Imaginative Possibilities Research Articles

Han Kang's Speculative Natural Histories Beyond Human Rights

Abstract This article asks what imaginative possibilities and limits may arise from South Korea's place in world literature and the novel of human rights. Looking at two novels by South Korean writer Han Kang, The Vegetarian and The Boy Is Coming (Human Acts in English), I examine how Han interrogates the “human” in human rights and proposes speculative philosophies of history that frame human rights violations, particularly in the context of the South Korean Cold War, within longer natural histories. In Han's imaginary, it is the specifically gendered body that labors to resolve Cold War memory into a natural history of capitalist destruction. If South Korea, as a sub-empire of global capitalism, has seemingly overcome state authoritarianism, Han's novels access the language of human rights in order to invoke “flashbacks” to mass people's movements as reminders of both democratic and labor struggle.

Subterranean geopolitics: Designing, digging, excavating and living

This position paper aims to frame and supplement other papers in this special issue on subterranean geopolitics. We trace the research genealogy that brings together the subterranean with the geopolitical before accounting for the state-of-play in the subfield of subterranean geopolitics. Six research themes and foci that can connect to and enrich the study of subterranean geopolitics are being highlighted and proposed: (i) the three-dimensional conceptualisation of territory, (ii) the political geographies of the environmental, marine and earth sciences, (iii) Anthropocene geopolitics, (iv) lived experiences and intersectional encounters, (v) popular cultures and imaginative possibilities and (vi) moral geographies. These intersect and overlap in complex ways and none are exhaustive. Indeed, along with the collection of papers in the special issue, they serve as invitations to further scholarly reflections and cross-cultural research into understanding the designing, digging, excavating and living of subterranean geopolitics.

Flowing magma bodies: towards a relational understanding of imaginative pedagogical possibilities

To contribute pedagogies that reimagine relationships in a more-than-human world I adopt a posthuman approach to map the content and expressions of imagination in a series of pedagogical events on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Kooyoora, Australia. By working with Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter and MacLure’s generative data fragments I attend to the collective – student/teacher bodies, geological landscape, embodied actions, histories, passions and reactions – to interrogate pedagogical assemblages of an imaginative geological walk. In doing so, I explore what holds these assemblages together and what breaks them apart and follow the generative onto-epistemological forces at play. I do so with a posthuman lens to remain open to the possibilities of learning from, with, and in these educational entanglements.

Chapter 1: “I piss a lot of people off when I play dwarves like dwarves”: Race, Gender, and Critical Systems in Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Background This chapter explores player interactions and engagement in tabletop role-playing game settings. Objective Particularly focusing on the intersection of gaming systems, virtual settings, and player interactions, this chapter seeks to explore how implicit systems shape individuals’ experiences and behaviors. Through this focus, the chapter intentionally draws parallels between informal gaming settings and classroom-based interactions. Setting Though this study makes specific connections to classroom pedagogies, data were collected from a multiyear ethnographic study of playing tabletop role-playing games with adult participants in informal learning environments. Data were collected from within public gaming cafes and shops. Research Design Participant observation within a role-playing game community served as the primary approach to this ethnographic study. In addition to fieldnote-based observation, interviews with players and archival analysis of gaming artifacts helped triangulate meaning-making at the gaming table. Analysis was conducted through an inductive coding approach that focused on player interactions, systems, and settings. Findings Cultural values, including racism and sexism, shaped player experiences at the table, based on systemic designs and textual guidance from game-related fiction. While games speak to broad possibilities for exploring race and gender, these constructs become limited through the layers of player beliefs, designed rule sets, and depictions within narratives. The emancipatory possibilities of ludic imagination are flattened by cultural norms that may oppress. Conclusions Broadening the findings from this study, this chapter concludes with classroom-based recommendations. If a contemporary approach to critical pedagogy depends on dialogue and cultural understanding, this chapter points to the limitations of confining such work to traditional classroom settings. Instead, it suggests that an interrogation of these systems, alongside youth, is a necessary step in critically oriented classrooms.

Imagined Futures and New Technology: Youths’ Language Attitudes in Songea, Tanzania

Building on investment theory, this study analyses the language attitudes of secondary school students in Songea, Tanzania, with a focus on identity and access to digital technology. The study involved 467 secondary school students aged 14–21 years. The data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. Less than half of the students had access to digital technology. Most of them lacked the required linguistic resources. English, a challenge to most students, and, to some extent, even Swahili, are seen as tools for future possibilities and success. Students invest in learning English and want to go abroad. Lack of resources notwithstanding, students’ decisions to invest in learning a particular language is mostly influenced by imagined possibilities. Structural inequalities and socioeconomic differences impact both language skills and the use of digital tools. Consequently, digital resources using mainly English and difficult Swahili terminology become an exclusion mechanism for many Tanzanian secondary school students.

