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The term “Latin-Africa” originates from twentieth-century Latin American Cold War rhetoric. Cuban leader Fidel Castro coined it in 1976, at Havana’s First Congress, to celebrate Cuban military support of Angola’s…

Durban and the “Southern Rebellion” In 2001, reparation did not seem poised to be a keyword for postcolonial thought in the 21st century. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism…

When Yogita Goyal first encouraged me to participate in a roundtable on keywords in postcolonial studies, I struggled to think of a particular concept or term that would be suitable…

Postcoloniality as a formation is haunted by failure. After the dismantling of European empires in the mid-twentieth century, the promise of decolonization dissipated quickly, as crises of governance, and flawed…

Moving away from postcolonial thought’s accounts of internationalist failure in the 1990s, this essay asks, how might anticolonial thought agitate in the present? Agitation, from the Latin agito, denotes a…

“Marriage hygiene” may not be a keyword now, but it was in the 1930s, when it was used chiefly as a euphemism for birth control. It appeared prominently in Lysol…

From charismata to rizz, the concept of charisma continues to swell and transform in intriguing ways. The Oxford University Press declared the slang term “rizz” the 2023 word of the…

Describing his unsettling return to Cambridge in 1945 after World War II, Raymond Williams ponders the “new and strange world around us” where people “just don’t speak the same language.”1…