Futurity

By drawing attention to the phenomenon of suspension, I want to emphasize the temporality of infrastructure. It is assumed that projects, once started, will be completed. Thus, infrastructure that is not yet in place is deemed incomplete, on its way to completion. The language of delays participates in the logic of finance capital. While such calculative techniques draw attention to the durée of the project and, hence, make us think about the temporality of infrastructure, they do not question the narrative of completion as telos. Infrastructure projects are not always completed: completion is not the only possible outcome once a project begins.
Cultural Anthropology
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/722-suspension

This is a pre-publication draft. Please see the journal's website for the final publication.

In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.

An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out by socially disenfranchised populations insofar as both embrace the possibility of an emancipated future that is radically at odds with the present (picture Gustave Courbet
helping to topple the Vendome Column in
1871), except something about such historical repetition and reenactment at this time  –a moment best described as an uncanny present: a present unfamiliar in its very presentness (Rebecca Bryant)– cries out for something like verification. The essay (published in ASAP Journal 3.2 2018) asks is such a thing as proof of authenticity even possible?

In this article I use four middle-grade novels to query the relationship between gendered forms of childhood and gender nonconformity in tweens. For the young characters in these novels, objects and spaces of gender enfranchise-ment—including gendered forms of childhood—are often out of reach. Using conceptual tools such as the orientation of objects, queer futures, and the trans-gender gaze, this work examines the ways in which these novels narrate their main characters' yearning for things that will make their gender identities legible, and how they, as agentic subjects, attempt to take revenge on the rules and structures of gender normativity.

Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variability are being pushed out and projected anew but where its historical, trans-local, cross-scalar, and open-ended working out is mappable. To outline its futural shapes, this text closely traces a set of affective, representational, and practical strategies as part of an unfinished, contested, and dynamic process of encounters across a variety of allies and actors: individuals, institutions, collectives, spaces, and networks. It illustrates , on the one hand, how trans* in Pakistan kicks off a capacious contact zone, triggers cross-sectional encounters, and generates momentum with implications, which impact but also exceed local conditions. On the other hand, it observes how its horizons might be curtailed by conditions and concerns that privilege some ways of gender nonconforming over certain others.

In the last few years, Native filmmakers have begun drawing explicitly on the science fiction genre. Engaging recent short films depicting noncolonial encounters of the third kind and alternative utopian–dystopian futures, I argue that Native science fiction film provides a creative subversive mode of representation, uniquely positioning indigenous filmmakers to vividly reimagine a multiplicity of futures for their communities while critically addressing contemporary issues. Synthesizing scholarship in visual anthropology, afro and feminist futurism, and indigenous methodologies, I attempt to further develop an indigenous futurist analytical framework as part of a larger argument for increased anthropological engagement with Native futures.

This article reorients archaeology's approach to things by acknowledging the moment of the encounter with the past as one of speculation. Years of scientific claim, research design and methodology place the agentive nature of research in the hands of the archaeologist: we go to the site to find the past. However, if we acquiesce to the possibility that antiquity approaches the archaeologist (rather than vice versa), then that forces us to contend with the contemporary nature of the encounter. This article considers the efficacy, urgency, and poetics of decolonization. Prologue Not all soil/miti is the same. 1