The Wretched and the Redemptive in John Berger’s Late Fiction

The precarious existence endured by the communities depicted in John Berger’s late fiction bears some similarity to the condition of the human condition that Frantz Fanon examines in his The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout his adult life Berger maintained a deeply held concern for the plight of the marginalised and abandoned in society and often made this the subject of his discursive essays. This article examines Berger’s late fiction as representations of despair and of hope in the midst of the changing nature of contemporary society. In doing so, it attempts to establish connections between the state of the contemporary world which Fanon circumscribes. Achille Mbembe’s more recent work and, in particular, his reassigning of Fanon’s vision for a new world, is included in this reading of Berger’s fiction which, in its conclusion, seeks to demonstrate how some measure of hope for a different society can be envisioned through the imaginative and speculative possibilities which fiction promises.

‘If you were an animal you would have eaten me’: Animal’s People and the history of corporate colonialism

ABSTRACT Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People provides a fictional account of the 1984 Union Carbide toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India. Animal, who is severely injured in the disaster, guides the reader through both the post-apocalyptic social landscape, as well as the community's failed efforts to hold the 'Kampani' accountable for the consequences of the leak. Reading Animal's story through the lens of what I identify as its historical precedent, I trace the continuities between the Union Carbide Corporation and the East India Company in order to reveal in both moments a shared substitution of the corporation for the human. Bringing Animal's People into dialogue with this broader legal history, I argue that the terms of humanity set forth in the British colonial era rationalize the portrait of disposable humanity that Sinha paints. The guiding question of the paper is how does the legal realm shape and guide the imaginative possibilities of the human as represented in literature?

Possibilities to Reinvent Digital Journalism to Face the Challenges of the New Technological Times

Because it involves constant change, the new technological times bring challenges: in addition to the pandemic crisis that affects everyone, among the tensions is a disruptive scenario in which platforming, algorithms, and datafication have emerged, which are related to the abuse of corporations, to which is added the crisis of journalism, challenges that require digital reinvention. Other communication problems can be indicated in a map of the communicative relations that are established and in which issues such as misinformation, sensationalism, consumerism, and pessimism can be located, to which solution alternatives are proposed. At the same time that there is crisis, promising possibilities arise such as mobile journalism, data journalism, longform journalism, experimental journalism, and promising possibilities such as adaptive journalism, sustainable journalism, experiential journalism, in addition to experiments such as artistic journalism, among others that stand alongside the consolidated practices of high-tech journalism involving platforms, human-algorithm hybrid journalism, robotic and AI journalism, of which empirical examples stand out. It arrives at the issue of hyper mediations and, moving forward, reflects on the possibilities offered by public space, regulation, and an international contract for the Internet. The methodological approach is essayistic and based on bibliographic review, and uses, as sources of evidence of the empirical cases referred to, journalistic documentation online, available on the Web. Thus, seeking to face such tensions, the purpose of this paper is to focus on possibilities of reinventing journalism through promising practices that highlight digital technologies, examining journalistic robots, use of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and other journalistic practices. As a result, several promising possibilities for the reinvention of journalism can be highlighted: (i) journalistically innovating on the Web so that it becomes a public space that allows citizen communication; (ii) consolidating the international movement to sign an Internet principles contract that includes digital journalism; (iii) contributing to improving the experience of both the communicators and the enjoyment of the interlocutors, among other imaginative possibilities and consolidated practices. Seeking a tension between these positions, we consider focusing on promising experimental practices that emphasize digital technologies, examining journalist robots, algorithms, and other journalistic experimental practices. It follows that the challenge of reinvention is to develop communicators' critical digital skills and the ability to sensitize interlocutors to feel from the other's perspective. Digital journalism can make use of different possibilities to face the challenges in new times.

