10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 s usaN a rNdt P(r)oEthics: Imaginary In(ter)vention, FutureS, and the Agency of Dream*Hopes 1 Literature & Agencies Literature pleases and entertains, yet it is under no obligation to be always accommodating; it also unsettles, shocks and startles, with the potential to share ideas and moralities In doing so, literature lives in, and as, discourse, so much so that there is no literature beyond discourse Fictional characters, their (speech) acts, conflicts, and visions do not spring from a vacuum; rather, they emerge from spaces in time - that is, historical contexts - and respective situated knowledges and values Foucault proclaims the “death of the author ” 1 And yet, no author is ever an utterly powerless and mindless marionette of the discourse of her*his space*time Discourses have agency, but so do authors, which they practice by, for instance, addressing or silencing certain societal norm(alities) and respective ideas That is why authors, despite their “death,” are also alive and conscious beyond what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious ” Roland Barthes, too, argues that “the author is dead”: The text lives in reading, and since no re-readings of a text are ever identical, meaning-making and hence textuality is an unstable process Moreover, while the reader has more than (just) a little say in what s*he can see in a text, and what not, all readings are positioned within specific power constellations and respectively coded knowledges and moralities “All things are subject to interpretation,” as Nietzsche puts it, “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth ” 2 Therefore, neither the reader nor the given textual realms exist beyond the discourse that encompasses both Hermeneutic circle meets butterfly effect: So long as texts and the readings thereof 1 Cf Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? ,” Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 62 (1969), 73-104 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (London: CUP, 1982), 16 240 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 continue to change, contexts do, too Contexts change texts change readings change contexts change … This circle hosts a vibrant polylogue between discourse, reader, and author as well as all respective contexts Being an agent within that polylogue, the author is not dead, but rather a ghost that keeps haunting the scenery Thus tuned, literature triggers change by holding steadfast to its principle of keeping itself and humans (as well as their moralities and knowledges) in motion Literature does not merely mirror the conundrum of being human; it lives right in the thick of it Literature does not simply represent social processes; it shapes them as well Narrations range amongst “the most important ways of self-, senseand indeed world-making,” says Ansgar Nünning 3 Narrations shape “communities, nations, and selves, as well as conflicts, enemies, and wars ” Therefore, they “can […] be abused as ideological and propagandistic devices, as means of fostering collective delusions, and as ‘weapons of mass destruction ’” 4 William Blake’s celebrated claim comes to mind here that “The Foundation of Empire […] is Art and Science Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose ” 5 Likewise literature also has the potential to undo its ancestors’ wor(l)ds, to muse through past atrocities, thus reconfiguring moralities and respective minds/ ets This “persuasive power” of narratives “can alter beliefs of readers” and hence narratives “are important tools for spreading values, emotional dispositions and cognitive practices,” 6 writes Vera Nünning In the same vein, Ottmar Ette speaks of literature as “ÜberLebensWissen” that remains pertinent for generating human futures 7 In complementary fashion, Édouard Glissant’s “poétique de la relation” suggests that literatures inhabit a “tout monde,” an “all-world,” that keeps generating a “unity in diversity” by means of imagination 8 Glissant holds: “[S]omething in the imagination, in the imaginary” is able to “understand these phases and tangles, where the people in the world are located today ” 9 3 Ansgar Nünning, “My Narratology: An Interview with Ansgar Nünning,” DIEGESIS 4 1 (2015), 105 4 Ibid 5 William Blake, cited in: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 12-13 6 Vera Nünning, “The Ethics of (Fictional) Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies,” Arcadia 50 1 (2015), 38 7 Ottmar Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004) 8 Glissant, Èdouard, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1996), 14, 71 9 Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010), 24 241 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics Glissant’s notion of imagination maintains that any knowledge is as diverse as it is incomplete and instable Unrestrained by the obligation to know, imagination can delve into the unknown as well as into what cannot (yet) be known; and even into the impossible Not bound to what is or might be possible, imagination can make things up: “Imagination is the very precondition of human freedom,” writes Richard Kearney, “to be free means to be able to surpass the empirical world as it is given here and now in order to project new possibilities of existence ” 10 Thus tuned, imagination equips all protagonists of the con*text*author*reader*discourse polylogue with the agency of in(ter)ventions, i e inventions that intervene. These in(ter)ventions display, reflect, and reconfigure moralities. This is what I call p(r)oEthics: a poetics that affirms the search for an ethics of freedom and justice. This p(r)oEthics keeps reflecting the dis*continuity of moralities, reconfiguring them on behalf of freedom and justice in the process Such p(r)oEthics is, amongst others, displayed in and via imagination; and this is what I wish to exemplify in the following by referring to Imagination and Maafa 2 Maafa and Imagination as In(ter)vention and P(r)oEthics “The greatest tragedy that can befall us,” Scott Momaday writes in The Man Made of Words (1997), “is to go unimagined ” 11 Of course, this is a figurative exaggeration The greatest tragedies, after all, are those that exceed imagination One of the possible