Rethinking Imagined Futures and Capitalist Dynamics from the Global South

Elizabeth Soer

Imagined futures are central to capitalist dynamics and shape forms of socio-political organization. This project is based on a doctoral dissertation that demonstrated how imagined futures influenced both economic policy and national imaginaries throughout South Africa’s transition from apartheid. The aim of the project is to develop a book proposal based on the dissertation, expanding on its main themes and further exploring how we can rethink and retheorize imagined futures from a Global South perspective. While the capitalist future is typically perceived as open and filled with risks and opportunities in the Global North, colonialism in the South rather closed options for the future and introduced different temporal dynamics. However, the South is not simply characterized by dependency and exploitation; it has also produced some of the most powerful alternative imagined futures to challenge capitalism’s “emptying of the future.” In this regard, the project builds upon previous research on the imagined futures and prefigurative politics of the anti-apartheid movement by better relating these imaginaries to similar movements across the Global South. Finally, it uses the insights from the dissertation to reflect on the implications for the relationship between neoliberalism and national imaginaries today.