Series: Critical South

Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonisation leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves. Lazali found that many of her...

Pablo Oyarzun is one of the foremost Benjamin scholars in Latin America. His writings have shaped the reception of Benjamin’s work in Latin America and have been central to the effort to identify the tasks and responsibilities of the kind of critical theory that would interrupt social violence. In this book, Oyarzun examines some of the key concepts in Benjamin’s...

This book makes available in English the work of one of the most important Brazilian philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. First published in 2004, Error, Illusion, Madness is an original contribution to the debate about the nature and role of the subject and its forms of expression. In a context where the category of the subject was being...

This book situates the nuanced intervention of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa within the international conjuncture of anti-colonial thought and decolonisation. It argues that the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its urgent political focus, should also be read as a philosophical intervention on the problem of Man that haunts the idea of race. As Steve Biko once...

This book is the first critical anthology in English on the history and legacy of race in the Caribbean. It brings together the major debates, lines of inquiry, and theories around race and racism that have emerged out of the Caribbean from the beginning of European colonisation at the end of the fifteenth century to the period of decolonisation in...

Foreword by Lanie Millar This book is a collection of essays and speeches by Mário Pinto de Andrade, the Angolan literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist, and one of Africa’s most important 20th-century intellectuals. His writings explore the task of intellectual emancipation of colonised people, which he saw as predicated on the necessary project of political decolonisation. As anti-colonial...

According to some chronicles of the Spanish Conquest, the violent arrival of the Conquerors to the Andes in the sixteenth century led to sex-dissident people who lived outside the dominant European cisheteropatriarchal model being burned at the stake. This act burned more than the flesh; it also charred practices, ways of life, and textualities, leaving an emptiness and a trauma...

This important intervention interrogates keystone features of the dominant European theoretical landscape in the field of populism studies, advancing existing debates and introducing new avenues of thought, in conjunction with insights from the contemporary Latin American political experience and perspectives. In each essay – the title a nod to the influential socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, from whom the authors...

Arabic and European studies of Ibn Khaldun, the great medieval polymath, follow one of two paths. In one direction, scholars interpret his Muqaddimah (‘Prolegomenon’), written in 1377, as the point at which the new social sciences emerged. They identify Ibn Khaldun’s ‘new science of culture’ as sociology or as an ‘Islamic’ alternative to sociology. In the other direction, the interpretation...

This book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the 'biographical space' – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalising dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres,...

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a Congolese philosopher, novelist, poet, essayist, and academic, widely considered to be one of the most important African thinkers of his generation. The ideas and arguments he has developed in his writings since the 1970s, including The Invention of Africa, have been hugely influential across many disciplines and established his reputation as one of the essential postcolonial...

Plebeian Prose is a key work by the pioneering Argentine Brazilian anthropologist, sociologist, and poet Néstor Perlongher. Perlongher, whose work has been highly influential in the development of Latin American cultural theory and literature, represents an original critical ‘queer’ voice in Latin American thought. This book is an exploration of the politics of desire, questions of identity, Latin American neo-baroque...

Aimé Césaire’s work is foundational for decolonial and postcolonial thought. His Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1955, influenced generations of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean and it remains a classic of anticolonial thought. This unique volume takes the form of a series of interviews with Césaire that were...

As the globalised regime of neoliberal capitalism consolidates its grip on the world, it refines the micropolitics proper to the capitalist system and makes it more perverse. This micropolitics involves the appropriation – what Suely Rolnik calls the “pimping” – of life, as it turns the life drive itself away from creation and cooperation and towards the deadening, destructive practice...

Hunting stories will usually glorify the hunters, since it is the hunters who write the stories. In this book, Dénètem Touam Bona takes up the perspective of the hunted, using the concept of marronage to highlight the lives and creativity of colonized and subjugated peoples. In a format that blends travel diary, anthropological inquiry, and philosophical and literary reflection, he...

How can thinkers grapple with the question of the human when they have been dehumanised? How can black thinkers confront and make sense of a world structured by antiblackness, a world that militates against the very existence of blacks? These are the questions that guide Tendayi Sithole’s brilliant analyses of the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Assata...

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a Congolese philosopher, novelist, poet, essayist, and academic, widely considered to be one of the most important African thinkers of his generation. The ideas and arguments he has developed in his writings since the 1970s, including The Invention of Africa, have been hugely influential across many disciplines and established his reputation as one of the essential postcolonial...

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives...

In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility,...

On June 3, 2015, massive women’s street demonstrations took place in many cities across Argentina to protest against femicide. Under the slogan Ni una menos, Not One (Woman) Less, thousands of women took to the streets to express their outrage at systematic violence against women, giving a face and a voice to women who might otherwise have died in silence....

It is impossible to understand capitalism without analysing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labour led to a form of proto-globalisation in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth. Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labour, the first revolution in Latin...

Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the state’s traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is...

The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilisation that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities; and on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western...

Introduction by Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Alex Brostoff In response to the damage caused by centuries of colonial ravaging and the current ecological, political and social crises, the leading Indigenous thinker and activist Ailton Krenak warns against the power of corporate capitalism and its destructive impact. Capitalism encroaches on every corner of the planet and orients us toward a future...

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives...

In this book, the leading Brazilian cultural theorist Flora Süssekind analyses the turbulent recent history of Brazil. She examines the protests which erupted in Brazil in 2013 and the ways that these were appropriated by the extreme right. Süssekind shows how these developments expressed a break from and threat to the democratic orientation and social pact represented by the 1988...

Raising feminist concerns about the struggles of African women amid debates surrounding the socio-cultural, economic and political future of Africa remains an immense challenge. Fatou Sow, the renowned Senegalese feminist activist and academic, illustrates here her own journey through a continuously developing global discourse. Her fundamental aim is to demonstrate the emergence and development of women's and feminist studies in...

In the face of the global rise of authoritarian phenomena – from Trump in the United States to Macri and Milei in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, and Erdoðan in Turkey, and the increasing traction of Vox in Spain and the AfD in Germany – Gisela Catanzaro argues for the continued relevance of the concept of ideology for...

This book by the late Brazilian activist and quilombo leader Antônio Bispo dos Santos offers an original perspective on ways of living and relating to others and to the land that is rooted in a quilombo cosmovision – the polytheistic, counter-colonial, confluential worldview articulated by Bispo through quilombola thinking in Brazil. It presents a fresh critique of capitalism and colonialism...