German phrasings for the imperative “Imagine! ,” “Stell dir doch mal vor! ” is very frank on stressing “Das ist unvorstellbar (This cannot be imagined! ) This is beyond be-greifen; comprendre, grasping, to be known ” Just think of the atrocities of Shoah, meaning “catastrophe” in modern Hebrew, or Maafa, which is Kiswahili for “great tragedy” and refers to the European enslavement of Africans Yet no such word would ever enable us to truly know “The horror, the horror! ,” to cite Kurtz’s last words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 12 What cannot be comprehended in terms of grasping and knowing, though, can be approximated by narrativised emotion Vera Nünning’s “‘meta-affective’ value of fiction” comes to mind here that features the “nuanced language for understanding emotions and the complex scenarios in which they are embedded” 10 Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining from Husserl to Lyotard (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991), 6, original emphasis 11 Scott N Momaday, The Ancient Child (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 55 12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Edinburgh; Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899), part III, 12 242 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 as “an important part of the value of fiction.” 13 Emotions become a way of knowing (beyond) words by means of narrativising and contextualising them both ethically and aesthetically This is what Glissant’s notion of “imagine” is all about, as well: “Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead stumped, the dying crouched ” 14 This “Imagine! ” invites its recipient to enter trauma - an emotion that flees from being felt, a memory that fights being remembered, a knowledge that does not want to be known It is imagination, in Glissant’s understanding, that offers the means to enter the (emotional) knowledge within trauma to whatever extent a person or a collective can manage, bear, survive Whereas this horror cannot be escaped physically (you may resist, but the body and soul are harmed nevertheless), the imagination thereof offers a way to combine both knowing and transcendence, facing and escaping, thus offering a wider range of individual agency within and beyond the horror Within the realm of imagination, you can close your eyes, leave the room, stop watching, skip the passage while reading, because you may not wish to imagine, to see, to know what is narrated Yet, whatever strategies are employed, a certain amount of picturing the scene imaginatively does happen I belong to those who evade reading passages or watching scenes that narrate brutality in a naturalistic way. And it is this watching-through-fingers aesthetics that is employed by Steven Spielberg in his film Amistad (1997) 15 The deportation of enslaved Africans as cargo in a ship’s hold is narrated via an “aesthetics” that conveys how enslaved humans suffer in the midst of the horror. The sound displays disturbing screams of pain, while flashing images show limbs, arms, faces They are synecdoches, featuring that humans are turned into a ware made of flesh. Moreover, body parts of different characters overlap, entangle, which evokes to see the enslaved Africans as rhizomatic collective In doing so, Spielberg’s Amistad performs Glissant’s aesthetics of imagination which claims that such a horror can neither be known nor understood - yet by being narrativised emotionally, it can be sensed into a new ethics This scene is, to me, a telling example of how imagination keeps entering my fantasy, taking me to the edge of the unimaginable, thus affecting my way of learning about the Maafa emotionally, triggering empathy and change 13 Cf Vera Nünning, “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions,” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, eds Ingeborg Jandl et al (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 50 14 Glissant, Poetics, 5, my emphasis 15 Stephen Spielberg, dir , Amistad (USA, 1993) 243 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics This “‘meta-affective’ value of fiction” (Vera Nünning) is also displayed by Bernardine Evaristo’s poststructuralist novel Blonde Roots (2008) 16 The novel turns well-known topological and temporal patterns upside down “Europa” is situated in the Global South and 16th-century feudalism, while “Amarika” features 19th-century plantation economy “Aphrika,” however, is turned into the enslaver’s continent Situated in the Global North, it inhabits Maafa’s dystopic future Again, the passage about the horrors of the Middle Passage triggers pain, and hence, my strategy of skim reading Yet by turning positions in Maafa upside down and making white persons endure the horrors of the Maafa, Blonde Roots forces me into leaving my trained comfort zone of skim reading While trying not to see the horror, I, somewhat aporetically, tried, on the other hand, eagerly to cast white people in this scenario In more than ten pages, the white focaliser, Doris Scagglethorpe, narrates what resonates powerfully with Glissant’s wording: white people “crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them”; white people vomiting, “naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead stumped, the dying crouched.” 17 Yet, no matter how hard I try to see all of this as being done to white people, my imagination fails me, making me see Black people instead And in my eagerness to follow the narrator’s lead and thus to imagine white people in the ship’s cargo hold, I overcome my strategy of skim reading, eventually imagining the horror more than I would usually accept to bear, emotionally This is, to me, a very powerful aesthetic strategy of emotional un*learning that also triggers the question: Why can I imagine a Black person in chains but not a white enslaved person? Because it did not happen like this? Or because this imagination would be afflicting my very own privileged white Self with this pain? The latter is a fearsome thought because it somewhat suggests that my imagination and emotional costume has been trained to see and feel such atrocities being done to Blacks, to Jews, but not to whites Evaristo’s imagination is, of course, far from proposing to enslave white