After Hope: Embodied Labour, Communities of Care, and Endurance-as-hope in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature

The horizons for our expectations about what the modern, post-colonial, globalised, cosmopolitan era might have meant, have collapsed; and modes of hope as we have known it, for the future we envisioned, have passed. I am interested in examining how contemporary writers in settler-colonial states are grappling with the idea of living on ‘after hope’, and what kind of sociality emerges out of the ruins. I will posit that what emerges is hope-as-endurance. This entails people finding ways of “merely” ‘living on’, in their bodies, communities, and urban spaces. I explore hope-as-endurance as a framework, by seeking out stories ‘otherwise’ to the trajectory of late liberal narratives. These narratives of the otherwise manifest in instances of intimacy, contagion, and care that may not necessarily shift structural imbalances but create social life and networks that exceed spaces and places. Occasions for endurance-as-hope may be enabled by bodies that suffer in different ways, whether immediately or by deferral. I investigate the ways in which suffering may not be borne of extreme occasions of trauma, but may result from the everyday exclusions and abandonments of late liberalism. By suffering, enduring and caring, these bodies are positioned as otherwise in the schema of late liberalism and through this, new and alternative forms of social life are generated, thus holding great transformative potential. 

• Southern African Literature
• Literary Non-Fiction
• Urban Studies
• Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies
• Global South Studies
• Critical Race Studies
• Indigenous Studies
• New Materialism