• Reference: PID2023-147494NB-I00
• Funded by: Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Investigation Agency, and the FEDER
• Principal Investigator: Cristina María Gámez Fernández
• Duration: 1/9/2024 - 31/8/2028
• Researchers: 
  • Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego (UMA)
  • Mar Gallego Durán (UHU)
  • Leonor María Martínez Serrano (UCO)
  • Susana Nicolás Román (UAL)
  • María Porras Sánchez (UCM)
  • Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo (US)

Description

The aim of this research project is to investigate the ideological and aesthetic patterns underlying representations of the complex nature of hope (Bloch 1986; Howard 2019; Rawls 2003; Stockdale 2021, among others) in acts of resistance (Butler 2004, 2009; Bracke 2016; Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016) to the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, 2016; Patel and Moore 2017) in a corpus of 21st-century literary narratives in English. This analysis will be carried out in the critical context of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, 2016; Patel and Moore 2017) as an alternative to the Anthropocene. Drawing on Daniel Hartleys (2016) five limitations of the term Anthropocene as a suitable description of this phenomenon, this project is theoretically grounded instead in the Capitalocene as a more effective conceptualization to sustain its theoretical framework and its subsequent analysis of 21st-century representations of hope in resistance against the realities emerging from its consequences. The five reasons adduced by Hartley rivet the need of historically- and culturally-specific approaches to such analyses.

Therefore, substantiated by these theoretical assumptions, this project will examine a corpus of 21st-century specific textual modalities in English with representations of acts of resistance, rather than resilience, to various realities in which hope is posited ambivalently. Hope cannot articulate the representation in contemporary narratives of legitimate wishes to participate in what Lauren Berlant called “the good life” (2011) only. It can also subvert those in myriad alternative conditions of possibility in its drive to avoid the consequences of the dynamics of capitalist logics that can range from establishing disadvantageous alliances for certain groups to make profit of them for exploitative reasons, occurrences of necroempowerment in what Sayak Valencia (2010) labels “gore capitalism,” to instances of collective suicide or suicide acts of terrorism. This research proposal intends to locate and describe the complex nature of hope inherent in resistance behaviors with the aim to determine possible emergent patterns of relationality in those ambivalent enactments of hope, both in the ideological and aesthetic dimensions of such “wonderful, messy tales” making sense of “possibilities for getting on now, as well as in deep earth history” (Haraway 2016, 44).