Embedded Interventions

This essay lays out a dialectical, intersectional, and interdisciplinary framework for decolonial thought, emphasizing the role of the arts in the history of struggle against empires. The analysis centers attention on the inter-imperial field of power in which peoples maneuver among several competing empires, never just one, whose exploitative legacies have accrued over centuries. Within this framework, the essay pinpoints infrastructures, institutions, and the arts as key sites of dialectical contestation; and it posits that gendered, racialized labor is pivotal to all these struggles. Taking 1001 Nights as a case study, it unpacks both the text’s coded intersectional interventions and its counterpointing epistemologies, highlighting art’s re-worlding epistemologies and temporalities. It further considers how recent fiction continues this re-worlding project. In closing, this essay argues for the importance of collaborative, interdisciplinary study of the dialectics of (de)coloniality

Psychoanalysis · Undoing · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Psychology