Unfamiliar families and disturbing climate futures

Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes

Governmentality at the limits of the international: African politics and Foucauldian theory

AbstractThe ability of International Relations theory to ‘travel well’ to other parts of the world has become one of the central questions within the discipline. This article argues that a Foucauldian-derived ‘analytics of government’ framework has particular advantages in overcoming some of the difficulties IR theory has faced abroad. These advantages include a methodological focus on specific practices of power at their point of application; attention to similarities between practices of power that cut across perceived binaries such as the domestic and international, and public and private; and an illumination of the ways in which practices of freedom are combined and interrelate with forms of coercion and violence. This argument is illustrated in the context of debates about the applicability of Foucauldian theory to African politics, through examples drawn from Bayart's work on globalisation, the power of development partnerships, and violence and civil war. It argues that deploying governmentality as an analytical framework, rather than seeing it as a specifically neoliberal form of power relation, can not only facilitate the application of IR theory outside Europe and North America but can also help develop a broader perspective on genuinely world politics.</jats:p

Interrogating Michel Foucault’s counter-conduct: theorising the subjects and practices of resistance in global politics

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise: visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty ad economic exploitation, such as protesting, agitating and occupying have received increased analytical attention in the past decade. This special issue provides much needed systematic attention to less visible practices of resistance or those not manifested in expressly political registers. It focuses on attempts to inventively modify, resist or escape the ways in which we are governed by interrogating critically the politics and ethics of resistance to ‘power that conducts’, expressed through Foucault’s notion of ‘counter- conduct.’ The contributions first, theoretically interrogate, develop, and refine the concept of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, offering a major statement its importance for both the study of resistance and also its place in Foucault’s work. Second, they provide inter/multi-disciplinary empirical investigations of counter-conduct in numerous thematic areas and spaces of global politics. Third, they explicitly reflect on variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power. Finally, the special issue concertedly considers issues of methodology and method emerging from the study of counter-conduct and how these also recalibrate the study of governing power itself

Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

From Wiley via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2020-12-15, rev-recd 2021-06-22, accepted 2021-06-24, pub-electronic 2021-07-21Article version: VoRPublication status: PublishedAbstract: Dominant and insurgent socio‐climatic imaginaries struggle for influence over how the future is envisioned. Africanfuturist imaginaries have huge potential to unsettle racialised and gendered climate narratives. In this article I use Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Who Fears Death in order to challenge mainstream climate imaginaries and to imagine new forms of being and becoming in the context of climate change. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, as well as black feminist traditions of imagining new genres of the human, I argue that Okorafor’s “wild necropolitics” illuminates how the forces of “wild nature” have become central features of the deployment of the means of destroying life, especially in the context of climate change. By examining the motifs of change, violence, wilderness and narration, I argue that reading and writing different stories about alternative climate futures is essential to the process of finding new ways of being and becoming human