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

“概述可能是过于正式的描述。我凭直觉工作，并将遵循文件或我的直觉，直到项目出现。我想部分原因是我接触档案材料的方式。我和他们有很深的接触。”- Saidiya Hartman（2018）如果想象是关于思想的，那么它也是关于感觉的。按照哈特曼的方法，我想分析不同的情感寄存器，想象的召唤，特别是它的文件在文化生产的非洲，加勒比海和亚洲的积极分子形成在英国作为一种手段，抵制取消抵押品赎回权的可能性强加给他们的世界的治理结构。我也想与档案相遇，并被档案引导，拒绝僵化的学科框架所强加的限制。当代的时刻是由对居住世界的强制限制的愤怒所定义的。活动家的疲劳和绝望是普遍的;那些投资于正义的人被迫重新思考方法，战略，并使其适应统治当代生活的无数压迫性话语和政权。我的研究迫切需要通过展示档案如何产生抵抗的动力来对抗这种疲劳。我的研究试图诊断对结构性暴力的悲观情绪反应，不是通过假设乐观主义作为解决方案，而是通过询问档案如何帮助我们应对和重新定位悲观主义？它为我们提供了什么，以及它如何为我们对未来的愿景提供信息？通过研究想象力如何成为提醒我们为什么要奋斗的生成源，我想补充那些寻求加强行动主义形成的文学作品。我对探索和绘制详细描述政治行动历史的档案的兴趣源于我自己对英国女权主义和反种族主义活动和学术遗产的投资。作为一个将时间和精力投入到草根运动中的人，我感兴趣的是，受试者如何设想让世界成为一个适合种族化、性别化资本结构底层的人居住的空间。

'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.