Political Possibilities Research Articles

Thinking conjuncturally, looking elsewhere

Inspired by Jamie Peck’s recent article on conjunctural methodologies, we discuss how geographers might interpret these troubling times. We hope to keep the conversation going by suggesting that a strength of conjunctural analysis lies in trying to get to grips with multiple crises without always knowing precisely where to look. Another strength of this approach is to take seriously all the cultural and political work involved in the articulation of different struggles, tensions, and contradictions combining in complex, and sometimes surprising, ways. So, in addition to looking inward to economic geography, we suggest that thinking conjuncturally might also involve looking elsewhere to ask what's at stake in the present moment – in all its complexity – in order to bring other political possibilities into view.

Speculating on shale: Resource-making and the ‘politics of possibility’ in Poland and the UK

This paper focuses on the speculative character of knowledge and action in relation to subterranean resources, drawing on the curtailed histories of shale gas development in Poland and the UK. It adopts a political-economic orientation towards speculation rather than a narrowly financial one, seeking to understand the ‘politics of possibility’ associated with speculative resources. Specifically, we build on work in political geography to understand speculation as a form of productive ‘resonance’ replicating across epistemic, economic, and political domains. Thinking of speculation as resonance – as synchronous vibration across different areas of social life, stimulated by and intensifying uncertainty - offers a novel way of thinking about the possibilities of subterranean resources for forging political alignments. We show how speculation was integral to demonstrating the resource potential of shale in both Poland and the UK, and consider how this speculative character of shale subsequently infiltrated into economic and policy realms. Resonating across these domains, and amplifying epistemic uncertainties about shale, speculation produced a politics of possibility orientated towards ‘gambling’ on potential outcomes. By taking seriously the political possibilities of the uncertainties attached to subterranean resources, we extend the value of speculation as a concept for analysing the constitutive role of uncertainty in political-economic governance.

Haider's "Mousetrap": Politicized Audiences in "Shakespearean" Kashmir

This paper interrogates Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the extent to which a critical understanding of audience illuminates the political possibilities of adaptation. Placing the song sequence "Bismil" at the center of inquiry, we bring together theories of Shakespearean adaptation and Bollywood melodrama to underline the way Haider navigates the cultural and political ethics of a Shakespearean adaptation of a Kashmiri narrative. We place Haider in a long history of audience-centric criticism of Hamlet and attempt to understand how refashioning the play into a Bollywood melodrama complicates our notions of the affective and critical possibilities of Shakespeare and drama. The history of alienation and self-reflexivity within the play, and the newly conferred melodramatic excess and its use of public and nonindividuated audiences come together in understanding how Haider's departure from Hamlet might be in how it refashions its audience.

A Clear and Present Pedagogy: Teaching About Planetary Crisis (When You're in a Planetary Crisis)

AbstractThe task of teaching about acute ecological crisis presents a vital pedagogical challenge and an important provocation for critical scholars. Across various environmental subfields, educators are revisiting fundamental and politically significant questions concerning what to teach, how to teach, and even why to teach as their traditional subject matter transforms around them. In this article, we explore how environmental educators are grappling with the implications of what they are teaching and consider the politicising effects of this predicament. We show how this distinctive educational context, beyond posing bewildering learning challenges, is also creating unique openings for radical scholarship in higher education. Through interviews with educators endeavouring to teach about planetary environmental crisis (from within an exceedingly dire planetary environmental crisis), we examine diverse attempts to interpret the radical demands of this learning challenge and to negotiate its many complexities, practical difficulties, and political possibilities.

The Ruins of the Enclave: Simultaneity and Agrarian Change in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica

ABSTRACT This article proposes the use of ruins and rubble as entry points to the study of agrarian change. Drawing from peasants’ collective memories of the so-called “abandonment of the banana company” in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica and the observation of ruined spaces and objects, this article argues that ruins and rubble allow us to see the spatial simultaneity of different temporalities in processes of agrarian change, aspects often obscured in linear transition narratives. This approach uses ruins and ruination as a lens for asking a different type of agrarian question: What does agrarian change look like after capitalist destruction has already taken place? In ruined spaces and objects we find both the materiality of crisis and oblivion as well as places of reappropriation and autonomy that guide the political possibilities for making ruined spaces livable.

