The international conference-festival organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies in Dakar, Senegal, in June 2025, was part of a broader effort to explore the re-emerging links between Africa and Asia as a “new axis of knowledge”. The significant participation of Latin American scholars and artists proved to be a very productive opportunity to expand this geographical frame and provided the point of departure for this special issue.
Considering the similar yet different experiences of colonialism, the struggles of forced or voluntary participation in uneven geographies of techno-capitalism, and the shared imaginaries of mutuality and self-respect, in this volume, we go beyond the conventional colonial-postcolonial binary and its attendant history and cartography of material and cognitive relations. Our goal is to advance a more collaborative epistemic agenda through what we envision as an Africa-Asia-Latin America axis of knowledge. The fact that, as guest editors, we have been offered the space to explore these themes is already the first step in that direction. Global Africa provides a multilingual platform for such a much-needed space. Yet, in many ways, this volume also reveals the difficulty of building such a relational ecology of knowledge, one that goes beyond finding transnational connections and comparisons within disciplinary engagements.
We intend this volume to contribute to the call for epistemic freedom against dominant discourses within academia and to strengthen South-South collaborations. This is a call to empower ways of thinking and doing as part of a wider consciousness that rejects what some scholars have called ‘Northness’. Not a fixed geographical region or structure, but “the quality that nurtures capitalist and imperial attitudes …, these qualities create tendencies toward domination” (Kamal & Courtheyn, 2024, 3), regardless of which region, nation-state, or city in the world they are located. Writing from Latin America, Quijano (1992) defined “coloniality” as integral to modernity (and rationality), linking the history of production of “others” over the last five centuries to the limits of knowledge production nowadays, especially regarding the relationship of otherness and hierarchy, on the one hand, and notions of totality, on the other. From the Caribbean, Trouillot (2002) pointed to the way the global projection of “North Atlantic universals” – seductive precisely because of their success in hiding their parochial historical location – has created a “geography of imagination” and a “geography of management” that allowed the management of our human imagination by emphasizing “space” over the concreteness of “place” and making time an attribute of space.
Indeed, our attempts to create a new axis of knowledge cutting across Asia, Africa, and Latin America must contend with powerful geographies of management and imagination, which both enable and constrain the circulation patterns that govern knowledge production in our universities and research institutions. Anglophone, Francophone, or Lusophone spaces are not mere linguistic contingents but enduring devices of coloniality that continuously reestablish, both within and between themselves, a manageable hierarchy of spaces involving training, fieldwork, publication, and reception, further compartmentalised by the global dominance of area studies (Ake, 1982). As the geography of management is deeply intertwined with that of imagination, one of our tasks is precisely to imagine different ways to articulate places, with all their concreteness. Testing the limits of comparative methodologies and expanding their usual geographical conventions are fundamental, as is experimenting with different ways of thinking about place and people. From this perspective, lived experience, acts of remembering, and everyday practices of making and knowing are legitimate academic pursuits precisely because they afford trans-regional, transdisciplinary dialogue and open pathways to future exchanges and new forms and modes of knowledge.
We received a large number of papers that inadvertently assumed a congruence between state territorial identity, culture, political economy, and change. This consciousness of heritage, development, education, technological progress, and the environment was shaped in the colonial era and indeed central to the wider processes of nation-building, including ideas of supra-local citizenship and belonging. This issue features important and overlooked transcontinental comparisons and movements of people and ideas, but a “national” base reference remains quite marked.
If we are to truly have a 360-degree, global view around Africa, then we must also encompass the liquid worlds around the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans from where nation-states were carved out in the previous century. This perspective is made possible by journals such as Global Africa, and it allows us to hope for future papers on the topic of community-based initiatives associated with land, water, or forests, which are at the heart of contemporary struggles in all three continents, as well as the basis for forced migrations and the creation of stateless peoples, across the world.
This Special Issue is an invitation to build alternative frameworks of knowledge production in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, acknowledging the postcolonial and post-postcolonial pathways already opened by the selection of papers gathered here. The collection celebrates revisionist histories, new epistemic agendas, and collaborative knowledge as future trans-continental pathways to academic inquiry.