Hope as a Philosophical Problem

In this section, we will pursue some insights concerning the work of hope in philosophy, particularly in pragmatic (Reference BlöserBlöser, 2019; Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein, 1953), Marxist (Reference BlochBloch, 1986; Reference LevitasLevitas, 1990), and anthropological (Reference LearLear, 2006) philosophies. Our goal, it should be said, is not to offer a single, universally applicable definition of hope. A pragmatic approach to hope – one that is neither universalistic nor relativistic – would precisely remind us that hope, like any practice, is not and cannot be universally and uniformly realized in all societies. As Reference BlöserBlöser (2019) proposes in her pragmatic account of hope, “We hope in a great variety of ways” (p. 212). This entails that, conceptually, there may be multiple realizations of hope making it ultimately impossible to point to supposedly necessary and sufficient conditions for its expression in all social formations. Yet, while hope is irreducible, it is not undefinable. Blöser opposed the skeptic-relativist claim – for example one cannot understand what hope is; it is too diverse – by returning to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s famous proposal to understand language avoids the invocation of universal conditions to define concepts. For instance, using the conceptual category of “games,” which includes “board‐games, card‐games, ball‐games, Olympic games, and so on” (§66), Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein (1953) reminded us that we do not need to resort to the foundationalist assumption that “[t]here must be something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” (§66). He rather proposed that “we look and see … family resemblances,” that is, “similarities, relationships, and a whole series” of criss-crossing correspondences, as opposed to necessary and sufficient characteristics instantiated in every activity we call “game” (§66). Likewise, defining hope as a family resemblance concept entails looking at and seeing modes of responding to inequality and violence in the peripheries of Brazil and how these responses resonate within other contexts where inequities of capitalism stand out.

One of the most paradigmatic accounts of hope in philosophy is Reference BlochBloch’s (1986) The Principle of Hope. Bloch did not exactly attempt to locate hope within particular political formations, but instead looked at hope as a principle of philosophical explication. From the very beginning of his three-volume book, Bloch argued that as much as we “learn (to) fear,” we can learn to hope: “It is a question of learning hope … Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness” (p. 3). For the German philosopher, hope makes people expand rather than contract: “The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (p. 3). Bloch thus saw hope both as an affect – that is, as a mode of being affected or touched by the Other, by ourselves, and by the world and its events – and as a form of practical reason, that is, a “directing act of a cognitive kind” (p. 12). A Marxist philosopher, Bloch geared his reflection mostly toward transforming reality. The cognitive direction of hope therefore leads us to a “better world,” to the anticipation of the future as a practical rather than a merely contemplative activity. In his words:

This passage summarizes Bloch’s embrace of practical utopia (as discussed below) and the pragmatic and agentive directionality he attributed to the temporality of hope. For Bloch, the temporality of hope is the future seen as “the unclosed space for new development in front of us,” a future that may be acted upon on practical grounds. This temporal space of decision is opposed to a future seen as “embarrassment” and to a past “seen as spell” – a past that imprisons the future. Bloch’s The Principle of Hope critiqued philosophical accounts that posit the past as “overwhelming what is approaching” (p. 8). His philosophical critique included Plato’s theory of anamnesis, “the doctrine that all knowledge is simply re-remembering” (p. 8), and Freud’s eternal return, the idea that individuals are psychically compelled to repeat traces of a primeval past. As opposed to the regressive account of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, Bloch appraised our potential for the “Not-Yet-Conscious,” consisting of a series of “progressions” rather than regressions (p. 56). Thus, instead of concerning himself with the nightdreams that are the focus of psychoanalysis, Bloch was interested in “daydreams,” that is, dreams of a better life, “by which life is pervaded and of which the figurative arts are full” (p. 8).Footnote ⁴

The role of the “dream” figures prominently in Reference LearLear’s (2006) description of the cultivation of hope as a pragmatic response to cultural devastation. Lear built on the case of the Crow people, a nomad, warrior, and hunting indigenous group who originally lived along the Yellowstone River Valley in the Midwest of the United States. The Crow were confined into a reservation in Montana by the U.S. government at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently experienced a breakdown in their way of life. Lear focused on the narration that the leader Crow, Plenty Coups, relayed to Frank Linderman, a friend of the group who rendered Plenty Coups’s story into writing. Lear drew attention to the fact that Linderman “was unable to get Plenty Coups to talk about anything that had happened after the Crows were confined to a reservation” (p. 2). The footnote reads:

This passage revolves around the collapse of temporality and the system of cultural references of the Crow. Plenty Coups points out that after the buffalo went away – that is, after they were confined to a reservation and suddenly their nomad, hunting, and warrior way of life stopped to make sense – nothing happened. Using temporality as “a name for time as it is experienced in a way of life” (p. 40), Lear wrote that Plenty Coups (and other Crow members) witnessed the demise of a temporal framework: There was no longer a time when the buffalo would be hunted, a time when the warriors would plant sticks in preparation to battle the enemies, a time when they would move to a different part of the river valley.

