Bringing political criticism, a variety of theoretical approaches, an understanding of history, and the author’s concrete experiences together, this book calls for a more courageous and hopeful imagination in dark times.
Bringing political criticism, a variety of theoretical approaches, and the author’s concrete experiences together, this book offers a political definition of hope as a utopian signifier, rooted in concrete processes of historical differentiation. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera addresses the problem of current limitations to the exercise of political imagination which severely contain, encrypt, and obscure our vision of social alternatives and normative possibilities? While grounding ethical and political stances on liberation philosophy and the anthropology of visual systems, A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown engages in dialogue with theories of encryption, a-legality, and the critique of anthropological absolutism coming from decolonial and ecological approaches. It allows us to understand 'decryption' as reversing encrypting linguistic and spatial processes in modernity, and proposes a new approach called 'fantastic critique' to reinvent the dynamics of power, judgement, time and the imagination, based on historical, literary, and philosophical examples. This book recovers and reimagines principles of hope and courage as republican, ethical virtues of revelation of what is figured and made in movement together, for practical action.
"In this elegantly written and richly referenced analysis, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera starts with “how to change change itself?” to embark the readers in a poetic and philosophic journey reimagining hope and a decolonial future." - Françoise Vergès, University College London, UK
"Three cheers for this joyful, highly original engagement with our dark times; for its poetic ability to see beauty amid the wreckage; and perhaps most of all for its intellectual daring -- all in the service of precious, stubborn hope." - Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh, USA
