Beyond the critical: reinventing the radical imagination in transformative development and global(ization) studies

摘要

Evidence is mounting of severe planetary and civilizational crises, interrelated and mutually constitutive of one another at unprecedented scales caused by the 'globalization' of a hegemonic mode of civilizational '(mal-)development.' Critical scholarship in both Development and Global(ization) Studies faces numerous challenges. In this article, we argue that critical scholarship needs to be radically transformed to become radically transformative. This means that we need to critically revisit what identifies both fields as "critical", at the meta-theoretical level, as a joint transformative project, fundamentally independent of capital's discursive lexicons and historical logics. An ontological recognition of the truth and a new dialectic of the truth and the real help enact an action-oriented agenda to explore the potentials for liberation. It is now time to bravely explore the realm of impossibility by re/imagineering alternative lifeways beyond capital, beyond fossil fuel, and beyond commodity-oriented cumulative growth and their associated narrow rationalities.