In his discussion of the poetics of mourning among the Warao in Venezuela, Reference BriggsBriggs (2014) reminded us that the “poetics of lament are crucial … in suggesting how mourners repeatedly [take] images from a shattered external world and imbue them with wholeness, immediacy, and a sense of the real” (p. 319). Thus, Plenty Coups’s “witnessing of the breakdown of happenings” is reflected in the very poetics of his narrative by his refusal to speak of the time after the passing of the buffalo. As the ethnographic record has documented, in territories where populations face violence or political destruction, silence may be a sign of the victims’ struggle to make sense of a shattered world by scaling the experience down to the ordinary (see Reference ButlerButler, 1997; Reference DasDas, 2007; Reference Silva and SilvaSilva, 2017). In other words, in his narration of the collapse of temporality, Plenty Coups, the designated mourner of the Crow, engaged the past strategically by breaking off his narrative and refusing to speak of the traumatic past, and instead narrating the vibrant time before things ceased to happen.

The hope that helped the Crow overcome despair and a massive disorientation caused by the consequences of confinement has an important sociolinguistic dimension. The Crow calibrated a varied sort of communicative practices, genres, and other resources that enabled them to cultivate the appropriate virtues and affects to survive the devastation and strive as a group, among them the interpretation of dreams. As a common habit of the Crow, Plenty Coups was sent as a young boy off to nature to dream. The dream Plenty Coups had on this quest would be pivotal in two different moments of his life: in his early years, as a prophetic vision that he would become an authoritative figure in the group, and after the passing of the buffalo as a resource for grappling with an order that had changed. In his dream, Plenty Coups dreamt of a “Buffalo-bull who he knows is a Person who wants him” (Reference LearLear, 2006, p. 65). The Man-Buffalo first showed Plenty Coups a feeble old man and young Plenty Coups felt pity for him. Then the Man-Buffalo showed him the Chickadee-person, a man who is frail yet strong of mind, and told young Plenty Coups that the Chickadee “is a good listener” who “never intrudes, never speaks in strange company, and yet never misses a chance to learn from others” (p. 70). The elders interpreted the dream as an indication that the “buffalo will go away forever,” and read the feeble old man as Plenty Coups himself at a later age. The generic activity of cooperatively interpreting and recounting dreams was further nurtured to build up a practical reason in the aftermath of their subjective collapse. The tribe thus used Plenty Coups’ dreams as resources to “struggle with the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand” (p. 68). The Crow also pursued other resources, like writing and formal education, as practical forms of rebuilding their cultural frameworks. Witnessing the death of an entire form of life, Plenty Coups strategically collaborated with his white friend in order to have the story of the Crow preserved in writing. Additionally, his dream-vision was recontextualized in later Crow efforts to implement formal education within the group. The future generations were stimulated to cultivate the Chickadee’s virtue of active listening to learn from others by engaging in formal education.

Reference LearLear (2006) concluded that the hope that guided the Crow through an imaginative, cognitive, and temporal collapse caused by the “passing of the buffalo” – that is, by their confinement to a reservation by the U.S. government – was radical. Just as the elders interpreted the young Plenty Coups’s dream as indicating that their traditional way of life was “coming to an end,” they pursued novel resources – including education and a refashioning of temporality and collective interpretation of dreams – to imagine a possibility of survival. Lear suggests that this modality of hope was radical because it relied on modes of thinking and being that did not yet exist: “There would be ways of continuing to form oneself as a Crow subject – ways to flourish as a Crow – even though the traditional forms were doomed. This hope is radical in that it is aiming for a subjectivity that is at once Crow and does not yet exist” (p. 104).

Engaging Ethnography: Temporal Communities of Hope

Reference LearLear (2006) frames his theorization of the Crow’s survival of cultural collapse within anthropological philosophy. He justifies his epistemic choice in these terms: “I am not primarily concerned with what actually happened to the Crow tribe or to any other group. I am concerned rather with the field of possibilities in which all human endeavors gain meaning” (p. 7). Although the ethnographic and historical record from which Lear drew concerned itself with what actually happened to the Crow, Lear was instead interested in what would happen to a human group if, from a certain moment on, nothing happened. In this section, we will diverge from Lear’s method and look at ethnographic approaches to hope that are concerned not with “what would happen if” a given problem occurred to a group, but rather “what happens when” a given problem emerges. Unlike Lear, Reference MattinglyCheryl Mattingly (2010) locates her study on the practice of hope at the border zone where Black families caring for children diagnosed with cancer encounter health professionals at a Los Angeles hospital in a “philosophical anthropology.” The noun phrase “philosophical anthropology” – where “philosophy” figures as the modifier instead of the head of the noun phrase – gives precedence to her interest in a situated, rather than potential or universal, description of human action. Reference MattinglyMattingly (2010) explains her theoretical orientation in these terms:

