Gestures of refusal

At a time marked by the worsening social, political, and environmental crises of late capitalism, gestures of refusal have emerged as key to envisioning new ways of being in the world — refusal as the basic condition of imagination and possibility. Our cluster outlines the radical histories and futures of refusal and explores its manifestation in diverse forms of contemporary culture. It traces the engagement with refusal as a strategy that not only disrupts the organizing logics of violence exemplified by the current moment, but also generates the speculative existence of other, more ethical lifeworlds. To this end, we perceive the modality of refusal as capaciousness, rather than as scarcity; as Mira Mattar puts it: "Every no a yes to not-this". The cluster takes up political and aesthetic expressions of refusal as critical praxis alongside thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Akwugo Emejulu, Anne Boyer, Sara Ahmed, and Bonnie Honig. From literary, visual, and cinematic genres, to performance art and other media technologies, we are interested in how refusal is written by the (always in-) process realization of what it describes.