Third Text

The (Post)Colony and the Common: Collective Creativity, Agency and Emancipation in a Global Context.

This potentual special issue aims to analyse in a comparative way how collective creativity and agency have shaped public arenas in contexts linked to processes of colonial and imperial emancipation and dominance. Focusing both on the confluence of political and social processes of emancipation from imperial and (neo)colonial backgrounds, and on the articulation of creative ‘forms of the we’, it seeks to expand the genealogies of collaborative artistic practice, social engineering and protest. It will also intend to understand how collective creativity has created new ‘commons’ and more critical public spheres.

We will specifically address artistic manifestation of the ‘commons’ emerging in connection with processes of emancipation taking place in contexts shaped by imperial and (neo)colonial forms of dominance. The temporality of the dossier will not be restricted to the present, since we attempt to assert how collectivism and the configuration of ‘commons’ played a central role in anti-imperialist and decolonising agendas from an early moment. Furthermore, we will prioritise comparative approaches dealing with case studies located outside Western context.

In order to do that, we will explore the linkages, but also the disconnections, between alternative emerging ‘we´s’. The processes of social imagination, protest and emancipation taking place in recent years in several locations all over the planet, have been commonly related to global mappings and present temporalities. This special issue pursues tracking those processes back in time, in order to understand how they challenge in some cases imperial and (neo)colonial legacies and dynamics of power and dominance.

The issue will focus on the following topics:

• Creative Collectivism and anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles
• Global Protest and/despite creativity
• Collective creative practices and politics of Emancipation
• Creative agency, the postcolony, and the (Global) Common

Send papers to the Special Issue Coordinator:
Carlos Garrido Castellano, PhD
Centro de Estudos Comparatistas
Universidade de Lisboa
cgc@campus.ul.pt