Our point here, of course, is not to claim that philosophers of hope did not build their work on the real world, or that they relied on linear examples of realities that, empirically, are neither linear nor unified. Our interest in this section is in contrasting the imaginative exercise of a philosophy of hope to approaches that turn their “close-to-the-ground attention to the everyday.” In other words, our interest is, to borrow an expression from Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein (1953), to bring the philosophical pursuit of hope down to the ordinary, or to the forms of dialogue that we as ethnographers may generate with those who experience the processes on the ground.

An example of how the comparative and situated activity of anthropology might complexify a philosophical view of hope is Reference BlochBloch’s (1986) treatment of the future in his account of the affect. For Bloch, hope lies in “the horizon of the future to be attained” (p. 131). This “not yet” is what gives the present its meaning – “It gives to the flow of the present specific space, the space of new, feasibly better present” (p. 283). In his philosophical account, this orientation to the “new” places “the past as the ante-room,” and, through a Marxist dialectics, “gives reality its real dimension” (p. 285). Yet while at a given situation we may indeed hope for something that will happen in the future, in particular for something new that may overcome uncertainty or precarity from the past, the examination of empirical situations may locate hope in other renditions of temporality – in the immediate present, for example.

Perhaps echoing a Western ideology of linear time, Reference BlochBloch (1986) indicated that the practice of hope lies “in the horizon of the future” (p. 131). But what should we say of hope in conditions where “time [is] without horizons or [with] very foreshortened horizons” (Reference Del Vecchio Good, Munakata, Kobayashi, Mattingly and GoodDel Vecchio Good et al., 1994, p. 856), as is time, for instance, for patients diagnosed with terminal cancer? Is there still any space for hope as a temporal practice? This is one of the questions underlying the work of Reference AnteliusEleonor Antelius (2007), who studied a group of therapists and patients at a rehabilitation clinic for people diagnosed with severe brain damage in Sweden. Of four similar rehabilitation day centers in her fieldwork, this center – which she calls Boost – received the most acutely debilitated patients, both physically and verbally. Given the severity of their injury and their motor and verbal disability, the prospects for full recovery were either minimal or nonexistent. However, rather than hopelessness, Antelius found among most of the patients and especially among the therapists a reorientation of hope toward the present. The dominant narrative among therapists – cultivated in the context of the clinic but also in broader discourses of nursing as a practice of hope (Reference Kylmä, Lähdevirta and Vehviläinen-JulkunenKylmä et al., 2001) – was that while the condition of many of the patients was certainly not going to improve, it might deteriorate if the daily rehabilitation work was not carried out. Rather than transformative, hope in this context was conservative: Physical and speech therapy were oriented to at least maintaining a condition that, without proper work, might worsen. Of course, this did not prevent some patients from hoping for a drastic transformation for the better; but such a transformation for most of them was out of reach, given the severity of their respective conditions.

Alongside this temporal imagination, patients cultivated small goals – which the therapists called “carrots” – so that they might perform immediate, local, and attainable actions daily to prevent a deterioration of their physical condition. For Boost patients, time seemed fixed and foreclosed, but this did not prevent a persistent, daily action aided by therapists. Some patients did sometimes surrender to despair, but a narrative plot prevalent among Boost therapists led the latter to motivate disheartened patients to pursue the small goals of daily physical therapy. In this context, Reference AnteliusAntelius (2007) suggests, hope must still be thought of in relation to time. But it is precisely time that needs to be reconceived here: instead of being about linear time – or about a teleological future – “hope is an opening of time” (p. 325). For therapists, opening or recalibrating time means, for instance, avoiding talk about a past prior to the injury (which could cause distress, given the patient’s new condition). Further, it means avoiding discussions of a long term future and locating hope in the immediate present made up of “carrots,” small actions that can help to preserve a physical condition seen as contextually satisfactory. We should note that hope here remains a modality of action: “Although action taken today might not bring about any positive change in the future, it will allow for no negative change” (p. 334). Antelius concludes that, instead of being about the (better) future, hope “in relation to people with severe disabilities needs instead to be about the present and about achievements, right here, right now” (p. 339).

