Institutions and Imaginaries

In this chapter, in order to build on the political participation I described in Chapters 1 and 2, I consider the deeper demands of solidarity. Participation in coalitional action is necessary but not sufficient for a robust ethics that learns from decolonial movements. My inquiry here is partially inspired by Hannah Arendt's theorisation of ‘the fleeting moment of action’ that characterises a ‘space of appearance’, which ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being’. What is at stake in this inquiry is how an ethical turn could gain a sustained political edge. For this to happen, actors need to maintain political action beyond its initial appearance – not participating in a single march but making political responsibility a larger part of their lives, well beyond the start of the movement. Put differently, participation needs to be more than what Ortega has called ‘political excursions’, meaning ‘a type of politically correct tourism – fleeting moments of experimenting with being political while not really being committed to effecting change’. If we are to think of responsibility in terms of our most central commitments, then we must address the shift from coalitions to communities, from contacts to relations, in Glissant's terms. The oppositional action of demanding a right to opacity is important, but it says little about the ‘meanwhile’ present between connected instances of direct action. ‘[P]olitical resistance often begins in a meanwhile’, novelist and artist John Berger writes. Griffin's concept of ‘secondary duties’ speaks to this meanwhile, as does Lugones's concept of ‘complex communication’. Lugones's starting point – not opposition but communication – introduces a sense of ‘relational identity’ that I will expand on in this chapter. It is in living out a relational identity that one moves from participation to solidarity.

In regard to the question of relational identity, we can immediately raise four concerns. The first is that a focus on the level of the individual and their identity presupposes a neoliberal subject of unlimited growth and change. Yet even when we are discussing how global forces and movements affect cultures, actual interactions always occur on the level of individuals. As the anthropologist Richard Price puts it in an essay on creolisation in the Caribbean, ‘Human beings meet and engage one another; cultures do not. Individuals who claim multiple identities interact with one another; ethnicities do not.’