The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Jonathan Gienapp

Reviewed by: The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Jonathan Gienapp Aviam Soifer Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 464; $35.00 cloth. The Second Creation by Jonathan Gienapp is a remarkable book. Gienapp has done impressive original research, and he writes about complex matters with admirable clarity. He also powerfully makes the point that the Constitution, as it emerged from the sweaty Philadelphia Convention in September 1787, left a large number of core constitutional issues unresolved or ambiguous at best. Others have shared this view, but Gienapp drives it home in useful ways. Though the constitutional ratification process in state conventions played an important role in Chief Justice John Marshall’s subsequent discourse on federalism and national power in McCulloch v. Maryland, the checkered history of these ratifying conventions hardly clarifies a number of important structural issues. Gienapp’s sophisticated and detailed study focuses on perceptions of the federal Constitution during the 1790s.1 He probes constitutional discourse in the context of four intense controversies in the earliest years of the American Republic to illuminate the “constitutional imaginary” of leading governmental players when “the American Constitution was breathtakingly novel and, because of that, a profound unknown” (4). To some, Gienapp’s claim that the “tumultuous decade” that followed state ratification in 1789 “did as much to mold the Constitution into what it became as anything that came before” will seem overstated (4). Nonetheless, his enlightening discourse is certain to enrich constitutional understanding, even among experts and certainly among members of the general public. Gienapp argues that the Constitution when ratified was “a profound unknown” which had breathtaking novelty; he devotes many careful pages to an astute analysis of the push-and-pull, primarily by members of the early Congresses, to fill in the blanks (4). He focuses primarily on four congressional battles over constitutional questions: (1) whether the president possessed sole authority to remove executive officers, including those appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate; (2) whether constitutional amendments ought to be inserted into the existing text of the Constitution or to be included in a supplementary section; (3) whether there was adequate constitutional authority to charter a national bank; and (4) whether Congress had the power to demand information prior to implementation of the Jay Treaty. The book makes many contributions, and it helps that Gienapp is attentive to imaginative possibilities— his term is “constitutional imaginaries” (10)—that powered early, intense debates at a time when it was not yet generally accepted that the Constitution itself was “fixed” or “locked in place” (19). Gienapp is a clear-eyed guide to debates in which “Federalists and Anti-Federalists punched and counter-punched so rapidly that it was hard for observers to see the debate whole” (76). The debates about the extent of the powers of the Executive remain lively, and largely unsettled, to this day.2 The little-known incorporation debate about James Madison’s proposal to intersperse amendments with the original constitutional text, which was unrealistic at best—though interspersing amendments might have enlightened future generations about what those who proposed new [End Page 1078] amendments believed such amendments actually entailed. Whether a bank charter was within the federal power articulated in “the sweeping clause”—as Article I’s Necessary and Proper Clause came to be called—evolved into a perennial battle, ultimately not settled until Chief Justice Marshall handed down his magisterial unanimous opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland. Marshall noted in McCulloch that even earlier opponents—making an obvious reference to James Madison—had come around to supporting broad federal power to charter a national bank. And, if anything, President Washington’s embrace of the Executive’s broad treaty-making power has prevailed in the courts as well as apparently in public opinion ever since.3 Unsurprisingly, it is James Madison’s speeches that often are at the center of Gienapp’s analysis; Gienapp justly celebrates Madison for his sophistication, including with a specific focus on Madison’s Federalist 37 and his “incisive examination of language,” including Madison’s discussion of “epistemological uncertainty and the frailty of...

Race

We argue that dominant white cultural views and public health co-produce race as a technology that charts the path of viral transmission away from the white bodies to form a trajectory for an otherwise aimless disease. This epistemological project is one enmeshed in popular culture, medical practice, and biopolitics. COVID-19 and the related Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement work together to make visible the narrative technologies. This project contributes to understanding race and public health as co-constituted in ways that shape imaginative possibilities, material and agential realties, and health outcomes in light of COVID-19. Our argument is novel in naming race a technology of American public health and taking up Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ call for a normative theory of narrative technology. We extend Coeckelbergh and Reijers’ narrative technologies to include race, a narrative artifact, co-produced by biology, public health, and individual actors.

The Not-So-Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Antibiotic Research: An Interdisciplinary Opportunity.

Literary-rhetorical devices like figurative language and analogy can help explain concepts that exceed our capacity to grasp intuitively. It is not surprising these devices are used to discuss virulence, pathogenesis, and antibiotics. Allusions to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seem to be used with particular frequency in research pertaining to pathogens, especially in studies contemporary with our evolving understanding of antibiotic resistance. More recent references to the text have appeared in research parsing definitions of virulence and acknowledging the role of anti-virulence in future therapeutics. While it is obvious that scientists invoke Stevenson’s story for stylistic purposes, its use could go beyond the stylistic—and might even generate rhetorical and imaginative possibilities for framing research. This perspective discusses the first published allusion to Jekyll and Hyde in reference to virulence and pathogenesis; comments on a select number of specific instances of Jekyll and Hyde in contemporary scientific literature; briefly contextualizes the novel; and concludes with the implications of a more productive engagement with humanistic disciplines in the face of antibiotic resistance.

