Sunday, 24 June 2018
2:30 – 4:30 pm
PANEL
Desire
Maria do Mar Castro Varela (Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work, Alice Salomon University, Berlin)
Antonio Y. Vázquez Arroyo (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark)
Françoise Vergès (Chair of Global South(s), Collège d'études mondiales, Paris)
Moderation: Rahul Rao (Senior Lecturer in Politics, SOAS University of London)
The concept of hauntology (a term coined by Jaques Derrida) describes the sense of nostalgia for a future that never arrives and is thus lost. This failure of the future is not defeatism or cynicism, but yearning for that which is perpetually deferred, a nostalgia for the yet to be. To imagine the unimaginable and hope in the face of hopelessness is precisely the task of utopias, a melancholia for that which is not-yet. In the face of unfulfilled desires that haunt the postcolonial world, how are we to overcome the acute paralysis of will and sheer lack of vision, so that we may once again aspire towards nondominant futures?