Introduction

In his recent book Universaliser: Pour un dialogue des cultures (2024), Souleymane Bachir Diagne invites us to “reinvent the universal” (Daigne 11-26) by considering it in relation to the “plural of the world” (116). The present collection of articles seeks to acknowledge the necessity of a major theoretical decentering, while also exploring a plurality of other critiques of the universal, including those that may be situated prior to or even in the margins of postcolonial critique. It proposes to understand how debates over the universal resurface between and within critical fields and find particular resonance in the plural ecologies of literary forms, and in Anglophone literature in particular.