Political imaginaries of solidarity: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in Toronto

This article discusses the impact of political imaginaries in facilitating or hindering sustained solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto, Canada. It conceives of the BDS movement as a space traversed by differentiated forces, actors, practices, and subjective dispositions that coalesce around a goal and constitute solidarity relations across time. In so doing, this article highlights the interplay of the multiple political imaginaries shaping the movement's trajectory and analyses the ways these imaginaries facilitate or hinder the movement's efforts to sustain solidarity. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2019, the article analyses activists' political imaginaries as sites of contestation structured through what Mbembe terms 'entangled temporalities.' It argues that the plurality of political imaginaries animating solidarity practices among BDS activists in Toronto significantly contributed to the attenuation and scattering of the movement relative to its unity and synchronicity a decade earlier. Specifically, the article identifies the continuum between an anti-colonial Third World Internationalist imaginary and a pragmatic rights-based imaginary as central to the trajectory of the movement.