"Holding it together: The Shape of postcolonial bricolage

The concept of bricolage has played a significant role in French intellectual history. This special issue moves past its status as an epistemological metaphor for practical knowledge, to consider the symbiotic relationship between conceptual knowing and creative making in postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial writing is by its very nature bricolé: made up of indigenous cultures, colonial legacies, intertextual/multilingual references, religious affiliations. Through artisanal practices such as quilting, patchwork, and textile theory, alongside the poetic legacies of creolization, we consider non-Western contexts that challenge hierarchized epistemic divisions between intellect and hands. If the etymology of ‘bri-colage’ implies a process of fracture and repair, this issue asks how bricolage generates a form of creative survivalism for an interdisciplinary understanding of Global French Studies.

We invite article submissions for "Holding it together: The shape of postcolonial bricolage." Articles should be 6,000 words or less, sent to Joanne Brueton (joanne.brueton@ulip.lon.ac.uk), Sura Qadiri (sq206@cam.ac.uk), Rebekah Vince (r.vince@qmul.ac.uk) and Khalid Lyamlahy (klyamlahy@uchicago.edu) by March 1 2027.