Reference KroskrityKroskrity (in press) also takes issue with universalizing theories of hope. Revisiting his five-decade ethnography with members of the Village of Tewa in Arizona and looking more closely at their moral call for action during the COVID-19 pandemic, he suggests that the hope driving actions to preserve Tewa culture and language is “conservative” rather than “prospective.” In contrast to the Crow’s “radical hope” – the hope for the emergence of a Crow subjectivity that did not exist yet – Kroskrity argues that the Tewa are “motivated to use their Indigenous traditions, including their distinctive language, in the present in order to bring about a future good life” (p. 29). Whereas the Crow were pressed to invent a radically new way of life because their traditional life had stopped making sense, the Tewa have preserved their traditional ways of life, including their linguistic ideologies of compartmentalization and purism, which have served the purpose of ensuring their survival as a group. Aimed at preserving a past to bring about a good present and future, the Tewa have aimed their actions not at the “novum” or “not yet” theorized by Bloch as the core of hope, but “at actions that would ensure they never have to confront a ‘not anymore’” (p. 30; see also Reference LempertLempert, 2018).

As we discuss later in this book, the movement of mourning for Marielle Franco predicates the participants’ hope in the present – an opening of time that reinscribes Marielle as politically and morally present even if biologically no longer among mourners. Our ethnographic case, like Antelius and Kroskrity’s cases, differs from philosophical renditions of the temporality and universality of hope. Yet while anthropology has a considerable record of ethnographic critique of philosophical universalization – as, for instance, in the critique to the universality of speech act theory by Reference RosaldoRosaldo (1982) and Reference CicourelCicourel (1987) and the ethnographic revisions of Gricean inferences by Reference Ochs KeenanOchs Keenan (1976), Reference HavilandHaviland (1997), and Reference Hanks and CosenzaHanks (2002) – the discipline has more to offer to our understanding of hope than situated critique of philosophical models. Reference MattinglyMattingly’s (2010) rendition of a “temporary [and] tenuous” (p. 216) community of hope at a children’s hospital that receives chronically ill Black patients in Los Angeles is a case in point. Mattingly bridges medical anthropology and narrative theory in examining what she calls the paradox of hope: “Biomedicine offers no cure. For many children, the prognosis is bleak. Thus cultivating a hopeful stance is paradoxical; it involves an ongoing conversation with embittered despair. To hope is to be reminded of what is not and what might never be” (p. 4). Even though her interactions in the hospital with patients, family members, and health professionals revealed that, paradoxically, “hope is on intimate terms with despair” (p. 3), she perceived among Black caregivers a narrative work focused on cultivating hope, even in the face of a prognosis that is “bleak” (p. 3). Mattingly found that even as Black family members navigate systemic inequalities, poverty, and structural racism, their narrative and semiotic work was grounded in avoiding despair. She suggests that narratives told by families connect “small scale dramas – particular historical events as experienced by particular historical actors in particular contexts – to larger social histories” (p. 217). Interlocutors like Andrena – the mother of Belinda, a child diagnosed with cancer who would eventually die – offer a good example of the “tactics,” in Reference de Certeaude Certeau’s (1984) sense, that peripheral subjects employ to navigate long standing inequities. In Andrena’s case, these tactics were also crucial to circumvent a sense of abandonment by the oncologist who treated Belinda. Even though her daughter did not survive, Andrena became active in local volunteer cancer organizations and eventually created her own foundation to raise funds to support parents with severely ill children. Andrena sought to advise parents in similar situations about basic everyday issues that were however ignored by clinicians and policymakers alike. Additionally, Andrena’s elder daughter pursued nursing training and eventually went on to work “at the same hospital where Belinda had been treated and Andrena volunteered” (p. 220).

Reference MattinglyMattingly’s (2010) conclusions about the practice of hope are manifold. They range from the importance of cultivating appropriate narratives for avoiding despair, to the complex connections between large-scale social problems including structural racism, and the micro-practices of care in everyday life. But fundamentally, in aid of our ensuing empirical examination of strategic cooperations between faveladas/os and subjects from other social groups, Mattingly’s argument about the “practice of creating communities in clinical borderlands” (p. 36) is particularly instructive. The use of the word “borderland” in Mattingly’s ethnography goes beyond the idea that borders in the contemporary world are porous. It refers to “practices that bind people together who otherwise wouldn’t belong together … It designates that flexible space in which healing is carried out, not only by health professionals, but also by patients and families” (p. 7). In her work, border spaces such as the hospital lobbies are privileged as sites of encounters across racial, economic, and cultural divides. These encounters involve frictions, hierarchies, and power, but they are also provisional spaces where hope is built: on the one hand, histories of the construction of medicine as a social force and the trajectories of racialization of Black people produce hierarchies and other patients as racially different; on the other hand, the collective practices of care for the sick demand “creating borderland communities between clinicians, patients, and families” (p. 216). Mattingly concludes that the “cultivation of hope depends upon the politics of this relational work, however temporary, however tenuous” (p. 216).

