If the World Is a Family, What Kind of Family Could It Be? Afterword to the Foreword by Susan Marks

In this Afterword to Marks’ thoughtful provocation, I offer alternative, emancipatory imaginings and practices of kinship that offer life-sustaining relational connections between people(s) as well as between humans and all other forms of life. To this end, I explore two such assemblages. The first of these was developed during the Cold War years as a ‘third way’ to organize global relations cooperatively, emerging from the early efforts of post-colonial states to create an anti-imperial world order. The second is the more recent, still precarious, emergence of queer kinship communities from their many ‘closets’. I conclude that these cooperative and queer kinship imaginaries offer hope that it may yet be possible to reconfigure the imperial system of nation-state-generated relational loyalties, based on the treacherous metaphors of ‘traditional’ family forms that endanger us all, including the planet itself.