Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise

'Prefigurative politics' has become a popular term for social movements' ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives; and prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised re-surfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck's 'process of reassurance' in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch's 'concrete utopia', and associating it with 'anxious' and 'catastrophic' forms of hope

Islands of relationality and resilience: the shifting stakes of the Anthropocene

In recent decades island studies scholars have done much to disrupt static notions of the island form, increasingly foregrounding how islands form part of complex networks of relations, assemblages and flows. In this paper, we shift the terms of debate more explicitly to relationality in the Anthropocene. We consider the implications and challenges that a wider set of debates, particularly surrounding island ‘resilience’, concerning the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities pose for island studies

Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion