In a memorable if typically vitriolic turn of phrase, V. S. Naipual once characterized a (fictionalized) Zaïre (and by extension the then Third World) as a ‘place where the future had come and gone’ (Naipaul 2002: 30). With these words he implicitly ratified European notions of civilization and progress and relegated the Third World to the trash-can of history. Yet today great swathes of the Euro-American world itself are tumbling ‘backwards’ into the sort of Dickensian decay that always belied its claims to modernity. Happiness, once the touchstone of Enlightenment values, now recoded as ‘wellbeing’, is seemingly on the retreat globally in the face of COVID-19 (and its probable successors) and global climate change—to mention only two of the most salient current threats to the integrity of the planetary community, whether human or trans-human. With increased global hardship for the majority most likely just around the corner, the question of how to guarantee future wellbeing, enshrined as it is in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, is worth posing anew.
It is significant that thinkers, activists and artists across the South have refused to be locked into a putatively immobile past or to passively accepting the burdens of colonial and postcolonial illbeing. Might these dual refusals be linked to one another, and what positive affirmations might they entail? How might the reinvention of futures go hand in hand with the reinvention of life-quality?
With adventurous notions such as ‘accelerated underdevelopment’ (Álvarez qtd in Chanan 2004: 228), ‘indigenous modernity (Muecke 2004) or ‘envelopment’ (Sarr 2016: 21-8), actors from the South have sought ways of (re)‘mak[ing] time’ (Mbiti 1969: 19), and with it, the texture and quality of lived experience itself.
What temporal schemes dovetail with technologies of wellbeing such as ‘Buen vivir’?
Are such futures qualitatively different from those projected by paradigms of exponential growth (e.g. the de-growth movement)?
Do we need to recalibrate our notions of wellbeing to make them future-fit?
Can concepts such as ‘bricolage’, ‘informality’ or ‘improvisation’ serve us in imagining and implementing future wellbeing, or are they part of the problem of illbeing?
Which actors are envisaged as future partners in futures of wellbeing?
How can specifically Southern knowledges concretely contribute to future wellbeing (e.g. indigenous climate smart knowledge)?
What is the role of education in the twinned questions of wellbeing and futurity?