“Aspirational” and “Prefigurative Translation” Reconciled

Prefigurative politics has functioned as an important prism through which scholars and activists address the challenge of solidarity in social movements and revolutionary endeavours. However, in a recent article, Baker argues that prefiguration is no longer attuned to the level of destruction and despair that communities are facing in our torn twenty-first century, and advances the concept of “aspiration”. This chapter critically engages with the contrast that Baker establishes between prefiguration and aspiration and argues that reconciling prefiguration and aspiration in a contemporary theory and practice of solidarity translation is not only epistemologically possible but also politically necessary. Drawing on ethnographies of the global justice movement, it provides a polyphonic, longitudinal, and multi-sited account of the ways in which antiglobalization protests, the Social Forum, Babels, and the language justice movement have framed the time, space, and language of solidarity and social change. It argues that, in our increasingly dystopic society, it is at intersection of prefiguration and aspiration that the potential for translational actors to heal and rebuild solidarities may dwell.