To highlight the interdependencies of persons, cultures, social, ecological, and artistic entities as a precondition for a planetary thinking or a world philosophy, this essay offers a short reconstruction of the coinage and transfer of the term “culture” in the European-African-Antillean context. It underlines that a world philosophy can no longer be executed on ideas of individual entities and corresponding opposites such as “European vs. African” and so forth. The author cites cultural understandings of different authors of the Global South as examples of affirmed cultural mixtures and of their mutual participations to bring about a philosophy of relation and dis-individuation. The argument is this: the world of today needs new terms to be conceived adequately in its cultural, social, eco­logical, and artistic interdependencies. The old term, “the individual,” must be replaced by the new term, “dividual” or “dividuation,” thereby underlining the processuality and intermixing of all sorts of entities, helping to move toward a decolonized philosophy of the world.

This essay juxtaposes the South Asian system of social hierarchies, conceptualized by Babasaheb Ambedkar as “graded inequality” with “serial relations” as conceptualized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Collective action against casteism faces internal problems. The complex psychological dynamics preserved over millennia through caste systems prevent solidarities across castes. The notion of “seriality” helps us to understand the material limitations placed by scripted functional roles on collective action. Internal divisions arising from prioritizing a caste or class perspective can be resolved with a better understanding of how “exigencies of sociality” create an ambiguous unity. A key lesson from Sartre is that it is only through praxis that consciousness remains open to the attractions of solidarity. Cultural otherness disconnected from the materiality of class (or gender) is a distortion. Conceiving of classes as historically determined while ignoring caste-being makes any analysis of revolutionary action incomplete. Reading Ambedkar and Sartre together opens the way for a genuinely historical materialist account of collective action against graded inequality.

This article draws out the politics of value by exploring the language used by the Black Lives Matter movement. It argues that this movement’s value claims, evident in the language of “mattering,” mobilize tensions between mate­rial and aspirational systems of human interdependence. To this end, this article examines Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018) as a text that articulates the political vision of this movement. It also draws extensively from Alicia Garza’s “A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Move­ment” (2014) and the platform of the Movement for Black Lives. It argues that the tension between value and values enables a choice between different imaginations of our relationship to the material world as well as a choice among diverse means of self-representation in struggles for inclusion. Value claims, such as those made by the Black Lives Matter movement embrace political contestation in a way that is deeply intersectional. Moreover, this movement’s claims about prioritization and distinction are paradoxically offered as a way of achieving equality.

This article explores Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and María Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender. While Wynter’s and Lugones’s work offer consequential insights for queer, trans, and intersex studies and activism, they have deliberately engaged these particular discourses and histories of struggle in limited ways. Wynter analyzes the contradictions of Western feminists’ organizing against female genital cutting in Africa, but she does not link her conclusions to their ramifications for activism against genital cutting on children deemed intersex. Lugones uses the existence of intersex people as a turning point in her critique of Aníbal Quijano when developing her concept of the coloniality of gender, but she does not go further to connect global intersex activism and decolonial feminist struggles. This article explores the work of Wynter and Lugones for their compatibility with trans and intersex studies and activism, and the places where their work can be furthered through insights from trans and intersex studies. It concludes that to move beyond the coloniality of gender requires trans and intersex liberation and that trans and intersex liberation must be understood in a broader decolonial feminist framework.

“Surfacing” is the process of rediscovering one’s sense of self-determination from within a context of enduring domination, including systems of enduring domination, such as racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. “Enduring domination” is the afterlife of domination that carries on into the conditions and mentality of anyone affected by domination, even indirectly. This article riggs together a concept from the Capability Approach to human development, a process from intersectional, epistemic justice work, and some broad possibilities within social practice art around norm play and subversion to fill out a practice of wondering that helps its participants surface. It serves as a contribution to broadly decolonial work.