Aural Resilience

In 2018, the artist Chen Ting-Jung (b 1985) manufactured a sound installation that reclaimed the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan. Constructed in 1967, the wall’s seventeen loudspeakers broadcast political propaganda across a narrow stretch of water to the People’s Republic of China for three decades. In recognition of the sonic Cold War, Chen stripped down this fortress into its rudiments: a horizontal arc of speakers, playing one of Taiwanese cultural icon Teresa Teng’s famous solo pieces. She titled the installation You Are the Only One I Care About (Whisper). This article explores this reclamation, where the questions about the exploitation of female labour and the aestheticisation of the female voice confront the aurality of the Cold War. I argue that the female voice became a specific site of production during the sonic combat between the Taiwan Strait. Most importantly, I investigate how Chen’s intervention is both a feminist critique and a form of sonic resilience that is open to different political possibilities.

The Two Shamans Beyond the Two Solitudes: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Haida Manga as a Tool for Indigenizing Comics

ABSTRACT Focusing on the two editions of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ A Tale of Two Shamans (2001, 2018) and how each incorporates “Indigenous methodologies, pedagogies, and epistemologies” (Pearce 319), this article explores the relational and situated knowledges that coalesce in the story and its telling. Using Haida and settler languages like English, Yahgulanaas’ book is an early example of his Haida manga practice. Haida manga can be understood as a way of Indigenizing comics because the use of Haida framelines deconstructs the spatial grammar of panel and gutter in favor of interconnected imagery and design. Likewise, Haida manga linguistically critiques colonizing assumptions regarding territories and borders as land-bound, shifting the location of the cultural practice to a region defined by water, with its political possibilities and cultural connections. Yahgulanaas’ books weave these actions and intentions into consumer objects, differently legible and knowable across diverse reading publics.

Post-retirement enlightenment syndrome: Worthy of investigation.

Post-Retirement Enlightenment Syndrome is a term used by some in illicit drug policy to reflect the experience of having politicians "come out" in favour of drug policy reform only after retirement. To date, the phenomenon has not been examined in any systematic manner. While discussions of the phenomenon on social media tend to be playful, they nevertheless express real frustration with the reluctance of privately supportive sitting politicians and policing officials to speak out in favour of non-punitive and/or harm reduction-oriented policies. In this commentary, we give an overview of the phenomenon of Post-Retirement Enlightenment Syndrome. We argue that these instances of sitting officials speaking out publicly in favour of drug policy reform, as well as instances in which such apparent "enlightenment" is not publicly expressed until after retirement, are potentially highly fruitful areas for investigation. Public positions on drug policy are invariably contoured by conditions of political possibility. We raise the call for both an unpacking and examination of the structural and relational aspects of "political will" and "political courage". Sitting and retired politicians each have a role in the drug policy landscape, whether as lawmakers or as high-profile and often respected commentators. This commentary argues that a more nuanced understanding of the conditions that may support or hinder the expression of public support for drug policy reform by political office bearers, whether sitting or former, has implications for advocates and researchers invested in policy change.

Translating Anger into Care: An Examination of Black Female Identity and Bonding in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016)

This article attempts to explore the political possibilities of anger as a potential source of Black female identity construction and solidarity in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). I will argue that Audre Lorde’s insights into anger in Sister Outsider (1984) are particularly suited to understanding how anger functions in Smith’s fictional work, where this emotion is presented as a powerful “energy” (Lorde 2019: 120) that has the potential to move the subject towards a more empowered selfhood. Nevertheless, I also explore, through the discourses of Lorde (2019) and bell hooks (1995, 2012), the social boundaries and potentially damaging effects attached to this emotion. More specifically, I consider how anger, by itself, is not enough to ensure a stable sense of self because it does not directly motivate the development of female solidarity. Instead, Smith demonstrates how anger may be effectively complemented through the paradigm of care, which does encourage the protagonists to move towards each other, and towards the liberating potential of a more outward view of the world.

A progressive sense of place and the open city: Micro-spatialities and micro-conflicts on a north London council estate

Doreen Massey’s progressive sense of place (2005) and Richard Sennett’s ethical case for the open city (2018) rely on seeing space as open. It is openness that guarantees an open future, an openness to others, and the possibility of a progressive politics. Curiously, the Garden City, for both, becomes a test case for a progressive sense of the open city. For Massey, her lived experience of growing up in Wythenshawe reveals both the possibility of, and also the undermining of, the possibility of creating a progressive sense of place. In contrast, Sennett sees the Garden City, for all its progressive elements, as ultimately blocking new ways of dwelling in the city. The Garden City, for him, is too closed to provide a progressive sense of place. In north London, we discover a hidden Garden City, with secret gardens. Its micro-spatialities – and its micro-conflicts – enable us to rethink both these accounts of a progressive sense of place and of the open city. Rather than seeing openness in a physical infrastructure of space and place, we wish to emphasize the openness and closedness that emerges from the ways the people encounter, manage and dispute the microspatialities of everyday life on the estate.

