorize of cultural diversity as such, Khader advocates shifting the terms of feminist debates about imperialism. Rather than asking whether feminists should embrace any universal values, as the popular relativism/universalism framing does, the book asks whether feminism requires embracing the specific values that have been thought to be vehicles for imperialism. Khader offers a nonideal universalist conception of transnational feminist praxis, that understands feminism as opposition to sexist oppression and transnational feminist praxis as a justice-enhancing project. Her nonideal universalist vision allows feminists remain feminists without committing to the values of what she calls “Enlightenment liberalism,” including controversial forms of autonomy, secularism, and individualism, as well as gender eliminativism. The result is a new vision of solidarity according to which it can be both possible and preferable for feminisms to be rooted in worldviews that are unfamiliar to, and stigmatized by, Westerners—and a call to attend more seriously to the moral and practical meanings of “other” women’s activism. The book draws heavily on examples from international development, postcolonial theory, and Southern women’s movements.

Asking whether one can develop an approach to studying political life that reflects its heterogeneity, Jane Anna Gordon offers the creolization of political theory as a viable response. Creolization, she argues, describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. In so doing, they provide a useful way of understanding similar processes that continue today, namely of one potential outcome when people who were previously strangers find themselves as unequal co-occupants of new political locations they seek to call “home.” In demonstrating a path that is different from the one usually associated with multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately and the aim is for each to tolerate the other by letting it remain in relative isolation, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another to create forms of belonging that are familiar but also distinctive and new. These are useful models for reconsidering how contemporary political solidarities could be constructed and how relationships may be forged among what have become radically separate fields for studying a shared world. Gordon demonstrates the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies through bringing together the ideas of the 18^th century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 20^th century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the decolonial methodologies and democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.