Political Possibilities Research Articles

The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics

In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of ‘satire’: a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of ‘cultural politics’ that explores the ability and mechanism of cultural forms to inform, inspire or enact political change. However, while satire may appear as the manifestation or culmination of a cultural political agenda, I argue that the concept ultimately works towards the closure of cultural political possibility. Drawing on the work of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, I argue that satire is better understood as a form of reification that prematurely resolves how, when and why cultural forms can do politics.

Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California

ABSTRACT This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of the US–Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to border architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and additional valences of violence enacted through border landscapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the border’s imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecology of critical border studies becomes more proximate, material, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts its sensory affects – the border as experience.

Resistance or exclusion? The paradoxes of volunteer tourism, migration, and memorialization nexuses

Lampedusa (Italy) and Lesvos (Greece) have become significant locations where the interaction between migration and tourism is expressed through the presence of volunteer tourism, which, along with supporting migrants, has spawned new practices, such as visiting emblematic sites of migrants’ passage, presence, and death. This study investigates the emergent practices of memorial tourism from the perspective of mobility justice. Specifically, considering this liminal practice, the study seeks an alternative route to the dead-end of political possibilities of volunteer tourism, by exploring, rather than denying, the paradoxes it produces. The study employs a comparative ethnographic approach using a multimethod process, including an online survey, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The author spent six months on Lampedusa and Lesvos as a volunteer. Via these tools, the research explores how volunteers’ actions reinforce and confirm mobility inequalities. Specifically, migration is ‘memorialized’ by volunteer tourists, while concurrently the individuals migrating, and in certain cases even those who return after completing their migratory path, have no access to the spaces of memory on Lampedusa and Lesvos. While volunteer tourists’ practices and relationships to these spaces can engender a growing awareness of the phenomenon of migration, an investigation of the emerging paradoxes argues that despite the risk of reproducing the forms of exclusion and injustice that volunteers seek to counter, some subjectivities gain new, significant positions that cause forms of resistance to the disciplinary power of the border regime.

Writing IR after COVID-19: Reassessing Political Possibilities, Good Faith, and Policy-Relevant Scholarship on Climate Change Mitigation and Nuclear Disarmament

AbstractTo address the COVID-19 pandemic, states around the world adopted a range of unprecedented and far-reaching policy measures, which had for a long time been presented as impossible. In this article, we argue that such actions suggest not only present but also past political possibilities and that these possibilities have been overlooked or denied by policymakers and scholars alike. We focus on two existential challenges about which pledges for transformative actions have been continuously made throughout the previous decades: climate change and the danger from nuclear weapons. We document the gap between pledges and accomplishments in these two realms and show how claims of impossibility to act do not hold up. Adopting a minimal standard of good faith as seeking to keep one's promises, we argue that the lack of adequate action renders the assumption that policymakers are acting in good faith problematic. We then diagnose a Panglossian double failure of the policy-relevant international relations scholarship: a failure to provide policymakers with the necessary tools to address the root causes of these existential problems and enable them to learn from past experiences and a failure to hold policymakers accountable. We propose three modifications to the scholarship to avoid repeating such failures and conclude with a dual call for political courage and scholarly responsibility.

Supposing the moral state: Japan and historical justice under liberal internationalism

Abstract Diplomatic spats over history between two of the United States' allies, Japan and the Republic of Korea, continue to simmer under the post-1945 liberal international order. The antagonism between the former colonizer and its colony has become a detriment not only for US security interests in the region, but also a challenge to the US claims to stand for human rights, as the issue of military sexual slavery has become tethered to the global human rights discourse by Korean American diaspora activists. Yet, when the US attempts to mediate between the two, it is rebuffed by its two allies because the US often acts as a neutral third party, rather than the major actor responsible for the making of post-1945 order in east Asia and the current impasse over history. This article asks how the entangled relation between order and justice in the making of the hub-and-spokes system in east Asia, mainly engineered by the United States, casts a long shadow over how to deal with history in Japan. This matters because questions of moral possibility in world politics always suppose a sovereign agentic state, and for Japan this creates a gap between the ideal moral state and the reality of being a semi-sovereign state. Thus, the persistence of Japan's ‘history problem’ must be understood not solely in terms of whether the empirical facts are accepted or not, but also in the sense of how being a sovereign matters when it comes to moral possibility in global politics.

