Imagining between possible and realized: Creative world-making as politically situated knowledge production

Dragos Simandan’s (2019) article, ‘Revisiting Positionality and the Thesis of Situated Knowledge’, is an ambitious attempt to consolidate a theory for geographers engaging feminist epistemologies on the partiality, situatedness and politics of knowledge. A key problematic in Simandan’s article is the ‘gap’, or more specifically, the series of ‘gaps’ – the lapses or absences – in how and what we know about and of the world. To him, ‘one’s knowledge is inevitably incomplete and situated because information about the world always reaches us through a channel that is constituted by four epistemic gaps’ (Simandan, 2019: 129). He names these as the gaps between ‘possible worlds vs. realized world’, ‘realized world versus witnessed situation’, ‘witnessed situation versus remember situation’ and ‘remembered situation versus confessed situation’ (Simandan, 2019: 129). For Simandan, these gaps lead to the ‘cumulative and unavoidable loss of (potential) knowledge’, and thus, for him, we must be attuned to these gaps in order to expand our understandings of the partiality of knowledge beyond what he calls ‘simply social difference’ (Simandan, 2019: 130–131, my emphasis). In what follows, I dwell on the politics of his deployment of ‘simply’, and, in so doing, hope to trouble especially the first gap that he identifies between ‘possible worlds’, denoted in plural, and the ‘realized world’, denoted as singular. Closer and more careful attunement to ‘simply social difference’, I note, forces us to confront the politics of such a singularized worldview of a realized world and makes room for imagined worlds alongside the possible and the realized in his formulation. I point to marginalized people’s creative engagements with social differentiation as political forms of world-making that exist between and alongside the possible and the realized.

Given the focus of Simandan’s anchor article, I would be remiss if I don’t begin with an acknowledgment of my own situatedness as a commentator and scholar. I am an urban social geographer who currently teaches in an interdisciplinary unit at the University of British Columbia called the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ Institute). My research has focused on organizing efforts for and by racial, migrant and sexual communities in the realms of sexual health, social services and education. My approach is informed and energized by my own intersecting locations and lived experiences as a queer Filipino Canadian academic raised in a working-class, first-generation, immigrant family. I do this work – and most of my other works – in unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territories in the so-called Vancouver. These locations inform my sense of my ethical and political responsibility to the communities that I belong to and to the places in which I work.

My research and teaching owe a great debt of gratitude to critical race, queer of colour and intersectional feminist thinkers within and beyond geography. When engaging the question of positionality and situatedness, I consider as foundational as Donna Haraway’s theories the works of women of colour feminists, including the early collections This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Alzaldua, 1981) and Making Face, Making Soul (Anzaldua, 1990). Before the term ‘situated knowledges’, thinkers involved in these collections – among them, the Combahee River Collective, Cherrie Moraga, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Barbara Christian and others – offered theorizations of the world derived from lived, felt and indeed enfleshed perspectives. It is alongside these scholars, uncited in the anchor article, that I read Simandan’s (2019) interventions. Significantly, as Haraway is canonized early on in the article as ‘one of the basic epistemological blocks underpinning feminist and queer scholarship’, knowledge by Black and Chicanx feminists is made to recede from view.

Simandan and I thus arrived at this juncture of thinking about situated knowledges from different – and differentiated – routes, a point not unrelated to the fact that we also occupy different embodiments and positionings in the world. These differences influence how we proceed with thinking about situated knowledges. Of course, our differences do not naturally lead to complete divergence in how we approach situated knowledges. We overlap, for example, in our shared commitment to approaching situatedness beyond the common individualistic confessional mode critiqued by Gillian Rose (1997). Perhaps this is what Simandan is getting at when he articulates his desire to partiality beyond ‘simply social difference’, though, of course, social differentiations are far from simple, especially for those who embody, in interlocking ways, the complex and violent minefields of marginalizations. As Simandan and I have different relationships to such minefields, my reaction to reading ‘simply’ appended to ‘social difference’ was no doubt affected by my recognition of such difference.

Throughout the text, Simandan makes use of authoritative and universalizing phrasing to make claims about the gaps he identifies as crucial to shaping our capacity to know. On the notion of possible worlds, he notes that we often don’t pay attention to and/or are unable to grasp the implications of multiple could-have-been worlds. From this, Simandan argues that, since the world could have turned out in a multitude of different ways, we tend to work with ‘a probabilistic, or stochastic account of how things happen’ (2019: 133). Tinged with statistical language that is disconcerting for its seeming neutrality, the language of probabilism and stochasticism leans a bit too apolitical, with the perhaps unintended consequence of smuggling in randomness and chance as crucial factors in the making of what Simandan terms the ‘realized world’, in the singular. And yet, how the world as we know and live it (differently, depending on our different social locations) came to exist is the cumulative effect of power relations, systems, institutions, struggles and discourses, with material consequences.

