Against Possibility: Time and Futurity in Asian North American Politics

When is the political future? Asian American and Canadian politics tend to look to the past for their visions of what is to come, greatly constraining their views of present political agency. This paper argues that Asian North American political thought has been hampered by an ontological problem of time, and that an alternative notion of political futurity is needed. Drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, I argue that the future has been misconstrued as possibility, prefiguring it in what is already known as possible (i.e. past) without asking after the conditions of the radically new. Against this ontological frame, I call for an approach to Asian North American futurities as potentials and desires in the real and undetermined present. Theology, I suggest, allows us to speak this futurity where conventional political language falters, opening our politics to articulations of newness beyond the possible.