This chapter reads Las edades de la rata (2019), a comic by Peruvian, Valencia-based Martín López Lam within a genealogy of the migrant subject. It proposes that Antonio Cornejo Polar’s ideas on migration as a phenomenon which goes back in time, both aesthetically and conceptually, are useful to think about how recent literature dealing with the contemporary migrant condition can be read as a continuation of long-lasting histories and traditions of displacement. The essay traces a connection between contemporary Latinx comics and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which Cornejo Polar identifies as one of the first manifestations of this migrant aesthetic. The qilqas of Guaman Poma are thus read alongside a form of our times, the contemporary comic, a medium that is defined by its radical formal heterogeneity and multimodal construction. Ultimately, by reading López Lam’s comic within this framework, the chapter draws a relationship between the many dimensions of the migrant subject, including its Latinx iterations, and the larger processes of coloniality which have shaped the encounter of cultures in Latin America and its diasporas.

Critical stances towards English Medium Instruction (EMI), and to a lesser extent the similar use of French, Portuguese and Spanish Medium Instruction in former colonies of European states, have been growing since ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This discussion contextualises ‘Southern’ critiques of EMI within early decolonial debates, ‘southern multilingualisms’ and ‘transknowledging’ (reciprocal translation and exchange of knowledge), which are often invisibilised in EMI. This is illustrated through critiques in two former British territories: the first, with critiques that circulated in Southern Africa from the 1960s; the second, with critiques that surfaced four decades later in Australia. Whereas EMI is readily recognised in South Africa (with 8 per cent L1 English speakers), Australia (with 250 Aboriginal linguistic communities at colonisation and 250 years of in-migration from all continents) is an EMI context for 23–30 per cent of citizens. Aggressive marketing of Australia as an educational destination for students from the Asia-Pacific amplifies its multilingual and EMI reality in higher education. The critique of EMI includes a history of cognitive capture, debt-trap diplomacy and educational failure. Included are key agents that advance EMI, invisibilise multilingualisms and perpetuate coloniality despite the claims of social justice and access that accompany EMI rationales.

This paper explores what is at stake when we talk of language activism, and what normative values often underlie such discussions. Language activism can generally be understood to involve some work in, on or through language (broadly understood), to include some kind of social action (pedagogy, policy, research), and to operate towards some vision of equitable change (social justice). None of these terms, however, is uncontested. If language itself remains an unchallenged ideal, without asking more fundamental questions about whose version of language is involved, language activism may have undesirable effects; if social action remains at the level of institutional advocacy, communities may be poorly served by inappropriate support; and if social justice defines the extent of the political philosophy, language activism may be as reactionary as it is progressive. This paper makes a case for activist applied linguistics – there is little point in applied linguistics otherwise – that by necessity bases its language and politics on emergent rather than extractivist approaches to communities, and on a decolonial agenda for both language and change. A materialist decolonial approach to language activism aims towards collaborative and emergent knowledge and politics.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter provides an overview of the importance of utopian theorizing in the twenty-first century. It resituates utopianism, through Blochean theory, as larger than a literary genre and more diverse than representations of perfect societies. Rather, it celebrates an ideal of the utopianism of the everyday, of the here-and-now as much as of the future. It argues for a utopianism that is necessarily decolonial as it seeks to undo the damage of racial capitalism and provide imaginative resources for living differently. It concludes with an overview of the chapters collected in this book, showing that they explore both reactionary or nostalgically inflected visions of America’s settler-colonial utopian foundations, as well as centering new strains of utopian thought emerging from the margins of hegemonic American culture.

To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how using various media in performance research (re-)contextualizes methods and the binary between bodily presence and recorded acts. They conclude that interdisciplinary research should invest in decolonizing methodologies as an ethical practice that both augments and challenges academic training.

