2025-03-17
2025-03-15
Special issue (Fall 2025)
Edited by The February Journal
2025-03-15
Special issue (Spring 2025)
Edited by Isabel Bredenbröker
2025-03-15
Special issue (Spring 2024)
Edited by Shura Dogadaeva and Andrei Zavadski
2025-03-15
Special issue (Winter 2023)
Edited by Shura Dogadaeva and Andrei Zavadski
Edited by Isabel Bredenbröker
This special issue investigates the potential of ‘hope,’ which is understood here as a future-oriented political practice. It combines critical perspectives on ‘hope’ with thinking about ‘problems.’ Contributions, which range from articles over conversations in written and spoken form to artistic text and imagery, add to sharpening the analytical usefulness of these ambiguous categories.
This article examines the dual role of hope in South Africa, highlighting its power as both a transformative force and a constraining burden amid systemic state failures and persistent socio-economic inequalities. Drawing on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s rhetoric of hope as a cornerstone of national identity and resilience, it explores how hope operates politically and affectively in a society shaped by historical adversity, political disillusionment, and ongoing infrastructural crises. Focusing ethnographically on the Slovo Park informal settlement in Johannesburg, the article reveals how residents navigate government rhetoric, exposing hope’s paradoxical role—offering resilience while also fueling frustration. While state-sponsored hope has served as a tool of governance and social cohesion, its failure to deliver tangible change has led marginalized communities to redefine hope on their own terms. Engaging with literature on hope as both an aspirational force and a mechanism of control, this article argues that hope sustains belief in progress but also constrains agency when institutional failures persist. Shifting focus from state rhetoric, it highlights how marginalized communities reconstruct hope as a grassroots tool for change—transforming it into a source of agency, resilience, and self-determined action, and reclaiming its potential to drive meaningful change. This analysis contributes to broader debates on hope’s role in perpetuating systemic inequalities while also offering a means for reclaiming its power to drive meaningful change in post-apartheid South Africa.
Studies show that prison staff and prisoners believe that hope, when it is vested in a possibility of release, is essential for ensuring safe management of the prison environment. However, the way in which this significance of hope manifests within prison walls has not been thoroughly explored through research. This paper, based on unique data gathered in a prison in England and Wales, empirically examines how prison staff interpret and understand hope, particularly from the perspective of those working closely with older prisoners serving life sentences—individuals with the slimmest chances of release within their lifetime. This article argues that hope in prison is viewed as a means to ensure the safety of both prisoners and staff, maintain order, propel rehabilitation, and, in some cases, as something that life-sentenced prisoners should not be entitled to. These findings begin to shed light on hope-in-practice, raising important questions about the ethical dimensions of promoting, protecting, and nurturing hope in the context of the harshest forms of imprisonment.
This article explores the role of performance as a colonial as well as anti-colonial cultural tool. It looks at how popular performance culture is used to create colonial imaginaries about Indigenous people in the German-speaking context, and how we can understand these imaginaries in connection to the realities and repetitions of colonial violence in the present. Based on their practice of working, thinking, and writing together as artists, researchers, and cultural workers, the two authors interlace biographically situated perspectives on the presence of anti-Indigenous racism and its rootedness in German society through colonial pop cultures and white performance traditions. The article is inspired by Melgarejo Weinandt’s performative alter ego Pocahunter engaged in a performance and multimedia practice countering colonial stereotyping and anti-Indigenous racism. Connecting to realities in the postsocialist East, where Husse grew up, cultural practices around ‘Indianthusiast’ spectacles, and museum cultures connected to the colonial writer Karl May, we think about ways to seek transformative modes of repair; in doing so, we look at different cultural expressions, artistic counter-practice, possible theoretical framings, modes of activism.
Friends with benefits was the title by which we—a group of three artist friends, Samuel Fischer-Glaser and Yulia Lokshina as well as this essay’s author—were invited to an exhibition in an artist-run space in Munich, Germany. The result was a 20-minute video installation that we framed as a music video for our imaginary vegan punk band by the same name: friends with benefits (2018/2023). We used this title as a name for our collaboration addressing the entanglements and sexual connotations that go along with it and expanded it to a diverse understanding of artistic collaboration. In this essay, we deal with what it means to be artists working in capitalist times and during multiple crises. We suggest a method for artistic collaborative work in Germany today. We embrace our working and living together, maneuvering continuously through problems and conflicts that emerge with the proximity of both work and life, friendship and love. Our common artistic strategies of collaboration include methods such as reading our own or others’ writings to each other, producing videos and re-using material already produced, a procedure we call ‘arte povera,’ and adding new layers of interpretation to it, thus exercising what in German is popularly known as ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ (literally: defamiliarizating effect). By reading and speaking in different registers, we gave the video material from 2018 a 2023 sound layer, in which we used our voices to perform different ideas of authorship and artisthood. By confronting ourselves with popular and problematic positions and by embodying them, we claim this as an ‘inconvenient’ method to develop critical thinking. Some of these voices that resound lead back to Munich as a site of avantgarde cultural production of New German Cinema as well as of two legendary and controversial figures of that movement, the director and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) and the actor Klaus Kinski (1926–1991). We also present ourselves as fictional musician characters that go on tour with their latest hit: Nie wieder Tier (‘Animal Never Again’). Through this setup, we ‘hope’ to approach ‘problematic’ situations in the present and address the symptoms of a still post-war German culture and the continuities of fascism.
What is possible when a home is not home because home is love and love contains hope? Do you not have hope? Does your place of origin hang around your neck like a problem? In the wake of the war that Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine, with the full-scale invasion beginning on 24 February 2022, the author negotiates in this autoethnographic essay with performative elements what it means to see, love, lose, and have hope in your home.
Two friends and scholars talk about hope in the context of Russia, touching on Russian history of thought and the contemporary struggles for queer rights. Pasha wonders how to go on. Kolya talks about how the absence of hope opens up the possibility for political action. Together, they think about what being queer in Russia today entails—and how one can find community in the midst of dark times.
This is an audio conversation with a transcript for accessibility.
This review focuses on Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (2022) and its dissection of the system of philanthrocapitalism in the financing of museum operations. The review asserts the importance of engaging with Shaked’s analysis as a means of recognizing the complicity of museum workers with these systems of wealth accumulation. Shaked demonstrates how existing systems of philanthropic giving uphold white supremacy and imperial hegemony by concentrating wealth and decision-making power in the hands of boards of trustees. To enact liberatory museum practices and ethics, therefore, museum workers and activists must also transform funding and governance.
