Description
For a discipline birthed through wars, it is not surprising that International Relations (IR) has been seeped in the pursuit of survival: of states, structures and systems. While the ‘rational’ focus on survival is well-documented within the discipline’s (his)story, the ‘emotional’ effects, artefacts and subjects of such survival go missing. If the story of IR is indeed a story about survival, where are the survivors? The disciplinary fixation on ‘survival’ pivots itself around prescribing reliable methods against unreliable threats, thereby foreclosing any alternative conceptualizations of doing IR. How can thinkers of global politics join the task of bringing forth unpredictable stories of human survival, in a discipline marked by its affinity for predictability? In the pursuit of emotional stories of humans who can only bring themselves to bear as fragmentated and incomplete, this research turns towards the literary genre of magical realism, to offer an emotional rearticulation of survival that includes survivors’ stories: of humans who magically transform an unbearably rational world by casting emotional spells to survive it. By gleaning magical methods of human survival in the work of magical realist fiction authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie and Isabel Allende, this paper posits an emotional turn away from predictable outcomes to magical ones in global politics.