Reading the “Memoirs of the Life of Florence Hall” ThroughThe Long Songof the Caribbean Colonial Archive

AbstractThis article suggests that we should analyze the mediated and fragmentary narratives of the lives of the enslaved—the predominate format of such texts in the archives—as well as self-written slave narratives. Although not biographical in the same fashion as the self-written texts, these more ephemeral texts can also enhance and productively contribute to our understandings of the literary and discursive features of the era. In order to attend to such texts, we need to develop more dynamic reading strategies for the multiple voices and varied formats common to them. One such strategy is animated by arguments about alternative histories suggested by neo-slave-narrative novels like Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2011). I suggest that drawing on the models of the imaginative possibilities of neo-slave-narrative fictions, along with conceptually related links to both Edward Said’s hermeneutics of contrapuntal reading and Saidiya Hartman’s exegetics of critical fabulation, reveals how an ephemeral and fragmentary text or “textual splinter” like “Memoirs of the Life of Florence Hall” may yield more complex readings and help us consider what the lives of the enslaved might have looked like, as well as offers portraits of the discursive networks in which it existed.The … archive was not meant to encode the nuances of Hall’s voice or memories of her experiences. The archive was instead meant to document the power of the establishment and the data that would be useful to its perpetuation.

Black Muslim brilliance: Confronting antiblackness and Islamophobia through transnational educational migration

Black Muslim youth confront antiblackness and Islamophobia in US schools and society, yet few studies examine how this population navigates these intersecting oppressions. In addition, there has been a dearth of scholarly literature that explores the educational spaces in which Black Muslim youth are nurtured and affirmed. This article addresses these understudied areas by examining a community of African American Muslim youth who, amidst the overlapping deprivations of antiblackness and Islamophobia, opt to leave the USA and continue their education abroad. Based on a 14-month ethnographic study at an Islamic school in Medina Baye, Senegal that was established for African American Muslim youth, and additional fieldwork throughout the USA, this article utilizes data from classroom observations, participant observations, and interviews. I argue that the school, the African American Islamic Institute Qur’an School, and the communities related to it in Senegal and the USA operate from an axiomatic stance of Black Muslim brilliance. I further argue that such an affirmation of students’ inherent capacities expands these African American Muslim youth’s imaginative possibilities and provides them with new ways of envisioning what it means to learn at the intersection of being young, Black, and Muslim. This research: (1) demonstrates the affordances of transnational educational migration as a route to educational justice for Black students; (2) contributes a diasporic and intersectional perspective to understanding Black Muslim youth’s educational experiences; and (3) illustrates the value of providing opportunities for Black youth from the USA to study abroad on the African continent.

Making as imaginative crossroads: Ghanaian makers and the geopolitics of technological progress

AbstractThis paper is about the politics of technological progress as it is being played out among a loose network of Ghanaian makers. It unpacks how the practice of ‘making’ unfolds as a site for positioning the self and the nation within a global imaginary of techno futures. The paper argues, first, that ‘making’ in Ghana is emblematic of a crossroads of imaginative possibilities for technological design and production, and second, that this marks a distinct turn in the politics of technological progress, particularly when situated against ongoing econo‐political negotiations between the Global south, the West, and China.

Wounded Warriors of the Future Disability Hierarchy in Avatar and Source Code

The article analyzes the representation of disabled veterans in James Cameron’s Avatar and Duncan Jones’s Source Code. The argument is that these two films use the figure of the heroic, technologically enhanced, white disabled veteran man to alleviate cultural anxieties, fears, and guilt about veterans and disabled people in the contemporary United States. In doing so, however, Avatar and Source Code perpetuate a disability hierarchy that reinforces a variety of oppressive cultural norms. The article, therefore, demonstrates how the films reflect the differential valuation and treatment of different kinds of disabled people in American culture at large via the genre of science fiction and its technological imaginative possibilities.

