The call for papers for the eleventh edition of post(s) is now open. In this issue, we will receive academic essays analyzing the issues raised by Giulianna Zambrano (Universidad San Francisco de Quito). In keeping with our interest in creative writing, we also invite visual essays and performative writings that present experimental and creative modes of knowledge production.

This call will be open until Juanuary 15, 2024. All submissions will be received through the OJS platform. For more details on the publication process, download our guide for authors.

"My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so we’ve always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we’ll be forever putting off the world’s demise.” Ailton Krenak

“What sea of dark reflections, of luminous abysses, of cosmic foams will there be on the other side of the horizon, in the twilight?” Cristina Rivera Garza

The narratives of the end of the world and the great catastrophe are articulated, above all, from the human perspective. In them, we speculate about our destiny to the detriment of other surrounding relations and temporalities. The invocation of the hecatomb responds to a mode of attention that shapes discourse, optics, temporality, or intention. As Ailton Krenak (2020) argues,  those who announce it sometimes succeed in discouraging the power of life and the joy that sustains various, coexisting, world-making projects.

The next issue of post(s) invites us to think about the thresholds and juxtapositions between the destruction and construction of space, between the devastation and persistence of matter and life as terrains of reflexive, activist, and creative power. Ursula K. Le Guin said that to find a new world, one must first have lost one; the very possibility of constructing another imaginary world arises from the rubble of the previous one, at that edge (1989, p. 48). Following this idea, we propose to think about what emerges in the ruins and devastated contemporary landscapes that can question the utopias and hopes that deny them as remnants of the destruction of progress and certain models of development. Likewise, we are interested in reflections and quests that oppose the reactionary and nostalgic tendency that romanticizes them through the exploration of modes and poetics of attention to “multiply worlds, [instead] of reducing them to our own” as a first condition in the construction of more habitable presents (Despret, 2022, pp. 35-6). We seek contributions that participate in this discussion through the exploration of matter, form, discourses, history, and representation of ruins and disaster scenarios, of the collapse of languages, models, and structures as they relate to discussions of current environmental, political, and social emergence.

From the discourse of modern progress and development, devastated or ruined global landscapes have been incorporated as surmountable scenarios or as preservable spaces to the extent that they account for a history that is presented as memorable (Gordillo 2014, Dillion 2011). This has often made it easier to articulate narratives about the end than to approach that which materializes, even if only as a brief spark, as a potency of life in the ruinous, the rubble, the debris, or the sediment.

Therefore, in this issue we think of contemporary ruins and landscapes of devastation as “active landscapes” (Tsing, 2020) in which it is possible to read the scope of destruction, but also to perceive a series of multi-species exchanges in which collaborative subsistence, indeterminate encounters, political imagination, practices of resistance, and memory account for the vital and affective power that opens the way to other world projects that require our attention. We seek curious approaches to observing, detecting, and listening to world-making projects where it would seem unthinkable.

We understand catastrophe as a disturbing event of transformative power that motivates us to ask ourselves about the vitality and desire that bubbles or that is invigorated in the face of a disturbance that is initially read as discomfort (Rolnik, 2019). We wonder about an approach to the world from the wounds, the cracks, the traces, the sediments of destruction, the untamed, and the wild in critical relation to the present that we live in and the projects that have made it possible.

Between models that collapse and other attempts at life that are being gestated or seek ways to sustain themselves, between that which appears as a horizon of possibility and coexists in profound dialogue with that which ceases or is about to cease to be, we ask ourselves:

What potential for life exists in scenarios of devastation?

What possible worlds and collaborations can be glimpsed in the rubble and ruins of past endeavors but also of those that never came to be or were abandoned in their attempt?

What possible archaeology does our political imagination need to respond to the force of what germinates, to the power of the unfinished and indeterminate in the midst of catastrophe?

What stories or sensitive frameworks make possible a revelatory thought and action of germinal potency and unsubmissive memory in the face of destruction?

What kind of micropolitical exercises of documenting, caring, listening, writing, and performing can be undertaken to address the power of the ruinous, the broken (flowers, 2021), the unfinished, and the indeterminate?

How can we approach the untamed regions in the face of the temporality of progress and capital that account for other quests for subsistence and collaboration in the face of precariousness (Tsing)?

We call on those who seek in these scenarios the answers to a posthumous condition, defined by Marina Garcés as "the imposition of a narrative, unique and linear, of the irreversible destruction of our conditions of life" (2017:22). With the intention of contributing to the need to imagine and articulate cohabitational futures in which we want to live, this issue follows the listening path proposed by Despret:

It is not to forget that if the earth creaks and squeaks, it also sings. It is also not to  forget that these songs are disappearing, but that they will disappear even more if we do not pay attention to them. And  that with them will disappear multiple ways of inhabiting the Earth, inventions of  life, compositions, melodic scores, delicate  appropriations, ways of being and importances. (2021:159)

Bibliography

Benjamin, W. (2008). Ensayos escogidos. Ediciones Coyoacán.
Despret, V. (2022). Habitar como un pájaro. Modos de hacer y de pensar los territorios. Editorial Cactus.
Dillon, B. (Ed). (2011). Ruins. The MIT Press.
flores, v. (2021). Romper el corazón del mundo. Modos fugitivos de hacer teoría. Con tinta me tienes. 
Garcés, M. (2017). Nueva ilustración radical. Anagrama. 
Gordillo, G. (2014). Rubble. The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press.
Krenak, A. (2020). Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. Companhia das letras.
Le Guin, Ursula. (1989). Dancing at the Edge of the World. Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove Press.
Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2018). Un mundo ch'ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Tinta Limón.
Rivera Garza, C. (2020). Autobiografía del algodón. Penguin Random House.
Rolnik, S. (2019). Las esferas de la insurrección. Tinta Limón.
Tsing, A. (2021). La seta del fin del mundo. Capitán Swing.

About our guest editor

Giulianna Zambrano Murillo (Quito, 1984) is a professor-researcher at USFQ, Ecuador. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work addresses the practices of liberation, resistance, memory, and justice in writing and poetics in contexts of violence, catastrophes, and political repression. She also researches the connections between human rights and literature, especially the right to narrate. She is the creator of "Buscamos en el silencio de las cosas," a project that explores the poetics of post-catastrophe objects as an exercise in collective memory and mourning. Currently, she directs Crónicas al borde, a non-fiction and sonic interventions podcast that combines narrative and creative sound to document life stories on the brink of transformation and their connection to contemporary social and human rights debates.