ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how performance employed as ethnography can facilitate an activism that works slowly and subtly, creating embodied and affective imaginaries with inadvertent transformative capacities. It shows how such activist imaginaries have been staged as performances of impossible futures, bringing together reality, fiction, and human and spirit worlds. Slow-motion activism can be an important intimacy politics that builds bonds of reciprocity, undoing customary divisions between global/local, private/public, real/fictional, and human/spirit worlds. The chapter discusses how the project's ‘untidy creativity' constituted a politics of intimacy through the magical labor of grief. Grief works through the maintaining of emotional bonds with the dead through cemeteries, memorials, shrines, photographs, commemorative objects, and affective rituals and performances. The chapter presents transdisciplinary debates on the activist potential of performance ethnography and offers a performance-based lens on the scholarship that theorizes the nature of contemporary politics that are enacted through ‘gently subversive, interpersonal, or creative acts’.
