The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics

Introduction: The Temporal Politics of Anticolonial Aesthetics

Carlos Garrido Castellano and Patrick Crowley

1. Discordant Trajectories of the (Post-)Soviet (Post)Colonial Aesthetics

Madina Tlostanova

2. Insolence, Indolence, and the Ayitian free Black

Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo

3. Futures in the Presents: Decolonial Visions of the Haitian Revolution

Rachel Douglas

4. C.L.R. James and the Genealogies of Socially Transformative Aesthetics

Carlos Garrido Castellano

5. Memorializing Masculinity? Gendering the Iconography of French Colonialism and Anticolonial Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe

Laura McGinnis

6. Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition: The Poetic and the Chronopolitics of Bandung

Brigitta Isabella

7. Whose Star?: The Ongoing Cultural Present and Futures of Algeria’s Revolution(s)

Patrick Crowley

8. Cosmopolitan Repair: Reclaiming and Restoring Cultural Heritage in Postcolonial Nigeria

Cresa Pugh

9. Anticolonial Aesthetics: Towards Eco-Cinema

Matthias De Groof

10. The Limits of the Anthropocene: Anticolonial Humanity in Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot and Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

Danielle Bouchard

11. Clasping Together the Magical and the Menial: Decolonizing Aesthetics

Jane Anna Gordon

Biography

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’.