Another relevant ethnographic approach to hope and the making of community is Reference PandolfoStefania Pandolfo’s (2018) depiction of a “spiritual community of pain” (p. 7). Pandolfo carried out fieldwork in a psychiatric hospital in Morocco, and observes practices of psychic healing in both the psychiatric context (concerned with the psyche, the Greek word for the soul that became the focus of Western medicine) and Islamic spiritual practice (concerned with the nafs, the Islamic rendition of the soul). Pandolfo addresses the intersection of colonialism and psychic suffering in Morocco, and follows the spiritual work invested in healing a condition that one of her interlocutors, a Qur’anic therapist, called “soul choking.” In Reference PandolfoPandolfo’s (2018) words:

From this description, it is possible to understand that the imams that Pandolfo was in dialogue with are at once spiritual leaders and observers of the political and colonial situation in Morocco. She identifies a similarity between the work of some imams and the type of healing that Frantz Fanon pursued in the context of French colonialism in Algeria. Fanon had diagnosed a similar situation of “soul choking” among his patients in the psychiatric hospital, whose symptoms were at once psychic and political. As a psychiatrist and political activist, Fanon perceived a disruption of culture in places where the colonial enterprise had advanced. For example, in “Racism and Culture,” a lecture delivered to Black artists and writers, Reference FanonFanon (1964) described the “agony of culture,” a “destabilization” of Indigenous reference systems under colonial domination that is similar to the “disablement of the soul” (p. 34) described by the Qu’ranic iman. In Reference FanonFanon’s (1964) words:

“Culture in agony” is also a form of death in life experienced by subjects living under colonialism. Notice that Fanon contrasted the opening of cultural time (the “culture … once alive and open to the future”) and the fixity of colonial oppression. Reference PandolfoPandolfo (2018) comments that an “undead” culture is “a culture that Fanon sees as incapable of performing its work, ‘the work of culture,’ Kulturarbeit (parallel to Traumabeit, the ‘dream-work’), which Freud had seen as the condition of possibility of human fellowship, in the sublimation of unconscious drives into symbolic and spiritual creations” (pp. 7–8). Overcoming this state of mummification, in Fanon’s terms, involves a recognition of the conditions of oppression that make the work of culture fail. Identifying his experience alongside the suffering of the people of Algeria, where he lived in his late years, Fanon found that “the people dispersed and undead found a novel cohesion in [their] suffering, a spiritual community of pain, which became a rampart of the Algerian revolution” (Reference PandolfoPandolfo, 2018, p. 7). Challenging the border zone between life and death (where they remained “dispersed and undead”), subjects under French colonialism nevertheless reconfigured their individual suffering by identifying in other companions some traces of their own suffering and thus forming a “spiritual community of pain” (p. 7). Pandolfo points out that both the Qu’ranic therapist and Fanon pursued a diagnosis of the colonial situation that would enable them to lead others into resisting it. The imam suggested a “pedagogy of imagination” that is at once a spiritual cure and “a necessary shock, towards the reanimation of the soul” (p. 8). Fanon further imagined a “leap” as “the creative offspring of a realization of loss, an interruption that is also a fugitive coming to life, one that resists hardening into an identity” (p. 8). Against the paralysis and silence caused by colonial fixity, Fanon’s imagining of this leap is also a form of imagining the practice of hope. In this sense, Pandolfo quotes these lines from his Black Skin, White Masks: “I am not a prisoner of History … I must remember at all times that the real leap (véritable saut) is bringing invention into existence” (Fanon, 1952, as cited in Reference PandolfoPandolfo, 2018, p. 8).

Crucially, the temporal communities of hope that we addressed in this section – the village of Tewa, the border community at the rehabilitation center and the hospital, the Algerian and Moroccan spiritual communities of pain – are cultural formations that collectively resist despair through reimagining semiotic resources – for example, language compartimentation and preservation, recasting of action into the present, strategic cooperation, a leap to reinvention – and through enacting more or less provisional, more or less cohesive, more or less spiritual forms of attachment. Ethnography and contextual reading are necessary to understand their historical situationality and their political promises. In the next section, we will turn to sociolinguistic accounts of hope.