The disappointment of Rosa Luxemburg: Rethinking revolutionary commitment in the face of failure

Despite the recent revival of revolutionary commitment in response to left melancholia, I suggest that the contemporary academic left has not adequately addressed the difficulty of responding to failure as an inevitable aspect of revolutionary politics. The dominant tendency has been to try to offset the risk of failure by managing revolutionary action in line with a pre-given model of revolutionary change – only to limit the range of possibilities for revolutionary engagement. To address this problem, I draw on Rosa Luxemburg, a foremost revolutionary thinker, whose experiences of disappointment led her to rethink the notion of revolutionary commitment as a practice of learning from failure. This rethinking of commitment suggests a different way of engaging with failure – one that expands our imagination of political possibilities beyond the confines of the dominant contemporary responses to left melancholia and enriches their visions of revolutionary change.

Revitalizing the Political Avant-garde of the “Absurd” in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room

ABSTRACT This article considers the political possibilities of the avant-garde in the experimental “absurd” plays of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room that endeavor to depict the senselessness of life, reducing plot and characters to a bare minimum. While the popular interpretation of the plays has been made against the ideological exhaustion of post–World War Europe and America and hence with the philosophy of existentialism, this article analyzes the two plays in terms of the tension with contemporary ideologies that continue to inform our present lives. One prominent mode of creating this tension is minimization of the communication between the actors, director, and the audience in order to create a misinterpretation of the purpose of communication. The article argues that the element of the avant-garde is revitalized in such studies dealing with existential angst, Marxist orientation of Ionesco or Pinter’s commentary on racism, and can be properly interpreted by an appreciation of the multiple modernities that the plays inhabit.

Mourners who can not mourn: Argentina's Parque de la Memoria as a spatial threshold of memory

In this paper I explore the subtle regulation of cultural practice in Argentina's Parque de la Memoria. I interpret the Parque de la Memoria, or memory park, as a spatial threshold. When family members of the desaparecidos enter the park they enter the memory of the spatial threshold as what remains (of what remained) of the violent attempt by the Argentine military regime to spatialise political order. The desaparecidos, or disappeared, were to be captured and performatively constituted in the space of exception as the embodiment of a terrorist subversion that threatened Argentina's re-founding as a Western, Christian civilisation. To resist the temptation to leave a flower at the monument as the memory of the spatial threshold between the sacred and profane, life and death, the city and the river, is to hold open the possibility for an alternative politics by maintaining potentiality's link to impotentiality as the ability to not-mourn. It is in this potentiality, not-yet-actualised and thus not exhausted, that space is opened for a post-dictatorship politics in Argentina that would reach beyond the exhausted notions of the need for reconciliation with, or the redemption of, the disappearances of the disappeared.

A Call from Raqqa

Abstract This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to newly imagined futures and political possibilities for displaced Kurdish Syrians. It examines the Syrian war and the broader Middle Eastern context as a system of unpredictable escalations (Højer et al. 2018) and the liberation of Kobanî as a “critical” and “generative” moment (Das 1995; Kapferer 2015) in the Kurdish imaginary. Using ethnographic (audiovisual) material, I point to how people in forced displacement must constantly navigate uncertainty and reconfigure and consolidate their unknown future paths. I argue that my interlocutor Mihemed stabilized these uncertainties through his capacity to hold multiple future possibilities open simultaneously in order to keep every outcome viable.

Architectures of Extraction: Labor and Industrial Ruination in Highland Bolivia

ABSTRACT What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? Focusing on a Bolivian tin mine, this paper examines the social effects of deteriorating “architectures of extraction,” a category that includes both aboveground infrastructures and belowground networks of tunnels and scaffolding. First, I argue that when Llallagua’s extractive architecture was built, it helped shore up a connection between tin mining, working-class identity, and revolutionary nationalism – which in turn became bound up with mestizaje, an ideology of racial and cultural whitening. Second, I argue that the ruination of this extractive architecture has had ambivalent implications for the racial politics of contemporary small-scale mining operations that continue to operate inside the mountain. On the one hand, the rotting structures reinforce regional racial hierarchies in a variety of ways, but on the other hand, the slow degradation of the physical structures has made the corresponding social structures more porous, if not fully permeable, to members of regional Indigenous ayllus. While access to the financial benefits of mining is far from unambiguously liberatory, this paper nevertheless suggests that the political possibilities contained within the ruins of extractive architectures are not uniformly adverse.

