Description
A politics of refusal is increasingly articulated as an alternative response to the disasters of modernity that beset global politics. Rather than seeking inclusion into racist, colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal systems, some global actors seek to live otherwise outside those structures. This paper explores the affirmative dimension of a feminist politics of refusal articulated by Bonnie Honig as a ‘return to the city’ after a period of fugitivity. The paper has three parts. First, I explore Honig’s conception of refusal ‘as an arc and not an act’ (Honig 2021, 103), with particular emphasis on the obligation to return to everyday life that completes her agonistic formulation. Second, I deepen Honig’s reflections on this return via Gillian Rose’s meditations on faith, failure and uncertainty in the ‘third city’ of everyday politics. Third, I trouble the notion of a return via literatures on pluriversality and Indigenous refusal, asking who has an obligation to return and suggesting that agonistic refusal can be practiced by building elsewhere in the context of entangled worlds.