people Rather, and somewhat paradoxically, the novel’s imagination claims that any such (Maafa) atrocity is “unvorstellbar,” unimaginable Evaristo’s p(r)oEthics triggers empathy and emotions for reflexivity in order to intervene into humanism’s morality that accepted the Maafa as naturally given and just While Evaristo’s p(r)oEthics reconfigures moralities by means of triggering pain, imagination’s in(ter)vention may also contribute to the un*making of moralities by spreading visions about healing Here, one of this planet’s most beautiful “Imagines” comes to mind - John Lennon’s from 1971: “Imagine all 16 Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots (London: Riverhead/ Penguin, 2009) 17 Ibid , 5 244 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 the people/ Living life in peace ” And in line with Glissant’s “tout monde,” he continues: “Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world ” While Evaristo’s “imagine” stresses, in line with Glissant’s imagination, that the horror of Maafa cannot be known yet sketched emotionally, Lennon’s imagine (also corresponding to Glissant’s notion) is about knowing that humans do not know yet how to share the world evenly and peacefully And yet, we can incubate it in our imagination, thus generating emotions that trigger agency towards it While Evaristo’s “imagine” is nightmarish, Lennon’s “imagine” invites the hearer to co-dream him or herself into a hope: “You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will live as one ” 18 Evaristo’s and Lennon’s calls to “imagine” are, however, not antithetical In fact, the p(r)oEthics of disturbing and hoping are complementary and interactive modes of (affective) intervention that entangle both an imagining against and imagining into an evenly shared planet and respective futureS In the following, I wish to dig deeper into hopes and dreams as one specific mode of imagination against and into, delving into their capacities to inspire agencies of in(ter)vention, p(r)oEthics and the un*making of futureS 3 Dream*Hopes’ FutureS Dreams unfold visually and/ or verbally, ranging from all sorts of unconscious dreams (while sleeping) to daydreams; they might be nightmarish, displaying fears, or feature hopes narrating what is wanted, desired and/ or strived for. In the following, I focus on one specific type of dream only: dreams within the realm of the literary imagination that display and trigger hopes While dreams may easily exceed what is seemingly plausible in the very now, hopes tend to be more grounded in plausibilities The famous saying (often accredited to Aristotle) “hope is a waking dream” 19 suggests that a dream is a moment in an unconscious Now; yet, when holding on to it, a dream may turn into a more sustainable mode of hope It is in this very sense that I speak, in the following, of dream*hopes (the asterisk is to mark the complementary entanglement of the two concepts) As a joint venture, dream*hopes express individual as well as collective thoughts, images and sensations in various states, ranging all the way from sleep to speech, from likeability to unlikability, from the slightest to the high- 18 John Lennon, “Imagine” (New York: Apple Records, 1971) 19 This is a quote often attributed to Aristotle (4th century BC) by Diogenes Laërtius (3rd century AD), in Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London: W Heinemann, 1925), Book 5, Chapter 1, Verse 18 245 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics est form of fulfilment - thus displaying needs, ideas and desires. Whether composed by the human unconscious or uttered intentionally, dream*hopes are very outspoken about their very source: If, as Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the Dark (1992), “The subject of the dream is the dreamer,” 20 then it can be said that dream*hopes are about dream*hopers These dream*hopers are socially positioned subjects who own power-coded agencies, and these very subject positions, in turn, inform their dream*hopes Ultimately, however, dream*hopes are much freer than their subjects, i e the dream*hoping person(s) Obviously, dream*hopes, just like humans, can be silenced, but they cannot be truly censored, nor can they be imprisoned, nor killed What is more, dream*hopes comment on “reality” without being hindered by its obstacles Dream*hopes offer and enter futureS without being expected to map the road or hand out the tools or manuals needed to realise them. Therefore, dream*hopes are even better qualified to narrate what should (not) be/ come (anymore) In this sense, dream*hopes are not agency per se, but they offer the agency to intervene, give orientation, resist, and affect change In spite of their residing beyond the realm of matter, dream*hopes materialise when they are translated into agency and actions In doing so, dream*hoping relies on knowledge as offered by memory Triggered by the Now and nourished by its memories, dream*hopes become collective, forceful and communicative motives, drives, orientations, and goals I dream because I can remember; I hope because I have come to know that alternatives are out there Thus tuned, dream*hopes disagree with Goya’s quintessential visual summary of the “Enlightenment,” suggesting that the “The Sleeping of Reason Produces Monster ” 21 Rather, dream*hopes are, to me, a mode of knowing on the move and, as such, vital agents in the generation of futureS I capitalise the “S” to stress that “future” does not exist in the (simplicity of any) singular: FutureS are causally intersected with both the past and the present as well as the respective power constellations that have shared futureS unevenly Throughout global historieS, some futureS have advanced and some hindered the other Therefore, the term futureS (with capitalised plural S) also addresses all the futureS that could not (yet) happen, because more powerful futureS have stolen them, thus preventing them from happening Moreover, the capital S is designed to stress that futureS do not happen; 20 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 17 21 Francisco Goya, Plate 43, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” from Los caprichos, 1799, the Metropolitan Museum of Art: https: / / www metmuseum org/ art/ collection/ search/ 338473 