Precarity: Poetic and Aesthetic Explorations

The Special Forum establishes as an integral part of “critical global studies” the effort to interrogate how plural poetic and aesthetic registers enable distinct analyses of the establishment, harms and survivances of “the international” and “the global.” The authors’ reconstructive moves refuse the occlusion of histories of colonialism and slavery, surfacing as central to precarity their practices of extraction, land dispossession, and dehumanization, that Eurocentric accounts of precarity as a contemporary sociological problem of post-Fordist political economy occlude. At the same time, the contributors centre the practices of endurance, survival and evasion of precarious populations. Supplementing, and at times destabilizing, social scientific modes of analysis, aesthetic-poetic registers centre the genres, practices and artistic production generated in the midst of precarity. The complex analytics that aesthetics and poetics offer the examination of precarity resist the abstraction, abjection, and universalization of precarious life and its obverse, the entrenchment as normative of Euro-Western, liberal subjectivities. In this way, the approaches espoused in this Special Forum pluralize the modes of seeing, sensing, and knowing precarity, through a poetic-aesthetic sensibility that attends to the specificity of precarious lives as lived.