Ian Reilly

Decolonial Media Imaginaries

A bold inquiry into media imaginaries and imaginaries-work as tools of decolonial resistance, worldmaking, and collective futurity.Decolonial Media Imaginaries (DMI) begins from the basic premise that imaginaries play a crucial role in articulating and elaborating identity, community, and solidarity-particularly through their function in the collaborative shaping of ways of life and living. Historically, however, such imaginaries have been structured by the imperatives of colonialism, capitalism, and global neoliberal expansion. Through the prism of contemporary decolonial politics, the book aims to decentre enduring imaginaries rooted in colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal fantasies about what constitutes the good life, in favour of centring decolonial imaginaries that redraw the lines of possibility surrounding emancipatory futures for human and more-than-human worlds. DMI presents a concise overview of the terrain prepared by decolonial thinkers (broadly conceived) to foreground the strategies, tools, tactics, and praxis that may be useful in bringing decolonial futures more closely within reach. This wide-ranging work explores ideas surrounding spectacle and display, corporatized technological fantasy, energy infrastructure, community-centred storytelling, pedagogical reparations, artworld decolonial praxis, and Black and Indigenous media futures. The book offers a speculative yet theoretically engaged discussion of how imaginaries-work contributes to a vital redrawing of shared futures grounded in justice, relationality, and collective flourishing.