Description
While there has been burgeoning engagement with emotions in global politics, this has not led to a recognition of emotional relations beyond the state and human. Is political agency the sole province of human beings? Or can trees, birds and lakes tell their own stories and enact another politics? The uncritical acceptance of humans as the only wise (if wayward) protagonists of global politics is rooted in colonialism and its enduring legacies in contemporary discourses of extinction, conservation, and rewilding. What stories and sites of affective politics go missing in the historical treatment of humans as the sole protagonists of global politics? Reading fictional accounts of emotional relations and recovering situated stories of more-than-human flourishing; including migrations of endangered bird-species and the role of trees as witnesses and keepers of relations to place for displaced/dispossessed populations, this paper presses closer to the affective labour of more-than-human protagonists in repairing relational attachments to make a case for an affective politics which recognises more-than-human dreamworlds and forms of mutualism which emerge even in the wake of loss. Transcending mainstream approaches, this paper calls for paying attention to the affective entanglements between more-than-human agents in rebuilding and reimagining sociopolitical worlds amid widespread destruction, for cultivating an alternative politics of flourishing.
