Marvelling in the margins : emotions, relations and the magic in global politics

Abstract

This research seeks to investigate how magical incantations of humans and more-than-humans provide refuge from, grapple with, and ultimately transform the disenchanted world of international relations, and spell new worlds into existence, which situate emotional relations at the heart of their politics. Arising from a growing realisation of critical emotional landscapes being ceded too readily to forms of knowledge which naturalise erasure of possible political action emerging from marginal(ized) sites and subjectivities, this project seeks to uncover moments of undocumented magic spelled by subaltern subjects in response to a violent world. I introduce magical realism as a form of literary writing which closely engages with emotional-relational entanglements of marginalized subjects and embraces their magical abilities to resist and transform unbearably rational worlds through their affective relations with each other. Building on philosophical conceptions of emotions as magical spells which are cast when a problem posed by the real world becomes too difficult to overcome, I show how, in the absence of agency granted by the real world, emotional-relational subjects spell alternative worlds into existence, where it becomes possible for them to not only enter but participate variously in the political. Reading a range of novels from different regions and historical-political contexts of the genre, I invite a magical reframing of some of the most crucial and contested themes in international relations- Time, Space and Relations. Attending to moments of magical incantations by those who work to resist and transform a world that has become too difficult to bear through conventional means, I contend that the discipline stands to gain invaluable lessons from an engagement with the kind of emotional-relational and magical politics that such literature and its resident subjects spell into being.