The symposium Dé-me(s)-tissages examines the ways in which colonial legacies are inscribed in bodies, shape emotions, and configure sensibilities, with consequences for mental health and forms of belonging. By bringing postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, and queer studies into dialogue with psychology, psychoanalysis, and sociology, the project adopts an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, class, and sexuality within subjective life and embodied experience (Garrau & Provost, 2022)—that is, what is felt, inhabited, and transmitted.

Postcolonial scholarship has highlighted the impact of coloniality on social and epistemic structures. Our contribution seeks to connect these analyses to lived embodiment, affects, and vulnerabilities, and to theorize the effects of colonial inheritances on the psyche. Whereas much of the existing literature separates the political from psychic life, we propose a space for reflection that interrogates how desires, fears, shame, and fantasies are historically produced. These are traversed by norms such as whiteness, cis-heteronormativity, and relations of power and domination that shape the organization of societies.

In the wake of postcolonial studies, Fanon (1952; 1961), Said (1978), and later Spivak (1999) offered analyses of colonial relations of domination, demonstrating how they persist after formal decolonization in representations, regimes of knowledge, and even in the very categories through which the figure of the "Other" is constructed. Their work provides a critical account of the invisibilization of certain voices and the production of colonial imaginaries.

Within the decolonial field, Lugones (2003; 2008) and Quijano (2008) demonstrate that coloniality exceeds the historical sequence of colonization. It designates a global model of power that persists beyond formal independence. This persistence is expressed in particular through an epistemic order that hierarchizes forms of knowledge, determines who is authorized to produce legitimate knowledge, and imposes interpretive frameworks (modernity, progress, rationality) presented as universal, though in fact situated and structured by relations of power. The notion of whiteness makes it possible to grasp one of the central effects of this epistemic order, understood not as a mere "racial" category, but as an unspoken norm that defines the legitimate human and the regime of values associated with modernity.

African epistemologies further develop these critiques of Eurocentrism (Mudimbe, 1988; Hountondji, 1994; Mbembe, 2015), particularly with regard to representations of Africa (Mudimbe, 1988), the valorization of "indigenous" forms of knowledge (Hountondji, 1994; Mbembe, 2015), and the concepts of the postcolony and necropolitics (Mbembe 2001; 2003).

Black feminist and intersectional approaches (Davis, 1981; Crenshaw, 1989/2013; Bilge, 2009) enter into dialogue with decolonial feminisms (Espinosa Miñoso, 2016; Curiel, 2013; Falquet, 2019). Taken together, they make it possible to theorize the interlocking dynamics of race, gender, class, and sexuality by foregrounding the positionality from which one speaks—the lugar de fala (Ribeiro, 2017)—and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988). They also render more visible the experiences and subjectivities of those concerned (Kilomba, 2008).

At the clinical level, early work emerging from anti-colonial movements, including that of Frantz Fanon (1952; 1961), called for attention to the socio-historical dimensions of psychic suffering. Santos Souza (1983) places at the center the intimate experience of racialization: not only as a form of social violence, but as psychic labor imposed upon the subject. Ayouch (2017), in turn, emphasizes the articulation of the psychic and the political in processes of subjectivation. The psyche is not an autonomous "inner" realm; it is constituted within relations of power (racism, coloniality, and norms of gender and sexuality).

From this perspective, contemporary social relations, shaped by the legacy of colonial power, are organized according to a logic of pigmentocracy (Urrea-Giraldo & Posso Quinceno, 2015; Viveros Vigoya, 2008), understood as a system of hierarchization that differentially distributes access to various forms of capital—economic, social, sexual, and cultural—according to phenotype, gender identity, and class position. This dynamic is inscribed within subjectivities and informs the very modalities of desire, affect, and embodied experience, thereby opening onto a situated approach to sensibility that highlights the fundamentally relational—and historically situated—character not only of "race" and gender, but of the entire set of relations of domination.

By bringing together these theoretical, clinical, and empirical perspectives, this symposium proposes to explore coloniality not only as a historical-political structure, but as an embodied and subjective experience. It will open an interdisciplinary space for dialogue to think through psychic experience, forms of belonging, and processes of subjectivation in their relational and situated depth. By weaving and unweaving, the aim is to articulate critical and creative pathways and to raise new questions.

With a view to a subsequent publication project, we are open to diverse and interdisciplinary proposals. You may draw inspiration from the conference axes listed below:

Axis 1: Relations of domination: intimate spaces / public spaces

Axis 2: Genders and sexualities: queer spaces

Axis 3: Bodies: issues of inheritance