Introduction the Temporal Politics of Anticolonial Aesthetics

Abstract

This essay aims at developing a critical intervention in the politics of time of anticolonial aesthetics. Engaging with recent debates on cultural activism and postcolonial and decolonial studies, our main objective is to examine the ways in which anticolonial cultural analysis and production keeps nurturing contemporary processes of progressive social transformation. We 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 thirteen essays included in this special issue engage with this argument from a wide variety of disciplines, including film studies, art history, literary criticism, and cultural and visual studies.