246 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 they are made - and unmade - by agencies that oppose the denial of history and the tautology of myths / insisting, as Roland Barthes puts it, that “[i]t is and will be like this because it is like this ” As for agencies of future-making, imagination in general and dream*hopes in particular have the capacity to enter, sense, and probe futureS Being able to enter the impossible may even advance into the resurrection of murdered futureS as well as spawning new ones In the following, I wish to explore imaginations in general and dream*hopes in particular To do so, I will discuss how imaginations manipulated Europe into accepting colonialism as a legitimate undertaking and how dream*hopes, on the other hand, have offered agencies as pathways into resisting colonialism and its aftermath I will therefore begin with delving into Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and continue by touching upon Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978), Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (1963), and J Cole’s song “Be free” (2014) in a more concise discussion 4 Post*colonial Imagination and Dream*Hopes in Literature 4.1 William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) 22 In The Tempest, Prospero rules over an island and reigns over Caliban, labelling him monstrous, cannibalistic, vicious, and animalistic While still offstage, Caliban is characterised by Prospero as “a freckled whelp, hag-born … not honoured with/ A human shape ” (1 2 283-284) Others call Caliban a monster, (2 2 31, 155, 159; 3 2 3, 4, 7, 24, 28; 5 1 258, passim ) a devil, (1 2 321; 2.2.58, 99, passim) a fish, a tortoise or some other kind of animal, (1.2.317, 1 2 283-4, 318; 2 2 25-6, 85, 107; 3 2 20, 28; 5 1 266, passim) or “a thing most brutish ” (1 2 359) These utterances have, throughout the centuries, often caused stage directors and artists to imagine Caliban as an animal-like creature, which crawls or hops 23 Still the question remains crucial: How can Caliban be so many things at the same time? Taking a closer look at the texture of this imagination quickly reveals one point: These negative attributes are invoked by the play’s white characters, while Caliban’s own speech and actions undermine these white gazes So, how reliable are the white characters’ gazes and labels, after all? 22 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611; London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000) Subsequent quotations from this play are referenced in parentheses in the text 23 Cf Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 247 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics They are not, I argue For one thing, they vary, noticeably, from one white character to another - without any one being more convincing or displaying more consistency than the other For another, their unreliability is supported by the following scene: Prospero’s magical powers create the illusion of a rich banquet (3 3 stage direction) Antonio, however, takes this banquet to be real In sheer ignorance of being tricked by an illusion, Antonio insists: “And I’ll be sworn ‘tis true: Travellers ne’er did lie,/ Though fools at home condemn ‘em ” (3 3 26-27) Antonio is unreliable 24 yet thinks that his (and all) travel accounts are reliable This is a sarcastic undermining of travel literature that also suggests that the gazes of the travellers in The Tempest might be unreliable in other respects, too Against this backdrop, Toni Morrison’s formula - “The subject of the dream is the dreamer” 25 comes to mind again, inducing us to ask: What do the gazes tell us about the gazing characters? Though miscellaneous, the labels converge in narrating Caliban as being non-human This is their smallest common denominator So, either Caliban is non-human (yet why then do the characters use different labels rather than calling him unitarily what he would be, species-wise) or his being non-human is an invention that serves a unitarily shared need on the part of the gazing characters Here, Frantz Fanon’s claim begins to deeply resonate The settler, i e coloniser, “paints the … [colonised, S A ] as a sort of quintessence of evil […] The … [colonised, S A ] is declared insensible to ethics ” At times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanises the colonised, using “zoological terms,” referring to the Black’s “bestiary ” 26 Thus tuned, I suggest that these utterances do not qualify Caliban but the colonial gaze and desire to define the colonial space and its subjects according to colonial needs as non-human and hence a terra nullius waiting to be exploited by Europe The strongest proof for this claim is the following first encounter-gaze on Caliban by Trinculo, which stages how he imagines Caliban in sequential flashes of inspiration: “What have we here, a man, or a fish? ” (2.2.24) So he starts off wondering, whether Caliban is human He makes a decision that he doubts from the outset: “A fish, he smells like fish […] a strange fish.” (2.2.25) It is not just reeking senses that guide his guess - an even stronger motif is in line with the economic desire of colonialism: 24 Antonio is not only untrustworthy because he takes an illusion to be the truth Moreover, Antonio is also not to be trusted in as far as he uses the voyage (and its unexpected turn) to attempt killing his brother, the king 25 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17 26 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; London: Penguin, 1985), 32-33 I take the liberty to replace the translator’s “native” into contemporary postcolonial terminology, i e colonised or Black 248 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 [W]ere I in England now […] and had this fish painted; […] when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian […] I do now let loose my opinion; hold it no longer; this is no fish, but an islander […] (2.2.27-32) At first, Trinculo’s gaze marks Caliban as fish; however, when becoming aware that he could profit from Caliban’s status as colonial subject, Trinculo sees an ‘Indian’ (i.e. colonised) in Caliban (since he could even profit from a dead one, let alone a living one) This monologue manifests exactly how the colonial space