(Im)possible Realism. A Counterpoint.

Impossible Realism is a conversation, a textual counterpoint, that was triggered by some “difficult” archival photos Mollona found during his field research in a Brazilian industrial town. He asked Clifford to discuss these images, and the exchange soon revolved around the challenge of representing cultural and class differences in situations of rapid change. How to engage, non-reductively, with multiple post-Western, histories? The authors discovered a shared commitment to ethnographic complexity and reflexivity, an approach developed in their different, but complementary, attempts to understand working class and Indigenous socio-cultural formations. They explored a common debt to Marxism and an appreciation for the work of Stuart Hall. Im)possible Realism represents this conversation in the form of alternating voices. This Dialogue will continue in the next issue of VAR.