ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author takes our attention away from the machinations of capital – into the realm of dreams, daydreams, and the threshold of imaginative life. The strategy of rhetoric and writing is crafted in a way as to redress the shame of being allocated a backstage in historical narrative. Elizabeth Povinelli shows neoliberal geography being drawn and re-drawn along zones of heightened future-mindedness and potentiality, and pockets of ‘fixity’ and abandonment. Recognition, legibility marking out of ‘difference’ coded as locked in tense, devoid of possibility of futures, marks a rendition of ‘late liberalism’. Anthropologies of late capitalist public cultures strongly foreground the figure of the activist. The activist usually defends a denomination of marginality – gendered, ethnic, religious – based on her own alignment among them or toward them. As new nation-states take on the task of earning legitimacy as democracies, strengthening their security, extending welfare benefits to citizens.