was invented by Europe to legitimate its invasion: imagine them as nature (thus lacking culture); imagine them as monster and devilish (thus lacking morality); imagine them as animal (thus lacking humanity) This ‘imagine’ corresponds to Glissant’s idea that imagination is beyond knowing for certain; and yet, it simultaneously behaves as antithetical to Glissant’s imagination in that it functions as if ascertainable To Glissant, such a comprendre, which he accredits to anthropology and colonial epistemologies, displays a repressive meaning 27 inasmuch as it relies on a single, monologic story The colonial-gaze story about Caliban, thus configured, is pillared on a logic that is as simple as it is fatal: If the colonised were not humans, humanism would not be applicable to them Rather, they had to be colonised to be taught culture, morality, and how to be human (including the human longing for freedom) Thus tuned, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), 28 for example, spreads the narration that white people are entitled to own colonial territories and respective resources and that Friday volunteers to be a slave This colonial rhetoric is, however, subverted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest For one thing, Caliban claims that the island was his and that he is not willing to be Prospero’s slave The latter admits: “We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood and serves in offices/ That profit us.” (1.3.292- 294) Yet in his very first speech sequence, Caliban makes clear: “There is wood enough within” (1 3 315) - somewhat suggesting: Well, as for me, I do have enough firewood. Go and fetch your own. Caliban is resistant and Prospero knows he is: Caliban “never yields … [him, S A ] kind answer ” (1 3 308-30) And he does so in blank verse Complementing Caliban’s capacity to be resistant in high register English, there are other features that characterise him as being 27 Glissant, Poetics, 26 28 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719; London: W W Norton, 1994); cf Susan Arndt, “Rassist Robinson,” Tagesspiegel, 13 February 2017, www tagesspiegel de/ wissen/ kritische-editionen-von-kolonialromanen-rassist-robinson/ 19381006 html 249 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics human - doing so in a consistent way that suggests reliability after all with respect to “Who is Caliban? ” To begin with, upon seeing Ferdinand for the first time, Miranda says “This/ Is the Third man I e’er saw ” (1 2 445-6) Third man? Whom did she see before besides Prospero: Caliban Yet it is not only Miranda who knows Caliban to be human; Prospero does as well - somewhat against his ways of addressing and imagining Caliban terminologically For example, when he wants to ensure Miranda that Ferdinand is a human being, how does he characterise being human? “[I]t eats and sleeps, and hath such senses/ As we have.” (1.2 413-14) So why not apply this definition of Prospero to deduce whether Caliban is human? Well, Caliban eats, sleeps, and has senses As for eating, in his very first encounter with Prospero, when claiming that he is not up to fetching firewood for him, Caliban stresses that he is busy eating: “I must eat my dinner ” (1 2 331) Dining is way more human than animal-like eating As for sleeping, he does it as well, displaying senses in the process: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again (3 2 136-153) Caliban’s capacity to dream attests to his having human senses and emotions What is more, his dreams imagine “open clouds” as a metaphor for freedom and “riches” as alluding to him owning the island Freed only in his dreams from being disowned and enslaved, he cries when awakened In the long run, however, his capacity to dream nourishes his hope of gaining freedom, which, in turn, triggers a sequence of actions Eventually, he manipulates Trinculo and Stephano into rioting against Prospero, by promising them the island as well as himself as their slave who will “fish for thee, and get thee wood enough ” (2 2 158) Yet it is a trick - and we know it is because we know that Caliban hates all of it, dreaming himself beyond it in a way that keeps triggering his resistance against Prospero What is more, he ends his false promises by singing: “No more dams I’ll make for fish/ Nor fetch in firing at requiring … Freedom, high-day; high-day freedom ” (2 2 176, 177, 181-182) The dramatic stage direction instructs that these lines be sung “drunkenly,” which has led to the overwhelming interpretation that Caliban is intoxicated by alcohol But what if one reads “drunkenly” as suggesting that Caliban merely feigns intoxication so as to only seemingly conform to the colonialist 250 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 illusion (as formerly practiced by Prospero and now uttered by Trinculo and Stephano) that the colonies could be won with “fire water,” i.e. liquor? Rather, the other way around, heaving learned his lesson after being manipulated by Prospero’s “water with berries” (1 2 340), it is now Caliban who tricks Trinculo and Stephano into an alliance in pursuit of his own dream*hope of eventually being free(d). He manages to do so by pretending to affirm their imagination that a colonial subject can be tricked into voluntary servitude like this, via liquor, while manipulating them into getting even more drunk Unlike Trinculo and Stephano, Prospero is not to be tricked that easily and ends the rebellion And yet, throughout his time on the island, he has learned his lesson: The colonialist imagination is misleading; Caliban is human and, as such, will never stop dream*hoping (of freedom) and hence cannot be controlled without violence and “crime ” Prospero therefore longs to eventually leave the island behind and to Caliban His epilogue is concluded by saying: “As you from crime would pardoned be,/ Let your indulgence set me free ” (Epilogue 19-20) Ultimately, the coloniser, against his will, might be read as sharing Caliban’s dream of ending colonialism This, however, would allow to position The Tempest as a scrutiny of colonialism At least it displays a warning that colonisation would not to be accomplished except through violence This warning, however, was not heeded by Europe Rather, Europe conquered the world, prospering