How can archaeologists, whose research is typically anchored in place-based sites and landscapes, apprehend the scale of mobility and pace of transformation inherent to immigration, industrialization, capitalism, and settler colonialism? Through a focus on the lived experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers, this study advances a multisited, polytemporal methodology that interprets archaeological evidence through lenses of precarity and futurity. The artifacts and features excavated at railroad work camps provide evidence of laborers’ efforts to care for themselves under extreme conditions. This evidence also reveals workers’ dependencies on commodity chains that constrained laborers’ abilities to resist exploitation. Attending to the temporal dimensions of risk and hope requires stretching archaeological methodologies beyond the work camps themselves to the workers’ childhood villages in China’s Pearl River Delta, to railroad section houses and station towns throughout the North American West, and to urban Chinatowns in major coastal cities. There is no inherent outer limit to the archaeology of futurity, a point illustrated by a closing reflection about connections between the author’s own positionality and the historical
exploitation of Chinese railroad workers.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Author(s): Ferri, Sabrina | Abstract: This essay examines Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on the future in the Zibaldone, his encyclopedic miscellany of notes and thoughts. Leopardi (1798-1837) is one of Europe’s greatest poets and thinkers, yet his reception outside of Italy has been relatively limited. The article aims to situate Leopardi’s ideas in the context of modern European thought and to frame his vision of futurity by examining a series of interconnected issues: the question of the modern individual’s experience of time and relationship with the future; the nature of society’s responsibility toward the generations to come; and the question of literature’s engagement with future readers. It shows how Leopardi’s philosophy of the future provided both a critique of European modernity and a response to its challenges. It also draws out the parallel issue of an author’s contemporaneity, that is her capacity to belong to her period and, at the same time, to transcend it. Thus, wh...

Queerness is many things, for example: an identity; a state of being; a characteristic; a mark of the unknown…The number of ways in which ‘queerness’ has been utilised is testament to not only the enigmatic properties of the term, but also the key thread that ties these utilisations together: politics. In every instance that the queer appears as a descriptive category, it represents an opposition to norms, discourses of truth and ways of doing. In this, queerness is inherently political. This essay seeks to explore the oppositional nature of queerness as explored in the first chapter of Lee Edelman’s forceful polemic ‘No Future’, which outlines his rationale for an embracing of the anti-normative attributes of queerness; with a critique informed by ‘Non-reproductive Futurism’ by Nina Powers, who considers the politics of Jacques Rancière to remedy what she sees as ‘Edelman’s body apolitic’. It is through a consideration of the call-and-response of these texts, alongside other readings, that will hopefully offer a way to simultaneously embrace the oppositional nature of queerness while forming a pragmatic politics that operates within current systems of power while also rejecting ‘cisheterorepronormative futurism’ (!)

(La imagen es la tapa desplegada).
El libro se consigue escribiendo a ezequiel.gatto@gmail.com o a  https://www.facebook.com/editorial.casagrand/

Aquí el índice:
CAPITULO 1 Una introducción conceptual / CAPITULO 2. El realismo capitalista y las futuridades. a.El dinero es tiempo, b.La ingeniería temporal de las finanzas, c.Tecnologías / CAPITULO 3. El vínculo con las futuridades en la política socialista y possocialista. a.Los componentes utópicos del socialismo, b.Vínculos possocialistas con las futuridades / CAPITULO 4. La inventiva posutópica. a.De “El futuro” a la multiplicidad de futuridades, b. El sismo probable, c.El diseño como posutopía, d.La estrategia de la improvisación, e.El arte de la enemistad / CAPITULO 5. Esbozos para una etnografía de las futurizaciones y las futurabilidades: a. Ecografía 3D de la pampa, b. Dos intervenciones

Una sinopsis:
Preguntar tiene una función estratégica: ¿Cuáles son las maneras contemporáneas de vinculación con la futuridad, en tanto virtualidad de acontecimientos? ¿En qué se diferencian de formas anteriores? ¿Dónde rastrear y cartografiar esos cambios? ¿Cómo se puede pensar el futuro en condiciones de alta discontinuidad y aceleración? ¿En qué medida y de qué manera nuestras condiciones se traducen en ideas, imágenes y estrategias de relación con la futuridad? ¿Qué pasa con la noción «futuro» cuando ya no se lo puede imaginar como se lo hacía? ¿Cómo se inscriben las diferentes hipótesis, gobiernos y aperturas del futuro en la vida social? ¿Qué vínculos se establecen entre proyectos y posibilidades? ¿Cómo podemos precipitar alguna potencia a partir de los incontables elementos que en nuestro presente existen como proyecciones, posibilidades y actualidades?
Este libro fue escrito con la intención de explorar esas preguntas, que hacen a los modos en que existimos en condiciones de contingencia, que diagnosticamos nuestra situación, que comprendemos el poder orientador de las instituciones, que procesamos las tensiones entre prescripciones y novedades. Es, en ese sentido, un intento de aportar a una etnografía de lo contemporáneo, donde no se trata tanto de donar una imagen de futuro o un qué hacer, sino más bien de presentar preguntas y miradas, que apuntan a un cómo hacemos, que buscan aportar a procesos poscapitalistas prestando atención a su intensidad y expansión. El pensamiento social tiene una inclinación a leer lo social en clave de problemas, asimetrías, injusticias; a veces olvida que las tareas de investigación y pensamiento brotan de un impulso a incrementar nuestras posibilidades, nuestras potencias y condiciones para que la vida pueda ser menos sufriente e injusta, más creativa y alegre.

