Decolonizing the Self: How Do We Perceive Others When We Practice Autotheory?

This issue is dedicated to self-decolonizing practices exercised through the prism of autotheory. Employing different genres and stemming from different geographical, epistemological, and other contexts, the volume’s contributions variously analyze ways in which personal experience and positioning, indigenous knowledges, and doing away with formal rigidity as well as utilizing media other than writing (dance, sound, and others) are important for self-decolonization.

This autotheory essay considers the interplay between colonialism and invisibility, and explores how narrative form can act as a cultural intervention. The essay suggests that autoforms—such as autotheory, fictocriticism, autofiction, and autoethnography—expose invisible cultural rules and intrinsically alter the way content is understood. It is especially concerned with how colonialism uses authorship to limit internal observation and critique and suggests that by refiguring the ‘I’ and the ‘we,’ autoforms expose these invisible internal rules. 

The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity.

This article delves into the concept of logo-somatic freedom through an analysis of three artworks: Chairs Mots, Diaphoner, and #DanseAvecLesMots. These works exemplify how encounters with ‘other livings’—including language, dance, and digital technology—foster and enrich logo-somatic freedom, transcending conventional boundaries between language, body, artist, audience, and technology. 

The essay mixes the genre of autoethnographic reflections with an attempt to conceptualize the challenge that members of the Russian academic community in exile are facing on both individual and collective levels. It frames the questions of responsibility, guilt, and identity transformation, and traces the evolution of my personal responses to them as an attempt to document and conceptualize the unavoidable shift in the research field, agenda, positionality, and methods that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought to Slavic/area studies.

This autotheoretical essay explores self-decolonization as a personal, embodied process through the author's experience of displacement and chronic illness. Russia’s full-scale invasion of and ongoing genocide in Ukraine have drawn the world’s attention to the brutal history of Russian colonialism. The fact the author was largely unfamiliar with this history blew a hole in the foundation of her scholarly expertise and sense of self.

This narrative essay presents testimonies that uncover the fragmented identity of members of minoritized ethnic groups in the academic context of the United Kingdom. It discusses outcomes of a project which, as part of an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) scholarship from the Doctoral School of the University of Salford, gathered testimonies and stories of international postgraduate doctoral researchers highlighting that the process of decolonization should start from within. 

This critical essay offers deep insights into the Ghanaian performance-poet and writer Yom Nfojoh’s EP Alter Native. By means of textual analysis and a systematic reading of Yom’s spoken word poems, the author deconstructs key verses and stanzas in his poems to reveal decolonial praxis, self-disclosure, and coded messages. Broadening the discussion, this essay incorporates the author's personal perspectives as an artist who likewise pursues decolonial aesthetics by highlighting his engagement with Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe Vodu art in relation to his artistic research and practice.

This imaginary guided tour gathers chronologically some of the ways Black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquero, and Raizal communities or people in Colombia have appeared represented—visible and invisible—in Colombian museums between 1994 and 2023. The author reflects on exhibitions (one of which she participated in), artworks, and books to show how a multicultural vision of the nation in museums has helped maintain a neutral memory that hides the dire consequences of the transatlantic slave trade among Afro-descendants.