How to Argue about Solar Geoengineering

ABSTRACTShould high‐income countries engage in solar geoengineering research and possible deployment? On the assumption that the speed of the energy transition will be insufficient to abate catastrophic climate impacts, research into solar geoengineering begins to look like a technically and socially feasible route to mitigate such impacts. But on the assumption that a rapid and relatively just energy transition is still within the realm of political possibility, research into solar geoengineering looks more like an ideological tool designed to divert time and resources from less risky climate solutions. At the heart of debates over solar geoengineering, then, is disagreement over what political actors can be expected to do in the future. In this article, I argue that both objectors to and proponents of solar geoengineering research often make background assumptions regarding expected future actions that are either (a) inaccurate or (b) inconsistent. I propose an account of expected future actions that avoids these problems and sketch what the debate over solar geoengineering looks like with these assumptions in place.

Liminality, Representation, Silence: The Poetics and Politics of Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019)

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the value of silence, located within liminal spaces in Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019). Structured as an informal graphic essay, Doab Dil proffers ironic commentaries on nature, culture, cities, the countryside, history, fiction, work, sleep, insomnia, popular culture, and the quest for meaning in life. In the process, Doab Dil combines text and drawing to construct a postmodernist intertextual mural of juxtaposed quotations, descriptions, and metaphysical reflection on the values of contemporary culture. At the points of these juxtapositions, liminal spaces are created that are characterised by a dense silence. The centrality of the liminal in the creative imagination of Doab Dil is evident in the title that signposts the fertile tract of land found at the confluence of two rivers. Recollecting Homi Bhabha on the liminal as a horizon of possibilities, this paper explores the ways in which the poetic representation of liminality constructs political spaces of critique, which draw on the silence between confluent thoughts on diverse themes for critical reflection. Through literary criticism, the paper investigates the poetics and politics of possibilities in Doab Dil positioned within liminal spaces, and the role of silence as a representational strategy for a metaphysical commentary on reality.

Housing justice, civic engagement, and socialist frames: Exploring a local right to counsel initiative

ABSTRACT This essay follows a group of activists in a local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter as they navigate the challenges presented by planning, strategizing, and authoring legislation for a right to counsel initiative in their local context. In this article, I argue that regular involvement in DSA encourages members to use a socialist analysis to understand local, national, and global problems, requiring an interdisciplinary and practical educational process in civic competency, socialist politics, and organizational strategies. I rely on data collected from 10 months of participant observation in a local DSA chapter in Boulder, Colorado from April 2019 to February 2020. I focus on the major political project assumed by Boulder DSA from 2018 to 2020, a right to counsel ballot initiative titled No Eviction Without Representation (NEWR). Developing this ballot initiative involved a multi-year effort that offered numerous educational opportunities for chapter members and leaders to engage with the local political context and promote specific forms of civic engagement directed at tangible social change. The NEWR ballot initiative illustrates the political possibilities of dedicated socialist organizers and demonstrates the value of the political network developed by DSA chapters throughout the country.

The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall

Reviewed by: The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. By Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. xi+ 411 pp. £29.99. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7. Mimesis meets prosthesis meets the novel genre. The natural self encounters the artificial or automated self. The organic comes up against the mechanic. The expansive and the contractive drives oppose one another. These are some of the sets of forces that run through and operate in Peter Boxall's most recent book—a fine achievement that recasts the history of prose fiction from the perspective of the relationship [End Page 119] between the living and the non-living, the human and the natural, the natural and the artificial. From Thomas More's Utopia to the twenty-first century, Boxall covers a long history (that of the novel in particular) in order to answer questions that underlie the whole book but are ultimately spelt out in the last chapter: how do we picture the world and 'what amalgam of abstract idea and thrown being, of fact and imagination, of blind circumstance and structured forethought, constitutes the experience of enworlding' (p. 319)? While the former has always been the concern of the novel genre—the novel has invariably endeavoured to picture the world (real or imaginary)—the latter reveals Boxall's specific approach. His contribution is to re-evaluate the novel from a philosophical and political standpoint that takes into account the forms that connect the mind with the world. In a move very much in accordance with the genre's pliability, he believes that the present requires us to reread the novel so as to discover in it 'a new set of aesthetic and political possibilities' (p. 21). It is thus that he retraces the novel back to its origins and explores the dialectic between reality and imagination with the novel as mediator between mind and matter, life and death. Boxall suggests that imagination is a prosthetic device and that the novel itself, throughout its history, has also been a prosthetic device—an extension of the self, its task having been to transform inanimate into living material. In different works, the non-living is brought to life, erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, the real and the artificial—for example, hand, glasses, puppet, radio, wig, whalebone leg as tropes, or tools that enhance interior life and are attached to it. The prosthetic condition, therefore, brings together interiority and material extension and finds different means of expression in a wealth of novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Don Delillo, to reach a certain climax in the discussion of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood. Through a careful choice of novels and writers, Boxall makes a strong case for the way prosthetic materials have been mobilized to deal in the relation between thought and world. Engaging just in passing with canonical theorists such as Georg Lukacs, Ian Watt, or Mikhail Bakhtin, this study privileges an original take on the novel and on how the prosthetic imagination has amalgamated idea and material throughout novelistic history. Its five parts provide a strict chronological account of the body and the way it establishes new connections with its prosthetic extensions. Boxall's timeline has a target and a culmination in his last chapter, the most interesting and challenging of all, in my view. As Chapter 9 presents a round-up of the discussion carried out throughout the book, it also makes a projection into the future by imagining what prosthetic worlds could or would look like in the twenty-first century. It is an intellectual and imaginative exercise as well as a serious and brave attempt to think of our own contemporary times and the future of this literary form that has been with us for centuries now. Even though artificial life has been a feature of the genre since its beginnings, it seems to be more than ever a contemporary phenomenon, posing new challenges to the...

