ABSTRACT
Grear asks how to recover public imagination against threats on the dark horizon of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. Saliently marked by climate change, the Anthropocene/Capitalocene is an ecological nemesis, resting on predatory colonial foundations and underpinning global order. The global public imagination remains shaped by a rationalizing historical discourse of ‘civilization’, Eurocentric human mastery, or ‘neoliberal economic progress’, operating and disguising domination and uneven structures between the states of the global North and the global South. Walidah Imarisha insists that the decolonization of the imagination is dangerous and subversive, for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Cornell and Seely discuss openness to being affected by others enriching imaginations by allowing for complex engagement. Transits through a range of breathing portals in bodies rendered visible to human public imagination could enable politics, law, economics, and more to embrace the material intra-action of the world as a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies. Lively agencies and non-human constituencies of meaning-making could become intrinsic to a reimagined ‘publics’. If complexity and contingency were embraced rather than feared, epistemic openness might be possible. Grear urgently concludes that awakening a resistive, fresh imagination is the fulcrum point for global systemic change.
