Episodes From a Colonial Present

Post-/Decolonial critique exposes and deconstructs global inequality in its epistemic and material dimensions. However, this knowledge tends to hide in universities and in abstract, inaccessible theoretical texts. This collective comic project deals with postcolonial critique of global inequality in everyday life in the spaces, discourses and practices of so-called 'global development'. Our project illuminates everyday life's postcoloniality as well as the decolonising potential of everyday struggles. It does so by focusing on (settler)colonial history, but also on recent interventions, for instance, by development experts. With the medium of comics, we want to tell such critical perspectives in a visualised form and by using everyday stories as examples, thus overcoming textual boundaries. Our project develops a combination of individual, interconnected narratives of non-fiction comics, along which we present thematic fields and perspectives of postcolonial critique of global inequality. The combination of the formats of comic and non-fictional research-based insights makes it possible to convey reality while at the same time using the literary freedom of a graphic novel to convey postcolonial critique in a more lively and humorous way than a purely factual comic could. Our project thus puts complex theoretical concepts into story form, making them tangible. The comic stories are developed by academics and activists engaged in postcolonial critiques of global inequality. For each story, different artists/illustrators connected to the geographical and political context of the story works with the academics/activists to transform the story into a comic strip.