Hope in Sociolinguistics

The academic field of language in society has increasingly made visible the word “hope,” both as a research topic and as a “reorientation of knowledge” (Reference MiyazakiMiyazaki, 2004, p. 16) within the area. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the world, spawning uneven effects across a global spectrum of race, class, geographic region, gender, and sexuality. Given a crippling and uncertain scenario, scholars themselves have pursued resources to propel different modes of knowing, feeling, and relating to others. A few months after the World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus a pandemic in March 2020, the editors of Open Anthropology, a journal that thematically groups articles from the American Anthropological Association journals, centered their July 2020 issue on hope. In their editorial, Reference Han and AntrosioSallie Han and Jason Antrosio (2020) were explicit about the reasons for choosing this topic: “We have chosen ‘hope’ as the theme of the July 2020 issue of Open Anthropology because collectively we are living in times that feel rather desperate” (n.p.). In December 2020, Mie Hiramoto, Rodrigo Borba, and Kira Hall, the editors of Gender & Language, a journal that intersects studies of gender, sexuality, and sociolinguistics, dedicated their editorial to “Hope in the Time of Crisis.” They were unequivocal in explicating a view of hope as practical affection: “Hope, as an affective agency fuelling forms of refusal, carries the potential to change established gender orders. Hope is not an elusive, immaterial feeling; it is tangible in the ways people harness the strength to act” (p. 352). As in Open Anthropology, Gender and Language editors not only framed hope as an affective practice, but also emphasized it as an epistemic stance that can reconfigure the very ways we think about knowledge. With this in mind, in this section we will draw from some recent works in the field of language in society that explicitly call for refocusing matters in the field, in particular by balancing, juxtaposing, or confronting broader structural dynamics of domination to the work on the ground of subjects engaged in resisting and surviving the patterns of inequality we observe.

Particularly central to our inquiry is the fundamental sociolinguistic account of hope in Reference Heller and McElhinnyMonica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny’s (2017) critical history of sociolinguistic scholarship and its entanglements with the conditions of late capitalism. They have offered an avenue to advance our understanding of philosophical takes on hope, such as Reference BlochBloch (1986) and Reference LearLear (2006), by embedding metadiscourses of hope in the actual production of value in contemporary economic arrangements. By locating aspirations of hope in the bearings of language in social processes, Heller and McElhinny tell a reticulated story of how a specialized field like sociolinguistics has been produced in tandem with the emergence of the welfare state in the postwar period, out of the need to handle linguistic diversity in schooling, and other policy preoccupations. The increasing dismantling of the welfare state since the 1990s has also presented challenges for the field, and especially for the responses of social groups to the consequences of neoliberalism’s policies and cognitive frameworks that led to rising inequality and the dissolution of policies of redistribution, in addition to the incarceration of dispossessed populations, urban violence, among other problems. Hope, for Reference Heller and McElhinnyHeller and McElhinny (2017), is located in metadiscourses that respond to the disjunctures of the existing neoliberal governance across nation-state boundaries. Like the Crow metadiscourse of hope, these responses might involve new forms of “thinking about time, about place, and about personhood” (p. 228). While the structures of feeling (Reference WilliamsWilliams, 2014; see also Reference Park and TupasPark, 2015) in current geopolitical arrangements have fostered hatred against groups such as immigrants, sexual minorities, and racialized populations, grassroots movements and their coalitions have also searched for “forms of solidarity independent of state boundaries” (Reference Heller and McElhinnyHeller & McElhinny, 2017, p. 234), for “new possibilities of a democratic cosmopolitanism” (p. 234), and especially for “recapturing the commons” (p. 252), in other words, those terrains within commodified regimes that may provide more horizontal, less hierarchical forms of belonging, engaging, and flourishing. For Heller and McElhinny, alternative forms of projecting, describing, and using language are the core of these possibilities of reimagining the terrains, temporalities, and semiotic regimes where those who are most affected by political-economical inequalities may be able to strive.