Wherefore An-Other Communism

The question of communism as a real political possibility, if not the most necessary political possibility, seems entirely foreign or strange in our world today. Just as striking is the claim that communism is inextricably linked with literature. But both of these claims are made by the often-overlooked and as-yet untranslated French thinker and political activist Dionys Mascolo. By examining and explicating Mascolo’s strange (re)conception of communism, with the aid of the thought of his friend Maurice Blanchot concerning communication and friendship, this article will explore another communism, between politics and literature—a communism of the future, a communism of thought, which approaches human need in a manner radically different from the common conception of communism.

What Comes after #StopAsianHate? Asian American Feminist Speculation

Abstract: Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi’s queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women’s community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh’s utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity.

GAME THEORY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE. THE PLAYFUL NATURE OF THE CULTURE OF POWER

Politics identifies and strengthens the ways of social development, and the law determines, giving them a universal and legal appearance. Such a coincidence of the regulatory possibilities of politics and law makes it possible to free the culture of exercising power from internal antipsychotics, focusing on social coexistence [Margaryan, 2019, 203,204]. All this keeps public policy not only from the cruel extremes of the political game but also forms the strategic thinking of the political elite in relation to radical changes. It is precisely the absence of such thinking that, marginalizing the socio-political order of countries in a democratic transition (including Armenia), and being tempted by the radical transformation of linear liberalization, the political elite ignores its function of social responsibility like Pierre Menard, the hero of Jorge Luis Borges, manages to rewrite Cervantes' novel “Don Quixote”. Being the greatest expert on the development of game logic in the culture of exercising power through a literary text, Borges shows that Pierre Menard, however, makes a lot of effort, but after finishing his essay, discovers that the new novel he created copies the original one. However, 300 years have passed since the publication of Don Quixote, and the same words, images, language thinking and strategy of exercising power are perceived differently, therefore, the new novel could not be equivalent: people have changed over time, and with them the perception of the game politics of the culture of power has changed either.

William Apess's Indian Nullification : Narrating Mashpee Wampanoag Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America and Beyond

Abstract: William Apess's Indian Nullification (1835) engages various forms of nullification, drawn from contemporary politics, secular history, and Judeo-Christian tradition, as part of a collective expression of sovereignty meant to gain ground (literally and figuratively) for the Mashpee Wampanoags. This essay argues that, for Apess, nullification emerges as a transformative practice that can be used in the absence of treaties to articulate the Mashpees' political and religious claims and leverage new political possibilities for them, in part through its invocation of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution. References to nullification also allow him to transform and elevate the Mashpees' situation from one of local concern to national and even eschatological importance. Nullification provides an avenue to respond to characterizations of Mashpees that circulated in the New England press in which their situation was used as an occasion, or even a vehicle, for working through issues of concern for many white Americans, such as miscegenation (to use a term common in the era) and growing sectional tensions. The essay concludes by briefly connecting Apess's arguments with the Mashpee Wampanoags' more recent efforts to gain federal recognition and assert their territorial claims.

