ABSTRACT
Humanity is facing severe planetary and civilizational crises, interrelated and interacting at unprecedented scales. These multiple crises can be traced to the ‘globalization’ of a hegemonic mode of capitalist ‘(mal-)development’. In an increasingly volatile and indeterminate context, critical scholarship in global studies faces numerous challenges on the path to producing new knowledge of Self, Other, and the pluriversal histories of civilizations. What does it mean to be ‘critical’ in an era of mounting acute contradictions and crises, where de-globalizing social forces are going ‘global’, and where criticism runs out of steam as its objects of critique (modernity-development-globalization) fast approach a historical dead-end? In this chapter, as an answer to this question, we argue that critical scholarship now needs to be radically transformed in order to become radically transformative. An ontological recognition of the truth helps enact an action-oriented agenda to explore the potential for liberation. This starts from the liberation of critical knowledge from the imperatives of asymmetrical power relations between subject and object, Southern and Northern, human and nonhuman, etc. It is time to explore the realm of impossibility by (re)imagineering alternative lifeways beyond capital, beyond fossil fuels, and beyond commodity-oriented cumulative growth, and their associated narrow rationalities.
