Since its entanglement with Europe and the rest of the western world due to the so-called Voyages of Discovery, the rise of Humanism, and the Age of Enlightenment between the 15th and 19th centuries, Afrika has enjoyed and endured a curiously fascinating relationship with the west and the Other, like many other parts of the world.

In this call for papers, our designation of the relationship between Afrika, the west, and the Other as one that has been marked by endurance is deliberate, as the relationship has simultaneously been characterised by fascination. The designation is deliberate because although Afrika was quick to accommodate the colonial presence and assimilate new religions, new ways of life, and new epistemologies, Afrika's entanglement with the west and the Other came at great cost to the continent. The entanglement often happened under duress and sometimes at great cost to the continent's identity and sense of self-dignity. Some of these disruptions and entanglements continue to reverberate in ways that are still felt on the continent.

Yet, in many ways and quite paradoxically, Afrika was quite receptive to the cultural and ideological winds of change that came to it following the western presence. Consequently, today the post-colonial identity of Afrika has become hybrid and carnivalesque. Afrikan identity is hybrid and carnivalesque in ways that blend the Indigenous and the imported in ways that have confounded both the lndigene and the former coloniser. Nowhere has the apparent 'clash' and blend between the Indigenous and the alien played out more poignantly and in such curious and fascinating ways than in the Afrikan continent's vast array of performing art forms. It is in this myriad interartistic blend of forms, ranging from drama and theatre to design and visual arts, as well as music, song, and dance, that the confluence or clash between so-called western (post)modernity on the one hand and Indigenous traditions on the other has played out.

Notwithstanding the fascinating instances of hybridity that have come to characterise contemporary performing arts in Afrika. Scholars and artists in Afrika and its diaspora today have been assailed by a new wave of resistance against the western presence and its aftermaths in some peculiar ways. Recoiling from what they perceive as the cultural and epistemic relegation and denigration of Indigenous practices and forms, these researchers, scholars, and artists have begun to question the place and provenance of western (post)modernity and its aesthetics on the continent's various forms of performance and art. Since the turn of the new millennium, a significant number of Afrikan post-colonial scholars, researchers and performing artists at home and abroad are now engaged on a relentless quest to decolonise these forms ostensibly aiming to liberate these forms from what they perceive as their entrenchment in predominantly colonialist western epistemologies and ways of being. This liberatory form has come to be known as the decolonial turn. Cognisant of the long history of the supposed superiority of the western canon, its forms, and epistemes in defining other parts of the globe and their practices, the decolonial turn is an academic project.