“Great Atlant”: Emperor Ferdinand III (1637—1657) as a German National Hero

The article deals with the appearance of the image of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III as a national hero in German journalism. There are still not many works devoted to Ferdinand III in historiography. The discussion surrounding his reign continues to highlight the weakness of imperial power during the Congress of Westphalia. The traditions of glorification of rulers were acquired in German printed publications of the middle of the 17th century pronounced national connotation. The Peace of Westphalia gave a new impetus to the development of the German national idea. Despite the emperor’s loss of some important prerogatives during the Congress of Westphalia, Ferdinand III turned on the pages of printed matter into a “German hero” who ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618—1648), who recreated the unity of the Empire and became its full head. The emperor is presented in the writings of the era as the defender of the German nation, thanks to whom the Empire was not only able to withstand thirty years of military chaos, but proved its viability and even reached a new peak. Constructing the image of a national hero, the authors addressed both the real political possibilities of the imperial power after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, and the moral arsenal of virtues, which the emperor had. The ideas of his inherent patriotism and his desire to care for the Fatherland constituted the main components of the image of the ideal ruler and national hero and firmly entered the national discourse. During his lifetime, publicists turned Ferdinand III into a symbol of the German nation and laid the foundation for similar writings in subsequent eras.

“F*** tha police!” à la Russe: Rancière and the Metamodernist Turn in Contemporary Russian Music

AbstractThe nationwide prominence of Russian oppositional artists has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that the new generation of Russian musicians, whose art became popular in the end of 2010s, brings political engagement to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in a novel and subversive manner. Some of their works became even more timely with the outbreak of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

The Bay Area Third World Strikes, 1968–1969: Coalitional Activism and Chicanx Campus Politics

ABSTRACT The Bay Area Third World Strikes, 1968–1969: Coalitional Activism and Chicanx Campus Politics. This essay looks at the 1968–1969 Third World Strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley through the lens of coalitional politics and activism. While the paper looks closely at Chicanx campus politics, the goal is to move away from a nationalist or Maoist reading of the two strikes. During these two events, Chicanx activism has to be read in conjunction with African American, Asian American, Native American, and white campus politics. This coalitional politics represented a temporary rupture of U.S. political behavior and manifested a utopic moment when an alternative political possibility was glimpsed. The essay ends exploring the limits of coalitional politics and activism, especially as nationalism and identity politics came to the fore.

Necrosettlements: Life-threatening housing, necropolitics and the poor's deadly living in Mumbai

Global megacities are rapidly transforming through slum redevelopment and alternative resettlements of evicted poor. Resettlement is broadly seen as enabling, a basis of improved housing and even a pathway towards urban citizenship. This article offers an alternative perspective on urban resettlement, whereby the urban poor are subjected to life-threatening housing interventions. It builds on Mbembe's (2003) 'necropolitics' through an ethnographic study of Mumbai's Mahul case to theorise state powers in unleashing life-threatening housing circumstances. In doing so, this article introduces the concept of necrosettlements to account for the particularity of necropolitical-economy, material reality, unfolding subjectivities, and political possibility of life-threatening settlements. First, it theorises a political economy that extracts economic surplus and creates urban growth from poor-exclusive housing in uninhabitable places and with a life-compromising built environment against general residential developments. Second, the material details of life-threatening housing comprise of place-based, local biosphere, township's architecture, infrastructural and constrained dwelling, and their cumulative effects. Third, subjectivities of living included physiological suffering, compromised survival, socioeconomic and political vulnerability, comorbidity and death. Fourth, and finally, rather than representing absolute sovereign domination, however, these settlements also emerged as potential sites for residents to invoke their right to life, question extractive urbanism and demand settlement justice.

Tomba’s Unforgotten Histories

Abstract The aim of Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality is to return to Marxism’s original historical vocation by freeing it from the hegemony of the exchange system and the encompassing agency of value. At the heart of this project appears the recognition that time, space and thus history have been captured by capitalism and transformed into categories of its own to organise people and social relationships for capital’s programme of accumulation. In this way, capital has been able to hijack history and invert it into a representation of the real, into a historical trompe-l’œil instead of ‘presentify(ing) the past’. In this regard contemporising the past is an act of intervening in history and actualising it rather than representing it. Through this operation Tomba is able to retrieve an inventory of repressed and forgotten histories, which will unveil the sources of an ‘alternate legacy of modernity’ and radical political possibilities for the present.

Ecologies of contention: how more-than-human natures shape contentious actions and politics

ABSTRACT Which role plays the more-than-human world in shaping the possibilities for contentious actions and politics? We discuss this question by revisiting reflections from social movement theory, agrarian studies, and commons management, and by reviewing empirical cases of protest significantly shaped by ecological endowments. Distinct political ecological opportunities may arise from vulnerabilities in ecological cycles, ecological potentials, interspecies relationships, ecological invisibility, ecological visibility, ecological resources, and ecological connectivity, among other features. However, whether people, activists, and social movements are able to turn them into a dynamic source of power ultimately depends upon how they perceive and relate themselves to the more-than-human world.

Review: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, by Emily Sun

Review: <i>On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China</i>, by Emily Sun