Paper short abstract:

Research with activists and artists in Kampala highlights the influence of heritage narratives on the political imagination. Drawing on and disrupting the cultural archive can help activists imagine the world they want: "art sustains our spirits and imaginations."

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we (Emilie Flower and Ruth Kelly) reflect on research workshops with young urban artists and activists in Kampala (July 2017 and March 2018) using creative methodologies to break out of traditional roles, explore alternative ways of knowing and enlarge the scope of what development might mean. Achille Mbembe argues that art has the potential "to free us from the shackles of development both as an ideology and as a practice"; to pave a way for a "practice of the imagination" and the future-oriented struggle to "write our name in history" (Mbembe and Paulisson 2009). We argue that images and texts from the past, or heritage narratives, have a strong influence on the political imagination today, that is, the cognitive space available for imagining and articulating alternative futures. In our workshops, activists emphasised the value of repertoires of resistance drawn from the past - Buganda oral poetry traditions and 'madness' in feminist protest - and artists created pieces referencing and revealing these repertoires. Screenings of short films of the artists' work provided powerful methodological prompts for debate and analysis; rather than asking audiences to respond to a communication product with a clear message, the (often ambiguous) artistic outputs generated in this project acted as catalysts for lively discussions of new ideas about what development could look like and how it could be framed. Drawing on and disrupting the cultural archive helped participating activists "to imagine and create the world we want …art sustains our spirits and imaginations."