This chapter examines recent changes in the treatment of time and temporality – past, present and future – in the work of Jeanette Winterson. Since she first started writing, Winterson’s work has corresponded closely with queer theory and lesbian and gay studies, and like many canonical queer theorists, Winterson repeatedly questions the concept of time and the writing of history. Her fiction not merely challenges sexual and gender difference, but collapses the divide between past and present to create an interstitial space where empowering experiences abound and significant encounters may grow and prosper. Recently, and especially in The Stone Gods, Winterson’s interstitial space has acquired a more fatalistic tone, circulating around a sense of finality and impending doom. This chapter argues that this reflects a more explicit nihilistic turn in critical and queer theory. Post-9/11 queer theory, like Winterson’s recent fiction, rejects reproductive continuance and circularity – and embraces temporal ends.

En los discursos actuales, el futuro oscila entre la omnipresencia un poco banal y la clausura del tiempo. A partir de la noción de futuridad, es posible pensar en una estrategia de pensamiento que permita no solo proyectar futuros, sino también mapear posibilidades, inventar, improvisar y descubrir. Para ello, articulando inquietudesfilosóficas, políticas y etnográficas, es necesario volver sobre algunos sentidos y límites de la palabra «futuro» y ensayar una propuesta para pensar la potencia política de la posibilidad.

In this article, I analyze two Berlin novels, that is, Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998) and Marica Bodrožić’s Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (2012), in order to trace their use of Berlin as a site through which to renegotiate the historical atrocities committed on European soil during the 20th century. First, I analyze Şenocak’s novel in light of its alleged failure to adequately represent the Armenian genocide. Rather than constituting a failure, I argue that this lack of representation is the logical outcome of the novel’s often acknowledged critique of memory and identity discourses in the Berlin Republic. In an attempt to avoid the monumentalizing and exclusionary tendencies of these discourses, the novel uses narrative gaps, fragments, ellipses, and allusions in order to engage the reader actively in a process of remembrance. In so doing, it gestures towards future-oriented possibilities inherent in the past, pointing to the potential futurity inherent in memory discourses surrounding Berlin. In the second part, I offer a reading of Bodrožić’s novel Kirschholz and alte Gefühle. Taking issue with post-Yugoslav memory and identity politics, the novel approaches representations of the past cautiously. Like Şenocak, Bodrožić experiments with narrative silences and allusions in order to leave the represented past open for present and future renegotiation, and to safeguard it from becoming co-opted by identity politics. I conclude by showing that, next to all of their similarities, the novels’ differ in their depiction of Berlin. Whereas Şenocak’s post-Wende Berlin is still firmly located within Germany and its past, Bodrožić’s Berlin gestures towards the city’s European future.

El investigador Ezequiel Gatto está pensando en torno de algo que llama una teoría de la futuridad. La argumenta retrucándole a la letra de una canción que marcó su juventud. Por qué “Todo un palo”, de Los Redondos, le sirve para explicar que el futuro sí tiene futuro. Lejos del optimismo moderno y del goce posmoderno, están los nuevos modos de habitar el tiempo, la relación entre actualidades y virtualidades, las otras gramáticas de la imaginación y la fuerza vital de pensar qué hacemos con lo que no esperábamos.

