A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown

(Hardback)

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Bringing political criticism, a variety of theoretical approaches, and the authors 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 the meaning of decryption as an epistemic framework to critically read the dynamics of power in modernity, 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, and it identifies routes of political and epistemic practice

Reviews

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 *

Author Bio

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera teaches international law and international affairs at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has served as an aide to the Colombian Congress and as a consultant to the United Nations in South America. He has lectured in law, philosophy and politics on three continents, and is the author of What if Latin America Ruled the World: How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century.