Holding it together: The shape of postcolonial bricolage (L'Esprit Créateur, Summer 2027)

'Holding it together: The shape of postcolonial bricolage'

Special Issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Summer 2027)

Guest Editors: Joanne Brueton, Sura Qadiri, Rebekah Vince, and Khalid Lyamlahy

None of the threads are friendly; they are merely cohabiting, finding a way to live together, like cities, like gardens, like refugees, like artists.

Sheila Hicks[1]

 The concept of bricolage has been influential in the history of Francophone thought. Claude Lévi Strauss used the term in La Pensée sauvage (1962) as an epistemological metaphor, evoking both the cognitive processes of myths cobbled together from the disparate fragments of other cultural formations, and a form of practical knowledge that opposes the Promethean scope of Western science. Because bricolage is not attached to a privileged source or absolute ‘archia’ (beginning), Jacques Derrida saw it as a general feature of discourse itself, which relies on interpretation and imagination, rather than an empirical truth-value (1967: 419). For Gérard Genette, the key task of any literary critic is to proceed through bricolage, borrowing from whichever conceptual tools come to hand as a way of deciphering the meaning of a text (1966: 145). 

 In this special issue, we seek to move beyond the purely discursive connotations of bricolage and return to its roots as a creative practice born from concrete, material ways of knowing. In this way, we are thinking about the term’s performative potential as itself an act of bricolage through its double evocation of the intellectual and the manual/material. We highlight the ways in which bricolage in all its forms involves both conceptual knowing and creative making, and how it can help to understand the relationship between the two as one that is symbiotic. It demonstrates how conceptual knowing can follow on from creative making as well as the reverse, and establishes the idea that they are co-constitutive in both ways. It also emphasises a useful relationship between the practical and the aspirational, which is particularly useful at a time when disciplines in the arts and humanities navigate a scarcity of resources and draw on solutions that are practical to enable survival on the one hand, but that can also be creative, innovative and exciting on the other, leading, for example, to new and multidisciplinary networks that reinvigorate both teaching and research. This creative survivalism is an act of resistance in an economic climate that undermines the value of the arts and humanities and is enabled by the discontinuous, diverse, and restorative (in the sense of joining things across fracture) cognitive approach inspired by bricolage. Moreover, it is both an undertaking of focused endeavour, informed by the desire for an approach or solution to a particular problem, but also a form of generative diversion. Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that the verb ‘bricoler’ is comprised of diversion, both in the sense of play, where thinking is reactive and improvisational using the finite potential of the instruments available, and in the sense of a detour, where intellectual obstacles are tackled in ad hoc ways through experience and handiwork (1962: 30). Building on this argument, we ask how crafting and making, thinking and writing, can inform and enrich each other and challenge hierarchized epistemic divisions between intellect and hands alongside the relationships with the world that they engender.

The etymology of the term ‘bri-colage’ implies a process of repair, its fractal geometry often forged from the generative process of destruction and recombination. As a critical apparatus, bricolage can generate the reparative reading that Sedgwick sought when attempting to nurture creative work, conferring plenitude, multiplicity, and value onto objects that help sustain culture in invisible ways (2002: 150). Bricolage is attuned to artisanal practices of weaving, textiles, quilting, patchworking often overlooked by academic enquiry. Yet creative practices that value the hand and its intergenerational transmission are critical to the future of the humanities, as they confront the disembodied sovereignty of AI. As a poetic technique, the eclectic reading and writing practices at the heart of narrative bricolage resist the concept of mastery central to the epistemic authority of canonisation. As a decolonial method, bricolage valorizes the syncretism of local and global knowledges in ways that recompose and transform ‘grand narratives’ or History with a capital ‘H’. 

A form of intellectual bricolage itself, this Special Issue draws on a wide range of non-Western, postcolonial contexts as well as the intersections between text-image, thought, literature, and translation, to ask a crucial question for the survival of Global French Studies and the importance of interdisciplinary kinships to that survival: how can art and writing hold it together in a world connected by fracture?

