Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Preface

Sabine Broeck, Carsten Junker

In recent years, monographs and anthologies have presented rather focused interventions of postcolonial or decolonial critique into the landscape of European and transatlantic humanities and social sciences, mainly in the United States and Britain, and we can also register a growing number of publications interested in revitalizing post-Fanonian Black Critique. This collection presents a different approach. Rather than mapping the respective fields and emphasizing the fissures between them, we propose to work through and make visible the possible points of dialogue and mutual recognition, that is, the joints between those fields.
Accordingly, we do not structure the volume along the lines of any of these recognizable approaches. There is neither a chronological nor a spatial order inherent to them. Since these approaches have always overlapped, we have organized the book along the lines of topical foci:

Epistemic Repercussions
Ethical Reassessments
Disciplinary Reconfigurations
Cultural Revisions.

The select articles do not claim to be representative of their fields; they are presented here because they share a sense of putting an epistemic critique of coloniality and enslavism respectively at the center of their analyses. This does not go to say that the authors and editors do not see possible controversies between these contributions. However, we want to vitalize the productive lines of tension between them and thus rather foreground possible mutually beneficial readings across seemingly clear-cut borders.
Accordingly, this transversal impetus is put to work here so that the articles signify within and beyond their own respective (sub)disciplines, as they are in no particular order: Sociology, Literature, Cultural Studies, Po-litical Science, Philosophy, Gender Studies, and History. In the same spirit, this collection assembles perspectives that would traditionally be contained within particular area-studies paradigms such as Asian Studies, American Studies, or European Studies, even though they certainly partake in the debates of those configurations. Thereby we suggest a critique of modernity from a range of perspectives, to avoid exclusionary logics that might constrict the fields and would thus create obstacles to encompassing modes of analysis and critique.
Our goal is to tease out the epistemic implications of postcolonial, decolonial, and Black critical lines of investigation. This allows for possibilities of broadening the analytical horizon for a critique of the sociopo-litical, cultural, and philosophical legacies of humanism and modernity in our current moment. Contrary to much postmodern intellectual debate that keeps reinstating the teleological, universalist logic of Enlightenment, even when calling critically for a more radical realization of its ideals, the contributions in this collection share the assumption that Enlightenment modernity cannot be thought without its "darker side[s]" (Mignolo 2011), that is coloniality and enslavism. In brief: it is white humanism that is the antagonist.
The sources of this epistemic endeavor are manifold. As our articles make manifest, they range from a mediation of indigenous knowledges, subaltern studies, third-world liberation movements, and Black struggles. While the interventions in this collection are situated in the wake of the generative paradigm of writing back to Empire from within and beyond metropolitan centers, they acknowledge and warn of the risk of appropri-ating non-hegemonic positions for postmodern white introspection.
The history of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) has been the history of critiquing humanism and modernity along those very lines. INPUTS, founded as a cross-disciplinary venture at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Uni