Western representations of the Southern disabled subject are shaped by discourses of Inclusive Development that simultaneously produce the conditions of the subject's visibility and intelligibility. The article traces these conditions through crip readings of historical and contemporary discourses and visual representations that outline the extent to which disability has always already been a crucial part of modern development rhetoric. The article asks if and how, Inclusive Development leads to a querying of ableist norms and processes of exclusion within practices and discourses of ‘development’. Analysing the hegemonic forms of disability and development knowledge produced within the textual and visual discourses on Inclusive Development the author foregrounds the ways in which ableist and colonial dichotomies are re-installed within the epistemologies of Inclusive Development. The article argues that the promises of justice and inclusion produced within development discourse point to a crip(dys)topic future that is always already out of place, thus effectively excluding inclusion.

Purpose-Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal compositions, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve. Design/methodology/approach-This study aims to answer the question "How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?" The authors critically examine four multimodal compositions created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. The authors take up Black Livingness as a theoretical framework and use visual methodologies to analyze themes of Black life, love and hope in the young people's multimodal renderings. Findings-The findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. The authors conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth. Originality/value-Recognizing that "the creation and use of images [is] a practice of decolonizing methodology" (Brown, 2013, loc. 2323), the authors examine Black student-created multimodal compositional practices to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures.

The historiography of natural-resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postin-dustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital-intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the "artisanal." In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effac-ing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life-worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep-level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama-zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above-named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close-up-a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image-with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep-level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.

This collection of essays engages the ways in which anthropological understandings of Indigenous media can be expanded and reimagined through a focus on futurity. Throughout, the contributors pose two distinct yet interconnected questions: What does the future of Indigenous media hold? And, how is the future itself being increasingly asserted through Indigenous media production? In a sense, then, the collection serves as both retrospective and opening. We reflect on the history of Indigenous media scholarship in tracing the trajectory of emerging forms and content, while also considering how the future is mobilized as a means for establishing temporal sovereignty in relation to anachronistic pasts. In doing so, we aim to provoke new questions about the histories, politics, and futures of Indigenous self-representation.

Atelier de réflexions à La Colonie à Paris le 14 novembre 2017 -
Avec Morad Montazami, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Nadine Bilong, Joan Grandjean, Anahi Alviso-Marino, Tarek Lakhrissi, Marie-Hélène Leblanc, Parand Danesh.


Depuis le début du 21e siècle, le monde connaît une multiplication inquiétante des conflits. Pensons notamment à la guerre contre le terrorisme islamique de George W. Bush en 2001, et à la guerre d’Irak qui s’en est suivi; à la guerre du Kivu en RD du Congo (2004-); aux contestations du printemps arabe déclenchées en 2010, qui ont mené à des renversements de régime en Tunisie, en Égypte, en Libye et aux guerres toujours en cours en Syrie (2011- ) et au Yémen (2014- )...

Abstract: This article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force-relations exercised by Indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. I draw on research with members of a community in the US South who claim Muskogee ancestry visiting ancestral “mound’ or earthwork and shellwork sites built over the last six thousand years. Wounded by ongoing colonial violence, these landscapes call out to descendants, drawing them into ancestral movements and relations of care. In these moments, ancestral sites refuse to be fixed within terminal chronological periods removed from a settled present, enrolling descendants into Indigenous spacetimes that dramatically exceed colonial timescales and temporalities. Drawing on this deep historical perspective, this article articulates a modest hope for the ways Indigenous landscapes, as agentive beings, animate decolonial possibilities for life in the ruins of colonial empires.