We open the question of bricolage to French-speaking, Arabic-speaking and multilingual spaces that awaken the legacy of creolization as a postcolonial bricolage, where forced transculturation (Hall: 2008 ) and the matrix of domination, violence, and conflict also produced an ethics of being affected by the other, or what Françoise Vergès deemed ‘an ongoing ethics of sharing the world’ (2003: 181). Postcolonial writing from former colonies is by its very nature bricolé (made up of indigenous cultures, colonial legacies, intertextual/multilingual references, religious affiliations, etc.). We also propose that a postcolonial reality rooted in the idea of being affected by the other plays itself out in European metropolises formerly at the heart of empire, albeit differently. Postcolonial patterns of migration (Habermas: 2008) transform European metropolises into culturally and religiously composite spaces that challenge notions of homogeneous social identity in ways that are creatively explored in art and literature particularly as a means of resisting its lack of reflection in policy (Gefen: 2024). 

The articles featured in this special issue will seek to reflect this eclectic understanding of bricolage and its value in a range of disciplinary, discursive and artisanal contexts. We welcome proposals that address the following topics:

Créolité and bricolage
Gendered and/or multilingual conceptions of bricolage
Textile theory, patchwork, quilting and compositionism
The materiality of cultural memory: tissage, métissage, heritage, and cultural transfer
Reparative reading as bricolage
Narrative studies: genealogies of filiation and affiliation
Cultural translation: the translator as a bricoleur; translation as praxis of bricolage
The urban commons: local solidarities, minor resourcefulness, materialities of resistance
Bricolage as disciplinary survival

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Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short 100-word biography to the Guest Editors: 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 Monday 12 October 2027. Submissions are welcome in French or English. 

Decisions will be communicated to applicants by Monday 19 October 2026. 

Articles of 6000 words (including footnotes), written in French or English, to conform with the Chicago Manual of Style, should be sent to the Guest Editors by March 1 2027.

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Selected Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques (1967), ‘La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ in L'Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil), pp. 409–428.

Gefen, Alexandre, Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-first Century, translated by Tegan Raleigh (Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024)

Genette, Gérard (1966) ‘Structuralisme et critique littéraire’ in Figures I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil), pp. 145–170.

Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Notes on a Post-secular Society’ in New Perspectives Quarterly, 25:4, 2008, pp.17-29

Hall, Stuart, 'Creolité and the Process of Creolization', in Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Shirley Anne Tate (eds), Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations (Liverpool, 2015; online edn, Liverpool Scholarship Online, 19 May 2016), https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781381717.003.0002

Johnson, Christopher (2012) ‘Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept’, Paragraph, 35.3: 355-372.

Knepper, Wendy, ‘Colonization, Creolization and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage’, Small Axe (2006), 10.3, 70–86.

Latour, Bruno (2010) ‘An Attempt at Writing a Compositionist Manifesto’, New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 3 (2010), pp. 471–490.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962), La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon)

Lévi-Strauss, Monique (2025) Sheila Hicks (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac)

Roberts, Les, ed. (2018) ‘Spatial Bricolage: The Art of Poetically Making Do’, Special issue, Humanities, 7.2, https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020043 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You’ in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 123–152.

Twitchin, Mischa (2021) ‘On Repair: Between cosmopolitics and decoloniality’, Performance Research, 26.6, 54–61.

Vergès, Françoise (2003) ‘Kiltir Kreol: Processes and Practices of Créolité and Creolization’, in Créolité and Creolization: Documenta 11_Platform 3, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya (Kassel: Fridericanum-Veranstaltungs GmbH), pp. 179–184.

Yardley, Ainslie (2008) ‘Piecing Together—A Methodological Bricolage’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9.2, https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-9.2.416

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[1] ‘Le fil voyageur: Raconté par Sheila Hicks et Monique Lévi-Strauss’, Musée du Quai Branly (30 September 2024 to 6 March 2025.