in the process The futureS thus enabled devoured (possible) futureS of the Global South 4.2 Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978) 29 As for Maafa, for example, the deportation of millions of Africans devastated social and economic structures in Africa, while providing the labour that paid the bills for the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America Millions of enslaved Africans died, yet, collectively, they survived the trauma and stayed Dispersal grew into Black diasporas in the Americas and beyond, generating futureS for those who “were never meant to survive,” as the lyrical I in Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978) puts it These futureS, however, did not simply happen; they were made - made by being imagined and by subsequently giving rise to resistant agencies Dream*hopes had a major share in it, as Lorde’s lyrical I suggests It addresses dreams, praising its actors, i e “those of us who cannot indulge/ the passing dreams of choice ” (I 4-5) Stanza I stresses that dreaming is as lonely, 29 Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 31-33 Subsequent quotations from this work are referenced in parentheses in the text 251 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics “alone” (I 3), as it is fragile: Dreams may fade out, “passing” and melting “like bread in our children’s mouths” (I 12), because dreamers lose faith in their hopes Yet due to its virtue of inhabiting what is seemingly impossible, dreams can recycle themselves, against all odds Inasmuch as bread melting in a mouth is also about nourishing (the survival of disillusionment), dreams and dreamers keep (re)emerging like phoenix from the ashes In this vein, Lorde’s lyrical I praises “those of us” who seek “a now that can breed/ futures” (I.10-11), “so” that “their dreams will not reflect the death of ours.” (I 13) Millions of dream(er)s might have died, yet, collectively, they have survived the death of their predecessors This is why dreamers and their dreams “live at the shoreline” (I 1), and “in doorways coming and going/ in the hours between dawns/ looking inward and outward/ at once before and after ” (I-6-9) Lorde’s dream(er)s are as errant as Glissant’s imagination, and as “crucial ” (I 3) After all, dreams are about “decision” (I 2) and “choice” (I 5), and about nothing less than “futures ” Stanzas II and III delve into the consequences of being silenced into an absence of dreams - with the consequence of being afraid to an extent that the cause of the fear is imagined as “illusion of some safety,” thus causing stagnation rather than alternate futureS Stanza IV, however, returns to the tone of empowerment of stanza I, now complementing the agency of dreams with that of memories: “So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive ” (IV 1-3) The remembering here is a reminder that silence and its suppression of dreams endanger survival, whereas dreams enable survival where it is not meant to grow The interaction between remembering and dreams may also have a further dimension Memory can provide an alternative to what is now, thus becoming the bread that informs and nourishes new dreams This interaction between memory and dreams is at the centre of Martin Luther King’s celebrated 1963 speech “I have a dream,” which insists on dreaming as intervention into history and memory, its resultant NOW and respective futureS 4.3 Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” Speech (1963) and J. Cole’s “Be Free” (2014) 30 At the beginning of his speech, King reminds his addressees of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and 30 In the following I will use in-text quotation from, Martin Luther King, Jr “I Have a Dream,” Great Speeches by African Americans, ed James Daley (Mineola New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 111-115 and J Cole, “Be Free,” (SoundCloud 2014) Web 252 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 their respective promises and visions, stressing that these “promised” futureS have not yet been fully realised FuturE has remained a monolithic concept, securing white (until 1920, male) privilege only “[O]ne hundred years later,” King says, “the [Black] still is not free ” 31 (111) And yet, as King dreams: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair ” (113) This take on history transcends the paralysis afflicting Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet ” (257) In due consequence, the angel cannot access the future: “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward ” (257-258) In contrast to Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” the Akan concept of memory, Sankofa, remembers in order to be able to “meet the future, undeterred ” Just as Sankofa plucks from the past that which is helpful to generate new futureS, King remembers past promises in order to translate them into the “fierce urgency of Now.” (112) Thus, the phrase “Now is the time” is repeated constantly throughout his speech 32 Stressing that the dream is dreamt in the now, due to its urgency, is another way of saying, past promises have not yet been fulfilled, and yet, we do not give up: we keep on dreaming “I still have a dream ” (114) In the little word “still,” a voice of agency proclaims itself, saying: We remember that we were abducted and were not meant to survive, and yet we did and persevered Therefore, we belong in the US, and the “American Dream” is also ours To King, 1963 is not just the historical result of the futureS of 1883 that did not happen, but also a beginning of new futureS Just like Lorde’s “those of us” who seek a “now that can breed/ futures” so that “their dreams will not reflect the death of ours,” King talks about Black lives not as closed narratives but as causal and open ones While Lorde com- 31 King spoke in accordance with the linguistic norms of his own time, hence his usage of the “n-word”; yet, in line with contemporary attempts at talking about racism without reproducing its violent words, I refrain from citing that word in this article and thus replace it with the word “Black ” 32 “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy Now is the time … Now is the time … Now is the time…” (112) King’s dream*hope of a ‘freedom to’ demands unlimited voting rights for Blacks, an end to “For whites only” signs and racist violence as well as equality in education and day-to-day life without discrimination, by police and otherwise Cf “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character ” (113) For police brutality cf also 112 253 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics pares dreams with bread that nourishes as it melts, King uses the metaphor of “stone”: “I have a dream today! This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope ” (114) Very much in line with the notion that “hope is a waking dream” King suggests that, although dreams may be imaginary, hopes can be hewed out, thus materialised, turned into faith, becoming as solid as stone in the process This dream*hope*faith’s objective is summarised in the concluding words of King’s speech, which somewhat echo Caliban’s vision of freedom “Freedom, high-day; high-day freedom” (2.2. 