I take Simandan’s point that we have much to learn from possible worlds, but I want to caution against the idea that we have to choose between possible and realized. For many of us who occupy marginalized subject positions, navigating the realized world also necessarily entails imagining possible other worlds. The arts is one such set of world-making practices. As Muñoz (1999) reminds us, in his work on queer of colour practices of disidentification, creative practices by marginalized people exemplify not only how they tarry with realized political worlds of marginalization, but also how they enact different worlds through creativity, imagination and play. In other words, in their speculative practices, they engage not only the here and now, but also the possibilities of what could have been and what still could be (c.f. Muñoz, 2009).

Let me pursue this point further through discussion of the work of Kent Monkman, a Cree/Irish artist and member of the Fish River Band in the so-called Northern Manitoba. In general, Monkman is known for producing artistic works that mess directly with the aesthetics of Canadian settler colonial nationalism, foregrounding violence against and displacement of Indigenous people as foundational to the making of the Canadian nation. In his 2017 painting titled, The Scream, Monkman depicts the forceful removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities. Monkman’s title is a call out to the oft-canonized modern art piece by Edvard Munch but departs from it with its vivid and political portrayal of racial, religious and settler colonial violence against Indigenous people. Arguably realist in aesthetic, at least at surface glance, the ‘scream’ in the title is in full display in the contorted faces and bodies of Indigenous women as they resisted the kidnapping of their children by priests, nuns and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Monkman’s The Scream intervenes against common representations of Canadian nation-building as innocent and settled. At its heart is the insistence that the realized world of Canada, produced through exalted narrations of nation (c.f. Razack, 2002; Thobani, 2007), is one produced not stochastically or probabilistically but through calculated practices of imposition, dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies. In addition, Monkman’s The Scream also forces us to reconsider the staid binary in Simandan’s article between ‘realized’ and ‘possible’. In The Scream, we are drawn to aesthetic imagination as a practice of world-making alongside the ‘realized’ and the ‘possible’. As our eyes are drawn to the foregrounded violence of settler colonial abduction, we also see in the background three figures running away from the violence. Turned away from the viewer, these fugitive figures signal not only the possibility but indeed the reality of worlds existing apart from the singularized vision of total Indigenous annihilation characteristic of settler colonialism (c.f. Wolfe, 2006). In the end, we do not know what worlds these three figures brought into being, but they nevertheless force us to confront the fact that the violence of settler colonialism was never complete; its desire for total displacement and replacement unrealized; and thus that Canada as a settler colonial geography is not the only realized world that exists. Other worlds, in many ways strategically invisible to others’ eyes, exist in the absence of such total colonial annihilation, energized and revivified by legal and political orders nurtured by Indigenous people in the face of the settler colonial onslaught (Daigle, 2016; Simpson, 2017). Indeed, that Kwagiulth geographer Sarah Hunt (2014) can refer to the practice of ‘dancing between worlds’ as a practice of shuttling between formal academic and Indigenous knowledge spaces attests to the very multiplicity and co-existence of multiple realized worlds.

In other artistic works by Kent Monkman, we see even starker depictions of the blurry lines between realized and possible worlds. Engaging traditions of Western landscape painting, ones that tend to hide the labour and violence necessary for the making of romanticized and tamed (and emptied) images of landscape (Mackey, 2000; Mitchell, 2000), Monkman foregrounds agentive depictions of Indigeneity in the landscape to unsettle the settler colonial and racial aesthetics of landscape art. In the 2003 painting, Artist and Model, Monkman plays with the role of artistic representation in the production of ideas about the real itself. In the painting, Monkman foregrounds two figures in entangled representational relation: Miss Chief, Monkman’s drag alter ego, painting a naked white subject strung onto a tree with arrows piercing through his bloodied naked body. The erotic, sexual and violent iconographies in Artist and Model reverse the usual relations of domination in settler colonialism, with Miss Chief herself in the powerful role of representing the world as the titular artist. The word ‘model’ is deployed polysemically in the title, playing with the twin ideas of model-as-normative (as in whiteness shaping the world in its image and likeness) and model-as-represented-object (as in the white body being depicted by Miss Chief in her art). On the space of the canvas, Monkman brings into imagined being a reversed world that foregrounds a fantasy of different geographies of social difference.

Reading Monkman’s artwork as part of a broader practice of speculative world-making by marginalized people that includes speculative fiction and fantasy film enables us to move beyond the binarization of possible and realized. Such imaginative and aesthetic practices create worlds that exist somewhere alongside or even in a bridge space between the real and the not-real. These world-making practices function partly as critique, naming how the world that they live is one produced through social differentiation and inequality, and also as an articulation of a different, more ideal world, one that moves beyond the here and now in ways that are more just. Theorizing positionality and situated knowledge through careful attention to these practices enables the possibility of a more capacious, and an even more politically attuned, approach to how we might conceptualize what it means to know the world.