Imagining alternative futures, marking the past – Pt 3

Originally published here.

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Memorials and futures of Equal Justice: Katy is an UG student in the Combined Honours programme and joined us to talk about recent fieldwork in Montgomery, Alabama. Katy won Ncl university funding to conduct research relating to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Katy’s work helped us to think about the power of commemoration and especially of material objects to rework the past in the present, to make the invisible visible. Here the aim is to inject a new and uncomfortable narrative into the history and historiography of the US and into its contemporary cultural life, adding something distinct to recent debates which have often focused on the removal of Confederate statues and markers.

Katy talked movingly about the museum’s planned National Memorial for Peace and Justice which features displays of soil taken from lynching sites in the museum (seen in the photo here which Katy took during her visit). Katy is working with ideas about the connotations of soil as dirtying and its etymology which is related to wallowing; but also about its links with growth, grit, life-support and renewal. Katy’s reflections on soil, memory and imagined futures also evoked ideas about digging up the past both as a metaphor and as the physical labour involved in locating and recovering these lost sites.

Katy has been drawing on these readings to make sense of this material: Forsdick C (2015) Travel, slavery, memory: thanatourism in the French Atlantic. Postcolonial Studies 8790(March): 1–15. Buzinde CN and Santos CA (2008) Representations of slavery. Annals of Tourism Research 35(2): 469–488. Ebron PA (1999) Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics. American Ethnologist 26(4): 910–932.

Imagining alternative futures, marking the past – Pt 2

Originally published here.

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Birdwatching at twilight in Singapore. Audrey started by focusing on daily time – sunset in the work of Michael Taussig and its liminal, shifting qualities and associations with change, ritual and even magic. She linked this moment to the very different timescales associated with the Anthropocene and the contemporary sense that human societies are at the threshold of a new era. This is likely to be an era of loss and dramatic ecological and social change. Can we also locate in it the possibility of hope and find ways, like twilight, of reenchanting the more than human world? Audrey recounted an evening birding in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, reflecting on moments of engagement with a nature already being lost but also with sometimes surprising signs of continuity. We thank Audrey for sharing her charming drawing of the scene which forms the image for this post in the name of Taussig’s urging that we experiment with philosophies and practices of ‘the mastery of non-mastery’ – learning to live with the imperfection and even ineptitude needed to be authentically curious and open to a world that we can never know entirely and should not seek to dominate.

Imagining alternative futures, marking the past Pt 1

originally published here

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Gay lives and heteronormative futures in Hainan, China. James’s PhD research has identified really interesting contrasts between his participants’ narratives of excitement and joy when they talk about their pasts and current experiences in terms of entering into the gay scene – and narratives of uncertainty and absence when contemplating their personal futures. James talked about the ways in which biographical narratives are dominated by anticipated futures of heterosexual family life and children, and of a strong push to reproduce filial relationships to maintain a line of ancestry and to ensure ongoing care for ageing generations. Discursive alternatives to heteronormative and patrilineal visions were almost entirely absent, and an imaginable future without them was often coined in terms of absence and even death. James gave us a really powerful account of how sexual subjectivities are constituted in relation not just to desires and relationships in the present but by temporally ordered biographies.

Readings that informed James’s analysis include: Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press; Hildebrandt, T. (2018). The One-Child Policy, Elder Care, and LGB Chinese: a Social Policy Explanation. Journal of Homosexuality; Wang, Q (2011) The Confucian Conception of Transcendence and Filial Piety. In Ruiping Fan (ed.), The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China. Springer. pp. 75–90