Imagining between possible and realized: Creative world-making as politically situated knowledge production

Abstract

In this rejoinder to Dragos Simandan’s (2019) consolidated theory of the partiality of geographical knowledge, I draw on feminisms of colour, including Black and Chicanx feminisms, to re-place power at the heart of how we understand the situatedness and limitations of how we know, experience and produce worlds. Furthermore, dissatisfied with Simandan’s binary construction of ‘possible worlds’ (in plural) and the ‘realized world’ (in singular), and his call to move beyond ‘ simply social difference’ (my emphasis) in how we theorize the partiality of geographical knowledge, I centre creative practices by marginalized people as practices that conjoin navigating the unjust ‘real’ world and imagining different, more just worlds. The artistic works of Cree/Irish artist Kent Monkman provide powerful examples of art as geographical knowledge that makes room both for critiques of the gender, racial and sexual violence of settler colonial world-making and for the agentive production of alternate worlds by Indigenous people, including through their creative practices.