181-182): “Free at last! Free at last! … free at last.” (114) As a crucial criterion for his dream being eventually fulfilled, King mentions the end of “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality ” (112) The killing of Michael Brown by a policeman on 9 May 2014 in Ferguson is just one of many other similar incidents that bespeak the fact that King’s dream has not yet come true This is addressed, in an intertextual bow to King’s “I have a dream” speech, by the African American rapper J Cole in his song “Be Free” (2014) It concludes by asking, “A man can DREAM, can’t he? ” (03: 43) Cole’s question mark interrogates the exclamation point that rhetorically guides King’s core credo “I have a dream! ” It may sound less confident, but it insists on staying true to that dream nonetheless Along the texture of King’s dream of the end of police brutality, Cole’s song asks somewhat rhetorically: “Can you tell me why/ every time I step outside I see my people die? ” (00: 57) And he keeps echoing the freedom song: “All we wanna do is take the chains off… All we wanna do is be free ” In what follows after these verses, he mixes his song with a 4-minute excerpt from the official police report that demonstrates that Michael Brown was not a threat to anyone To conclude his song, Cole eventually asks, in reference to King’s conviction that equality can only be gained in solidarity with white people: “Are we all alone, fighting on our own? ” (01: 57) Again, this sounds somewhat rhetorical, thus questioning the availability of white solidarity Consequently, Cole subverts (the love of white leftists for) King’s pacifistic believing in “soul force” rather than “bitterness,” “hatred,” and “physical violence,” claiming: “I’m lettin’ you know that there ain’t no drink out there that can numb my soul ” This echoes Caliban being lured into slavery by Prospero’s “water with berries” (1 2 340), which makes him wary of repeating the mistake when encountering Trinculo and Stephano - thus pretending to be already drunk rather than becoming drunk Moreover, J Cole addresses that not even (police) violence can stop Black resistance: “I’m lettin’ you know that there ain’t no gun they make that can kill my soul ” (01: 01) Ultimately, Cole’s rhetorical 254 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 question “A man can DREAM, can’t he”? is a promise to do both: keep on remembering lost futureS and dream*hoping and fighting for evenly shared futureS Having discussed the power of dream*hoping with respect to colonialism and racism, in the closing section of my article, I wish to enter, in exemplary fashion, another realm of dream*hopes - that of Afrofuturist, environmentalist feminism as displayed by Wanuri Kahiu’s 2009 YouTube short film Pumzi 4.4 Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) 33 ‘DREAM DETECTED’… ‘Take your dream suppressant ’ (1: 12-1: 20) This digital voice is the techno-dictatorship speaking, displaying its fear of human dreams In her dream Asha longs to touch a tree, which she appears to not be able to So why is the techno-dictatorship afraid of it? The techno-dictatorship governs over a postapocalyptic settlement subsisting on the power generated through exercise machines transforming free human labour into energy It is called Maituu meaning “(mother) seed ” Yet Maituu is also a wordplay on “our truth”: The Kikuyu word for ‘truth’ is MA, and IITU means ‘OURS ’ “Our truth,” which the techno-dictatorship is pillared on, is that “The outside is dead” - a bone-dry nuclear wasteland Seemingly, all humans have bought that truth, living on their own recycled urine and sweat, which has become their world’s currency Within that system, Asha is privileged, working in the Virtual Natural History Museum It exhibits pictures of trees and artefacts of former life forms such as (dry) branches Although this memory is all that remains of vegetation, it is powerful nonetheless As suggested earlier, memory is the soil that nourishes dream*hopes of alternative futureS Whereas in Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” remembering is all about not forgetting the lingering pains of the now and King’s remembering concerns past promises, Pumzi features the memory of nature and its death Despite the museum’s narration of dead nature, in the museum’s palimpsest, the green nature is alive And it is the imagination thus provided that grants Asha the very knowledge needed to imagine a tree in her very Now Thus equipped, she can dream of and long for it, so that what might seem to be a void (i e that she fails to touch the tree) eventually turns out to be a success inasmuch as the dream is already a thinking beyond the possible Furthermore, her dream triggers a hope that eventually turns into resistance 33 Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi (2009; YouTube, 2012), www youtube com/ watch? v=IlR7l_B86Fc In the following, the short film is referenced in parentheses in the text. 255 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics Shortly after her first dream and her taking the dream suppressants somewhat pain-driven, Asha discovers a soil sample with an “abnormally high water content” (5: 06) and without “radioactivity ” (5: 22) Having touched the soil, Asha embarks upon dreaming again This time, however, the dream starts off nightmarishly, featuring