We are proposing a workshop on the overall characterisation of the field of postcolonial and decolonial studies.

This workshop is part of a multidisciplinary international project which aims to create a digital resource portal to assemble the data (documents, publications, works) that make up this field. However, the first difficulty encountered concerns the characterization of the domain of knowledge of these studies, its extent, its limits and the definition of the structuring concepts that constitute it.

Compared with other fields of study, the field of postcolonial studies is characterised by a greater diversity and fluidity, as well as resistance to the more traditional national interpretative models. This is because it lies at the crossroads of history, comparative literature and literary theory, as well as sociology. As a result, it is an area that is particularly well suited to observing the circulation of concepts and therefore of knowledge, but it is also more complex to characterise the common basis of this work. In this sense, too, the field of postcolonial studies is innovative in the SHS as a whole, with its inherent intersectionality and multidisciplinarity.

In this context, we would particularly like to reflect here on the different points of view that make up this field of study: we will be particularly attentive to the differences in disciplinary anchoring and geographical, historical, linguistic and cultural context. In fact, unlike most other fields of study, this one is not accompanied by a body of knowledge that has been established and catalogued in a consensual manner. One of the challenges of this project is to integrate this fact into a characterisation of knowledge.

Our point of view would thus be the opposite of what is usually encountered in knowledge organisations, whereby the primary aim is to represent the unity and stability of the field. Here, the field appears to have little hierarchy, but is marked by complementary links and a plasticity that is rarely apparent elsewhere. We will enlist, as well as interrogate, the relevance of the Glissantian notion of rhizome to characterise this field.