This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye's cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude's insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with Ndiaye, coupled with Ndiaye's steady defiance of these categories, point to broader tensions between structuralism and area studies, on the one hand, and poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, on the other. The conversation also invites careful scrutiny of the problem of Eurocentrism, in the sense that Laude's structuralist position is in fact anti -Eurocentric: colonialism is condemned for destroying local traditions, which are in turn revered at the expense of allegedly derivative expressions emerging from the same societies. Ndiaye nevertheless holds his own against Laude's aggressive paternalism, and manages to call into question a number of the art historian's assumptions around the perceived axes and obligations of artistic identity.

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye's cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude's insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with Ndiaye, coupled with Ndiaye's steady defiance of these categories, point to broader tensions between structuralism and area studies, on the one hand, and poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, on the other. The conversation also invites careful scrutiny of the problem of Eurocentrism, in the sense that Laude's structuralist position is in fact anti -Eurocentric: colonialism is condemned for destroying local traditions, which are in turn revered at the expense of allegedly derivative expressions emerging from the same societies. Ndiaye nevertheless holds his own against Laude's aggressive paternalism, and manages to call into question a number of the art historian's assumptions around the perceived axes and obligations of artistic identity.

When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay, and its accompanying special issue of ARTMargins , seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism's presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.