A very direct call to adjust the focus of attention in studies of language in society is found in Reference BonninBonnin’s (2021) essay, “Discourse Analysis for Social Change: Voice, Agency, and Hope.” In it, he unpacks an ethnographic scene that, as seen from the perspective of his theoretical review of “voice” (Reference AghaAgha, 2005; Reference BakhtinBakhtin, 1986; Reference BonninBonnin, 2019) and “agency” (Reference Blommaert and RamptonBlommaert & Rampton, 2011; Reference HaylesHayles, 2012; Reference PennycookPennycook, 2018), points to the salience of the method of hope among those experiencing the effects of economic inequality. Bonnin recounts a scene from an interview with Ana, a woman who had worked for the Buenos Aires subway for twenty-five years. Ana offered him a well-humored response about her participation in building the subway union. Rather than focusing on categories of oppression such as the strenuous workload and even restrictions impeding their use of the bathroom, Ana provided an example of how workers mocked “supervisors and rulebooks alike” (p. 70). One of the rules imposed on subway workers in 1994 was that they could only drink mate with the bombilla (a drinking straw). Ana says that in 1997, as the workers had become bolder, they went about hiding the bombilla when the supervisor approached: “When we saw him coming, we would hide it. He would say ‘you’re drinking mate,’ and we’d reply ‘but without a bombilla!’ (laughs)” (Reference BonninBonnin, 2021, p. 69). In his analysis, Bonnin illustrates not only the complexity of voices that Ana embeds into her utterance, “the voices of the rulebook, of the supervisor and of the workers who collectively reinterpret institutional regulations – literally – in order to resist them” (p. 70), but also how Ana, “a spokesperson for the group” (p. 70), and union workers temporally built agency through engaging semiotic resources such as creativity, collective work, and humor. From 1994 to 1997, workers went on to “propose not simply to disobey the regulation, but to act on it – on its literal text – collectively, by combining objects, words and actions to generate an alternative interpretation” (p. 72). In the face of such an interactional text, Bonnin’s position is that the typical interest of critical language studies in dimensions such as “the denunciation of linguistic inequality, of dominant ideologies, of racism, of sexist discourses” (p. 75) should not eclipse the production of voice, agency, and hope among those who experience inequality on the ground. As usually a drive to denounce inequalities accompanies critical work in sociolinguistics, Bonnin pointed out two limits to using academia as a platform for such work. The first has to do with the reach of our publications: we tend to write for our peers in outlets that are unlikely to be read by (or afforded access to) the stakeholders in the realities we seek to critique. The second limit has to do with focus: “If we only privilege the analysis of practices of social control, ideological domination, discursive hegemony, sociolinguistic orders or dominant ideologies, we block our perception, and even our own imagination, to those voices that act for change” (p. 75). Bonnin’s conclusion resonates with similar ones in studies on agency, resistance, and hope (e.g., Reference Awayed‐BisharaAwayed-Bishara, 2021; Reference Charalambous, Charalambous, Zembylas, Theodorou, Panagiotopoulou, Rosen and StrzykalaCharalambous, Charalambous, Zembylas, & Theodorou, 2020; Reference MilaniMilani, 2022; Reference MahmoodMahmood, 2001, Reference Mahmood2005; Reference Moita LopesMoita Lopes, 2020; Reference Rampton, Charalambous and CharalambousRampton, Charalambous, & Charalambous, 2019), as well as our own perception of the agentive, non-melancholic, and proactive stance of faveladas/os when faced with the dynamics of social domination. In this regard, Reference MattinglyMattingly’s (2010) words about the frictional interplay of structure and agency are as critical as they are blunt: “Reality needs to be exposed as a space of possibility and not only of imprisonment or structural reproduction. Despite the immense power of oppressive social structures, reality is not summed up by their existence” (p. 39).

Reference Pérez-Milans and GuoMiguel Pérez-Milans and Guo (Grace) Xiaoyan (2020) provide an interesting reading of the dialectics of agency and structure that turns out to be applicable to our orientation to languaging hope. Ethnography becomes all the more pertinent to their study because they observe a form of communicative practice and structure of feeling – religion – that in secular discourses, including within academia, is readily conflated with uncritical adherence to domination on the part of pious subjects (see Reference AsadAsad, 2003; Reference MahmoodMahmood, 2005). In their ethnography on returnees to China who had converted to Christianity, Pérez-Milans and Guo critique the binary view that associates secularism with “values of rationality, reason and impartiality” (p. 204) and religion with the opposite of modernity (i.e., “backwardness, irrationality, emotion and bias” [p. 204]) as they instead attempt to see what claims and justifications their interlocutors found in religion “amid neoliberal pressures for professional success” (p. 199). In contrast to the image of the “successful” returnee in China – that is, someone who attained higher education at a prestigious school in the West and obtained one of the most prestigious jobs back in China – the profiles of Pérez-Milans and Guo’s interlocutors didn’t meet the standards of the “outstanding” student who climbs up the market ladder in China through “prestigious talent-attraction schemes” (p. 198). Their interlocutors on the ground found that such “schemes were out of reach for them,” and additionally had to cope with “a strong sense of isolation and overwhelming stress in coping with family and societal expectations for them to succeed academically and professionally” (p. 199). Such pressures and anxieties about professional “success” are well known and documented in the literature on the political economy of language (e.g., Reference Del PercioDel Percio, 2018; Reference Flubacher and Del PercioFlubacher & Del Percio, 2017; Reference HellerHeller, 2011; Reference Martín Rojo, Tollefson and Pérez-MilansMartín Rojo, 2018; Reference O’ReganO’Regan, 2021; Reference ParkPark, 2021; Reference Urciuoli and GreenhouseUrciuoli, 2010). What makes this study singular is that, as Reference BonninBonnin (2021) and Reference MattinglyMattingly (2010) suggested, its participants do not surrender to the “romance” of power and structure decoupled from the work on the ground of precarized subjects who tend to be semiotically erased from corporate and academic renditions alike. In other words, Pérez-Milans and Guo sought to identify hope as a “technology” (Reference AhmedAhmed, 2010, p. 181) that their subjects build within religion – which allows them to simultaneously produce a discourse register and a space “to build social relations of solidarity with others” amidst a “general state of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their experiences at university and work” (p. 200) – while at the same time attending to how both this space and register “(dis)enable … larger structures of inequality” (p. 200). Pérez-Milans and Guo handle the irreducible tension between structure and agency through a dialogue with interlocutors who feel inequality in their daily lives. The result is an epistemic effort to make visible “practices, experiences, feelings and subjectivities of those who seem to fall behind the official accounts of successful return” (p. 199) and, we should add, of those whose voices also fall behind some scholarly accounts.