Introduction to the special issue: in/civility in peace and conflict

ABSTRACT In this introduction to the special issue, we bring anthropological debates about civility into conversation with peace and conflict research on civil society peacebuilding. International peacebuilding has been widely criticised for its claims to being impartial and based entirely on technical expertise and, therefore, to acting outside politics, disguising processes of exclusion and hierarchies such as those between the global/local and the civil/uncivil. Extending from this critique, we propose civility as a conceptual lens to focus on the practices and norms aimed at promoting restraint and respect in violent conflict. Through this lens, we seek to examine the ambivalent notions and practices – often considered ‘the virtue’ – of civil society as manifested in public claims for decency, respect, peace and doing good. By (re-)drawing boundaries in society, these claims create possibilities for solidarity and peaceful politics across differences, but they often also (re-)produce conflict, violence and inequalities between people and groups.

Review of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics, by Emily Sun

Emily Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Breathing Aesthetics. By Jean-Thomas Tremblay

In Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay contends with the paradoxical dimensions of breath, inquiring how the air that promises our species’ and planetary survival can be deployed as a necropolitical force of capitalist and imperial domination. As Tremblay details with clarifying exigency, breath can be emblematic of neither the fullness of life nor its absence despite the prevalence of cultural narratives that read respiratory disruption as a symptom of failure. Deftly situated at the seams that bind queer and disability studies with an ecocritical, feminist framework, Tremblay’s study implements a dramatic reorientation of life and death, “vitality and morbidity” (2), refuting their conventionally antagonistic relationship. Tremblay instead attends to their “enmeshment,” revealing the presence of simultaneously occurring modes of breathing that not only critique normative sexual practices, gender identities, and able-bodiedness that promise access to respiratory abundance, but also produce new social relationalities across discrete breathing bodies who are most vulnerable to the effects of environmental ruin. In this sense, “breathlessness” signifies another “modality of breathing, not its negation” (31–32), and Tremblay traces the aesthetic and political possibilities of contracted breath through an expansive archive of music, narrative and documentary cinema, elemental media, fiction, poetry, and performance art.

“Are you me?”: understanding the political potential of feminist identity spaces on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic

AbstractIn this study we performed a critical discourse analysis of the r/workingmoms subreddit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020). Using this data we argue that Reddit’s platform can facilitate what we schematize as feminist “identity spaces.” We use the heuristic of “spaces” rather than “networks” or “online communities” and connect this theorization to our understanding of the discursive work on the subreddit which facilitates in-group communication and situated structural critique. However, we also interrogate the political possibilities of identity spaces and understand them as a symptom of what Angela McRobbie has called “the cultural politics of disarticulation.” Ultimately, we argue that the same platform affordances that allow for identity spaces to thrive also limit their political potency and we frame this within Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism.”

The market as an instrument of planning in sustainability capitalism

AbstractThis article seeks to unpack the potential and limits of markets as instruments of economic planning in sustainability capitalism. Recent policies for sustainability transitions in the United States (USA) and the European Union (EU) (eg, Infrastructure Law, EU Green Deal) have signaled aspirations for a more prominent role of the state in coordinating the economy, while still relying primarily on market mechanisms for such coordination. Yet, could the market itself be conceptualised and structured as a political instrumentality for the achievement of social objectives? An important part of the puzzle of sustainability transitions is the transportation sector, and specifically the transition to Electric Vehicles, or New Energy Vehicles (NEVs). I explore the comparative legal constructions of markets for NEVs in China – the current global leader in NEVs – the USA, and the EU. Drawing from this case study, I first argue that law makes planning possible within markets, as the functional power of market processes can be strategically deployed for the achievement of politically set objectives. Acknowledging the deliberate and artificial character of markets raises the question of what we want markets for, broadening the scope of the political possibilities enclosed in them. I, then, proceed to challenge the enduring argument of the epistemic deficit of central planners, which morphs into prescriptions of decentralisation. I show that arguments against legal centralism and planning cannot stand on just epistemological grounds and are inevitably political. Finally, I attempt to outline the limits of planning within markets – and thus, to a certain extent, the limits of the constitutive function of law – for broader projects of social transformation.