Speculative communities : designing contact zones in times of eco-eco crisis

The chapter premises on Arturo Escobar’s observation in his "Designs for the Pluriverse" (2017) that the recent global ecological and economic crisis is deeply rooted in “the crisis of a particular world or set of world-making practices, the dominant form of Euro-modernity” (loc. 1662). Therefore, it is crucial to rearticulate the global warming not only as a multipronged capitalist crisis but also as a crisis within modernity, and its hegemony of modernity’s one-world ontology. As the author posits, one important way to enact nondualist, relational worlds as multiple onto-epistemic formations, while highlighting their internal and external interconnectedness is a new understanding of contact zones, introduced by a linguist Mary Louis Pratt in the early 1990s. Looking for an answer to the question of how to rearticulate the colonial difference and power relations which are inherent to the concept, Sugiera has recourse to a range of methodological approaches: the alter-politics concept of the Australian anthropologist born in Beirut Ghassan Hage, the alter-anthropology of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and the speculative concept of ecology of knowledges of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos who in his "Epistemologies of the South" (2014) asks a pertinent question “whether it is possible to know by creating solidarity” (p. 156)? For Santos left the question largely unanswered, Sugiera seeks help in the Maria Puig della Bellacasa’s idea of caring ("Matters of Care", 2017) which she defines as a transformative ethos which involves affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence; „a speculative affective mode that encourages intervention in what things could be” (p. 66). This allows Sugiera to offer a new concept of speculative contact zones, and to in order to demonstrate the concept in action, she takes a closer look at a new wave of speculative fiction which deal with an imagined future of climatic change and a deep-economic crisis, particularly Kim Stanley Robinson’s "New York 2140" (2017). The novel, set in lower Manhattan flooded by two major rises in seawater level, serves here as an example of a truly experimental zone, a hotbed of new designs for societal transition that dare to imagine a world beyond capitalist neoliberal economy.