The complex relationship between language and temporality that guides our work is a key them in Reference FabrícioBranca Fabrício’s (2022) work, which draws on renditions of temporality from Afrodiasporic traditions and Brazilian popular music to outline a general orientation in sociolinguistics for “hopeful futures” amidst “the sound of the past and the fury of the present” (p. 1). Fabrício recontextualizes a Yoruba saying that goes, “Exu matou um pássaro ontem com uma pedra que arremessou hoje,” or “Exu killed a bird yesterday with a rock he threw today” (p. 2). She intertwines this nonlinear view of time where the interpretation of the past is modified by actions in the present with lyrics that became emblematic of the struggle against Bolsonaro’s far-right agenda: “Já não posso sofrer no ano passado. Tenho chorado demais, tenho chorado pra cachorro. Ano passado eu morri, mas esse ano eu não morro … Revide,” which translates approximately to “I can’t keep suffering for what has happened. Enough bleeding, enough crying. Last year I died, not this year … Tomorrow cannot be the same old yesterday with a new name … Fight back” (p. 2). In 2019, a few months after Bolsonaro’s inauguration, these verses were performed by Emicida, a leading rapper in Brazil, Majur, a non-binary trans singer, and Pabllo Vittar, a drag queen artist, in a concert featured in the Netflix documentary AmarElo: É Tudo Pra Ontem, released in English as AmarElo: It’s All for Yesterday. They quickly became a symbol of strategic alliances of racial, economic, and sexual minorities against the conservative offensive that has attempted to crush Brazilian democracy. These lyrics echo different voices, including the original verses of Belchior, an artist born in Ceará, a state stigmatized as inferior in the country’s political and economic geography. Fabrício foregrounds these alternative ways of interpreting time, life, death, and sociality to think about the 2021 sociolinguistic scholarship on gender and sexuality. In the face of a pandemic that took millions of lives, Fabrício was particularly interested in asking “how colonial yesterdays and futures were reimagined with the stones thrown at the current gloomy timespace” (p. 3). In arguing that “there is only hope on a tightrope” (p. 13), she gauges the indeterminacy, friction, and multiplicity predicated in “agentive responses” to colonial, racist and heteropatriarchal reminiscences (p. 20). Through unsettling, crystalized views of time and space – for instance, by “moving southward” and seeking alternative alliances “beyond the traditional circuits of knowledge” – the works she revises project time, space, gender, sexuality, and language otherwise.

Finally, the last text that inspires our orientation to languaging hope returns us once more to the Brazilian context: Reference Borba, Peck, Stroud and WilliamsBorba’s (2019b) empirical analysis of a collective of activists in Rio de Janeiro that confronted hate speech by calibrating a “method of hope.” Building on Reference MiyazakiMiyazaki’s (2004) ethnographic argument that hope should be seen less as a subject and more as a method of reorienting and uniting knowledge and one’s stance on the future, Borba studied how the collective À Esquerda da Praça (To the Left of the Square) reoriented their collective action in 2015, when a stationery store in Praça São Salvador, a square in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, was vandalized with slurs in graffiti linking queer people to Dilma Rousseff, who at the time was facing impeachment proceedings. By connecting non-heterosexuals and the left with corruption, the vandalism simultaneously shunned them from the public space. For Borba, temporality was differently predicated in the iterations of hate and in the reinscriptions of hope. Reference Borba, Peck, Stroud and WilliamsBorba (2019b) writes that hate recycles the past: it is “past oriented; it encapsulates an encroached history of citations that produces semiotic vulnerability and by doing so materializes in the here and now macrosociological discourses” (p. 177). Instead of walking back into the past with additional hate speech, the activists reclaimed the square by spray-painting on the same wall two hands holding one another with rainbow beams emerging from them. The activists explored the indexical potential of language to reorganize a wounded past and propel action into a more affirmative future. This situated approach to language in relation to temporality is central to our understanding of languaging hope, a phenomenon that we intend to engage in fuller detail in the pages that follow.