Reality check: An experimental manipulation of inferential confusion in eating disorders

Background and objectivesInferential confusion (IC) entails confusing an imagined possibility with a sensory-based possibility, and acting upon the imagined possibility as if it was real. Although IC was formulated in the context of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), this reasoning bias has shown to be relevant to other obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, such as eating disorders (EDs). The goal of this study was to induce IC experimentally in individuals with EDs relative to healthy controls (HC). MethodsThirty-six women (ED group, n = 18; HC group, n = 18) were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: in the High IC condition, participants watched ED-themed videos with key sequences missing – provoking a distrust of the senses and lending more space for the imagination, thus triggering IC. In the Low IC condition, participants watched videos without sequences missing. Participants completed measures of IC, negative affect and compulsive behaviors after watching the videos. ResultsOne-way ANOVA indicated that ED participants assigned to the High IC condition reported a greater urge to engage in compulsive behaviors. ED participants also neutralized more after watching the videos and endorsed higher trait IC. LimitationsThere was no clinical control group. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that individuals with EDs display a greater vulnerability to IC, as they are more prone to compulsive behaviors when IC is triggered. This investigation may foster our understanding of the relationship between EDs and OCD through the examination of cognitive factors that are implicated in both disorders.

Otherworlding: Othering Places and Spaces through Mythologization

The concept of otherworld is often conceived as a realm inhabited by supernatural beings or as a fantastic location where the possibilities of imagination are realities. It gets linked to concepts of otherness and the other, but the question of what makes something an otherworld generally remains unasked. Otherworlds are usually thought of as somehow outside of or beyond the empirical world, but the issue is not so simple.

What Should Immigration Law Become?

This Essay explores the future of immigration law and asks what it should become after the 2020 election. It begins with a discussion of some of the changes brought about by the Trump administration and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In thinking about a starting place for immigration law, one can and should begin with human rights, ensuring international norms are met, providing the most vulnerable urgent protections, as well as responding to humanitarian crises. Simultaneously, immigration law can be viewed as a facet or subset of national security law, administrative law, or constitutional law, and at times all of these sources acting at once upon a particular immigrant or set of immigrants. This confluence of concerns drives the cacophony of voices, and hence the confusion and obfuscation which has frustrated comprehensive immigration reform and remedies for immigrants for decades. Other areas also of course impact the field. Another way of asking the same question is: How do we begin to explore imaginative possibilities at fixing the broken immigration system? In determining what immigration law should become this essay examines the possibilities inspired by three distinct “buckets” or categories: (1) Supreme Court decisions; (2) proposed and, thus far, unsuccessful legislation, including the immigration plan of candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden; and (3) remedies and approaches inspired by other fields of law. The Essay concludes with a discussion of legal analysis and a proposal for change.

Bratya Basu’s “The Final Night”: The (im)possibility of gender equality and religious plurality

ABSTRACT This study attempts a feminist analysis of a work of historical fiction set within the tumultuous events of the partition of British India in 1947. It uses a play, Antim Raat or “The Final Night,” by Bratya Basu to portray how individual histories of injury in “private” and “public” domains, stay alive in the memory of the Muslim nationalist leader, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, and influences his political pursuit of Pakistan. The play depicts experiences of rejection and religious intolerance via the political act of marriage, set within a wider context where Jinnah uses religious identity for the partition of India in 1947. The paper therefore locates personal wounds within the larger narrative of the injured nation to signify Jinnah’s exit from “old” spaces and relationships to create and celebrate “new” dreams, freedom and boundaries. The complexities of inter-religious marriage in the plot also prompt readers to uncover the intricate connection between women’s marital choices and religious patriarchies. Dina Wadia, Jinnah’s daughter, viewed as a feminist and revolutionary character in the play, assesses the (im)possibilities of an ethico-political imagination in the blurred boundaries between familial and professional realms for a political leader of the stature of Jinnah.

The power of aroma: gender, biopolitics and melodramatic imagination in the Legend of Zhen Huan

ABSTRACT This article combines ethnography and textual analysis to consider the reasons for the immense popularity of the 2012 Chinese television series “The Legend of Zhen Huan” (LZH). I argue that LZH, a historical melodrama, stages key phenomena—especially in the depiction of feminine wielding of aroma—that audiences recognize as parallel to contemporary gender norms and governance in China. In LZH, aroma is treated as a diagnostic, infiltrating, and affective force that makes the female body permeable and affective, extending feminine power. Women use aroma to channel and transform male power. For audiences, who watched the series by the millions and continue to repeat its catchphrases, the depiction of aroma in LZH highlights the forms of biopower they are subject to, as well as imagined possibilities for political and personal resistance. Such resistance involves strategic manipulation of gender norms that have been pressed in the government’s recent exertion of biopower.