Loving the Self, Imagining Otherwise: A Case for Self-Love and Its Speculative Possibilities

Love is in the air and on the brain. From the Greeks’ four-part identification of love as eros, philia, storge, and agape to Rihanna’s Tik-Tok–resurgent 2016 hit “Love on the Brain,” love has been engaged in various ways. In this article, I focus on a single manifestation of love: self-love. Given both the uptick in scholarly considerations of love, with some celebrating its radical potential and others bemoaning its conservative investments, and the energetic contemporary public discourse on self-love, whether as representative of neoliberal individualism or as a necessary means to reclaim marginalized bodies, a turn to self-love is especially timely. In this essay, I suggest that self-love can be a potent relational praxis with the capacity to unsettle dominant, hierarchical modes of being, knowing, and relating. Self-love, I contend, helps us think in terms of otherwise possibilities and beyond extant grammars of liberation, diversifying our political and analytical arsenal beyond the affordances of more presentist intersectional analyses. I make my case by turning to radical Black articulations of self-love as exemplified by James Baldwin and by a second-wave tradition of Black feminist love-politics that includes Audre Lorde and June Jordan. I bring these articulations into conversation with a particularly generative critical-creative site: contemporary Caribbean speculative fiction, specifically Popisho, by Leone Ross. In the process, I offer speculative fiction as an aesthetic practice that is also a practice of what I call “(un)worlding.” By bringing these varied texts and contexts together, I emphasize the necessary, oftentimes uncomfortable work of practicing radical self-love as a means to liberatory living. As a means to otherwise.