Affirmative Refusals: Reclaiming Political Imagination with Bonnie Honig and Lola Olufemi

Abstract

This article reconstructs Bonnie Honig's A Feminist Theory of Refusal (2021) and brings it into dialogue with Lola Olufemi's Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021). I set out by showing how both Olufemi and Honig reclaim radical political imagination in a time of vanishing alternatives, focusing on the notion of refusal as well as on the powers and limitations of the historical archive. Second, I retrace Honig's way of conceptualizing feminist refusal by taking up three 'refusal concepts,' namely inoperativity (Agamben), inclination (Cavarero), and fabulation (Hartman) via a reading of Euripides's Bacchae tragedy. In Honig, the play serves a double purpose: it exemplifies and critically radicalizes the three refusal concepts that she envisages. Turning to Olufemi, the idea is that her Experiments can be read in a similar way in regard to Honig's own reflections: namely as both exemplifying and challenging various aspects of Honig's refusal theory, thus further radicalizing political imagination.