Asha as drowning This may be read as the dream suppressant’s effectivity Likewise, Asha awakens once her nightmarish dream eventually turns into the former dream with a happy Asha reaching out her hand to touch the tree Yet, upon awaking, Asha pursues her dream nevertheless, suppressing the dream suppressants Thus, the soil of memory turns the seed of dream*hope into the bloom of action: Asha waters the soil and adds a seed, which, at the museum, is viewed as a mere artefact of memory In doing so, she turns soil and seed into a hope for futureS Obviously, the dream has finally and irrevocably won Asha over. All hyped and triggered, Asha insists on sharing her dream*hope with the Council and on pursuing it outside Maituu This request, however, is denied on account of Maituu’s constitutive truth: “This is impossible! … The outside is dead! ” (07: 05; 07: 54-07: 56) Nevertheless, that this alleged impossibility is not true is displayed by the seed*soil’s own truth A seedling has sprung, leading Asha to protest: “But the soil is alive! ” (8: 27-8: 38) To convince the Council, Asha casts her dream on the interface screen, which only results in being ordered to take her dream suppressants again. Eventually, she is fired and sentenced to labour at the exercise machines Yet irreversibly energised by the dream*hope, Asha resists and flees, determined to sow the seedling at the soil’s very origin, which turns out to be in the middle of the desert She crosses it, exhausting herself Neither eating nor drinking herself, she waters the seed while herself nourished by her dream*hope Though ending up meeting “her tree” dried up and dead, Asha keeps dream*hoping She plants the seed, nurturing it with water recycled from her body, shading it with her body The happy ending is when a trans*species human*tree eventually becomes a forest “Pumzi” is the Kiswahili word for “breath” and breath it is that Asha is giving to the world Photosynthetically, human exhalation provides trees and plants with CO 2 , while inhaling the O 2 emitted in return Metaphorically, this is the symbiosis that ultimately outwits and outlives the techno-dictatorship, thus reviving futureS declared to be dead. Donating her bodily fluids for the survival of her seedling is a trans*species idea of inhabiting the planet - which seems to be its last chance indeed 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 256 s usaN a rNdt 5 Imaginations in Literatures and Its Studies My paper has walked all the way from literature via imagination to dream*hopes that can undo the ablation of futureS And it did so because of wishing to argue that this is a most precious value of literature: It imagines invention in order to intervene, while displaying the agency of dream*hopes that are nourished by emotions and empathy, while reflecting moralities, p(r)o-Ethically One of the major ingredients of the power of literature is the power of imagination in general and dream*hopes in particular Emancipated from the obsession with any “I know, therefore I am,” imagination and dream*hopes lend literature the capacity to enter the unknown, errantly; to think outside the box and to visit the impossible - and to inhabit such realms is what keeps horizons distant enough to keep us moving - overcoming histories, entering futureS, undeterred There is no end to dream*hoping imaginations in literatures We are what we imagine, dream, hope; and we will be what we will have imagined, dreamed, hoped, imagined Faust’s idea of arriving in a moment you eventually long to “linger on” is not what literature is all about 34 The value of literature, to me, is its being an open book that is true to itself by keeping itself and moralities of being human in motion, thus generating “empathy …which encompasses both affective and cognitive processes” 35 towards change This p(r)oEthics is, in turn, consequently echoed by the study of literature in general and (contextual) narratology in particular “An alliance between narratology and cultural history can,” as Ansgar Nünning puts it, “open up productive new possibilities for the analysis both of the dialogic relationship between novels and their cultural contexts and of the epistemological, historical, and cultural implications of narrative strategies 36 - and, as I wish to add, ethical ones In doing so, contextual narratology does not merely analyse literary imagination, its dream*hoping, and other whereabouts of literature; it scrutinises and multiplies it, thus affecting literature and its impact on the 34 Cf Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (1699-1700; digital edition, Würzburg, 2018), https: / / www uni-wuerzburg de/ aktuelles/ pressemitteilungen/ single/ news/ goethes-faust-als-digitale-edition/ 35 Nünning, “The Ethics of the (Fictional) Form,” 40 36 Nünning, Ansgar, “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials,” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, eds Sandra Heinen/ Roy Sommer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 53 257 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics conundrum of becoming human 37 Ultimately, the tools offered by contextual narratology, and literary studies in general, are not only capable of approaching the con/ text*author*reader*discourse polylogue; rather, they are to be acknowledged as another vital agent thereof In other words, literary studies itself affects epistemologies and moralities, thus being a core agent of wor(l)d-making In doing so, “literary narrative theory should foster,” as Ansgar Nünning suggests, “a more sustained dialogue with narrative research in other disciplines ” 38 What is more, self-reflexivity is needed which “not only looks at the cultural variability and historical development of narrative forms and genres, but also considers the historicity, and cultural specificities, of its own approaches, concepts and methods ” 39 Thus tuned, literary studies will have a role in sharing planetary futureS more evenly They do not only scrutinise and amplify the moralities of literatures; they generate their own, p(r)o-Ethically “You may say I am a dreamer, but [I Hope] I am not the only one ” Works Cited Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart. 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