Remaking the World: The uses of the Imagination in Feminist and Anti-Racist Organising and Archives

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'Outlining may be too formal a description. I work intuitively and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges.... I think partly it's because of the way I engage with archival material. I have a deep encounter with them.' - Saidiya Hartman (2018) If the imagination is about thought, it is also about feeling. Following Hartman's approach, I want to analyse the different affective registers that imagining conjures, specifically its documentation in the cultural production of African, Carribean and Asian activist formations in the UK as a means of resisting the foreclosure of possibility forced upon them by the world's governing structures. I too want to encounter and be led by the archive, refusing the limits imposed by rigid disciplinary frames.The contemporary moment is defined by an exasperation with the enforced limits of the world as inhabited. Activist fatigue and despair is rife; those invested in justice are being forced to rethink methods, strategies and adapt them to the myriad of oppressive discourses and regimes that govern contemporary life. My research feels urgent as a means of combating this fatigue by demonstrating how the archive can engender the impetus to resist. My research attempts to diagnose pessimistic affective responses to structural violence, not by positing optimism as the solution but by asking how can the archive help us respond to and repurpose pessimism? What does it offer us and how it can inform our visions for the future? By examining how the imagination can be a generative source that reminds us why we struggle, I want to add to literature that seeks to strengthen activist formations. My interests in exploring and mapping archives detailing histories of political action stems from my own investment in the legacy of feminist and anti-racist activism and scholarship in the UK. As someone who dedicates time and energy to grassroots movements, I am interested in how subjects conceive of making the world an inhabitable space for those on the underside of racialised, gendered capital structures.