Recent art history studies have delved into notions of futurity as it relates to indigenous approaches to environmental destruction in the face of ongoing colonial oppression. Building on the concept of indigenous futures, the present investigation focuses on the Kichwa artist Manuel Amaru Cholango's decolonial critique of technology. Since the 1990s and in response to the quincentennial celebration of the "discovery" of America in 1992, Cholango has developed an oeuvre that criticizes the instrumentalization of modern technology for the exploitation of the earth and the perpetuation of colonialism. By advancing the notion of Andean technology, Cholango brings to bear other ways of relating to the environment that can help create, once again, the possibility of the future.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid?

Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country's literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.

In this chapter I question the assumption that modern education entails a break with the past, particularly when school systems are dysfunctional and resource deficient, as in Niger. The globalized mobilization of "girl power" rhetoric, I argue, is an alibi for the depoliticization of collective welfare and a step towards the privatization of responsibility, and, ultimately, tyrannical futures.

For well over a century after James Clarence Mangan’s death, scholars and writers recalled his difficult life when explicating his work, or more fancifully treated him as a man out of time, living in the nineteenth century but existing in, or haunted by, ancient Ireland. This aspect of his affect has been a consistent theme in descriptions of him — fifty-five years after Mangan’s death, James Joyce remarked that Mangan had appeared as if doing ‘penance for some ancient sin’.1 This sense of recuperating antiquity was also very much a concern of his own time. Ancient Ireland drew Mangan, as it did many antiquarians, historians and nascent cultural nationalists throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. At the outset of his career, Mangan wrote for the Dublin Penny Journal, begun by scholar George Petrie and writer and clergyman Caesar Otway in 1832 to educate the public on Irish antiquities. In his first piece (15 September 1832), Mangan asserted his ‘intention of entering the MINE of ancient Irish literature, and bring out from the obscurity of oblivion those treasures of intellect and genius and antiquarian curiosity which are there to be found’.2 Eight years later, he began to edit a five-part series on ‘Ancient Irish Literature’ in the Irish Penny Journal, for which he produced some of his best-known translations of Irish poems, including ‘The Woman of Three Cows’, and ‘Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan’, as well as a fairly faithful version of a Fenian tale, ‘Bodach an Chota-Lachtna, or the Clown with the Grey Coat’.

Ayana V. Jackson’s recent exhibition, Future Past-Imperfect (2016) marks a turn to movement photography in the artist’s repertoire. What is particularly distinct about this work, is its remix of 19th century photographer, Edward Muybridge’s taxonomy of object/subjects, to apprehend Black futures. This article utilizes Jackson’s motion series, To Kill or Allow to Live (2016) alongside literatures of Black feminism, queer and queer of color critique to argue against linear progress time and towards Blackqueer futurity. I propose bafflement and its orientation to time and space through elsewhere/when as a different orientation to temporality that can imagine belonging. I define bafflement—as how elements of the art text come together and produce different, often difficult, effects and affects on the viewer. Bafflement is a lens with which to encounter moments of frustration, dis-ease, and elsewhere/when that coalesce around art objects and their circulation. Attending to the spatial divide between time and history is valuable to apprehending Blackqueer temporalities.

Drawing from Jean Baudrillard's critique of the National Debt Clock at Times square, Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share, and David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, this paper examines those material concretions of the debt economy for which it can find no use, to which it assigns no value, and that its fantasy of a future of infinite growth leaves behind in the accumulating wastes of the present. Expanding on Baudrillard's critique, the paper argues that the engine of neoliberal capitalism is a trade in abstract negativity that obfuscates its catastrophic consequences for both marginalized populations and the global environment. In this context, the task of criticism thus is not to enumerate political prescriptions for the immediate alleviation of the present and ongoing catastrophe but to advance an ethical sensibility that can situate what Bataille calls the " restrictive economy " of debt within a " general economy " that emphasizes expenditure over accumulation. Wallace's novel provides a literary frame in which to imagine such an ethics by suggesting that the first step toward addressing the end of the world is to assume responsibility for the excesses of consumerist desire, that is, to realign our attention away from the debt's abstract negativity and toward the mounting trash heap that literally and symbolically obscures the possibility of another future.

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com