In this chapter we articulate how transformative agency via double stimulation in cultural-historical activity theory can be a form of emancipatory agency from below among those most historically excluded and marginalised. Generated in a six-year-long formative intervention focussing on African land restitution, we show that the emergence of emancipatory transformative agency involves responsive mediation in which second stimuli, suitable to arising contradictions and conflict of motives, need to be co-developed as the formative intervention process unfolds. Emancipatory transformative agency by double stimulation (ETADS) pathways involve complex and parallel forms of movement over time that are not necessarily linear. The chapter reveals that ETADS pathways emerge as communities take ethical-political ownership of co-directing the emancipatory direction of their own development in the formative intervention process. In the process they challenge deep-seated oppressions of longue durée, transform power relations, build intergenerational solidarity and make decisions that advance the common good.

Beginning with an account of how Marxism fared in two historical contexts of decolonization (South Africa and India), the chapter then focuses on one recent influential mode of Marxist literary analysis: “world-literature” – with a hyphen – as elaborated the by Warwick Research Collective. How does this approach square with the current push for decolonization? In response to that question, the chapter contrasts WReC with claims from current “decolonial theory” to illustrate differences between their presuppositions. In conclusion, the suggestion is that Marxim’s specific contribution contemporary debates on decolonization might be to question tendencies to reify concepts such as “race,” “culture” or the “West” as metaphysical categories. That contribution, in turn, is best received on the understanding that there are experiential dimensions relating to aesthetics, language, race, gender, sexuality and religion that the Marxist framework is ill-equipped to account for in a non-reductive fashion. Hence, it is perhaps the dialectical method that is the enduring lesson of Marxism – a method that may bracket and then reintroduce the Marxist optic in the unending labour of making sense of the world.

In this essay I work with Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s formulation of “pluriversal decoloniality and decolonial pluriversality”: a sense of spaciousness in investigating and engaging with all that has been inherited from modernity and coloniality. I distance myself from those understandings of decolonial practice that seek to discard and replace: for literatures, like genders and sexualities, are a palimpsest, they build on waves of what is experienced and encountered through lineages. There are deaths and memories as well as traces and continuities, and I wish that they all be folded in for the reading, teaching and writing experience to be, as bell hooks outlines, exciting and passionate – and as Mignolo insists, exceeding the “object of study.” I see Octavio Paz’s critical method of reading as decolonial and draw upon it: keeping many thinkers and poets as unruly talismans thrown together in an unruly manner, I look at paradigms of gendered/sexual signs in relation to pedagogies and research methodologies for English literature in the global south. What could be a template to read historically, critically and imaginatively across and between Western and non-Western texts with an incisive, generous, difficult passion that marks all erotic pursuit as errant and explosive, even the intellectual?

Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

The concluding chapter summarizes the case for embracing a wider approach to the deep intellectual roots of the IPE field in the pre-1945 period that goes beyond the common focus on just thinkers from Europe and the United States and the debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. The wider approach of this volume highlights important contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States in the pre-1945 era as well as important debates both within each of the three orthodoxies and with perspectives beyond them. In addition to providing a more comprehensive history, this wider approach can help to strengthen efforts to foster more “global conversations” in the field of IPE today, to improve interpretations of contemporary political discourse as well as to contribute to the study of topics that are attracting growing interest within current IPE scholarship.

Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.

This chapter is a conclusion, a revisit from the beginning to recapture all that has been written. Analogously and methodically, the West had encountered Africa, witnessed its cultural practices but made the wrong, albeit demeaning, interpretation of it. Then came the “native,” attempting to walk them to the light through vast decades of experience and armed with an arsenal of cultural materials as evidence. The result is the challenge of the colonial matrix of power and resituating African literature at the center of African epistemology via autoethnography. Reemphasizing the points earlier made, the chapter discusses the position of self as an ambassador of the society it (self) comes from, having allowed its cultural ethos to manifest through self. Thus, everything about the individual manifests and reflects the “internal dynamics sustaining society.” This is further backed by the fact that the society shapes an individual through its “mores” and “institutions,” and thus makes it expedient to read a society through the character of an individual (an emissary), as opposed to an alien who cannot know beyond what is visible to the eyes.