Page - 14 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

14 siting futurity Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement. Hern asks “how to establish solidarity across difference when our shared histories are so dominated by violent violations of trust?” (Hern 2016, 98–99), and his answer, which motivates his methodology of talking to as many people involved in the area he is working on as possible, is “to find ways to enact trustworthiness repeatedly and deliberately and consistently” (ibid., 99). As I share Hern’s love of the idea of thinking and acting “a material commonal- ity” and “radically abandon[ing] the ‘law of scarcity’” (ibid., 99), I too went looking for “some inspirations, some new ideas in action, where imagination meets struggle” (ibid., 100). Unlike Hern, whose focus on new ideas leads him to ways to rethink “the city as postsovereign space” and “urban land beyond prop- erty” (ibid., 233), Vienna sprang to my mind as an apposite lens with which to focus on imaginative struggle in the context of urbanism. This leads to my third goal: “to identify problems and topics that clearly communicate why the humanities matter in contem- porary society” (Apter 2013, 5). I take this challenge from Emily Apter’s Against World Literature, a text I was looking forward to teaching in a seminar on Comparative and World Literature when the 2018 strike intervened. As an Anglophone comparatist at a Canadian university that only allowed a graduate diploma of Comparative Literature to be established when it was bun- dled together with a graduate diploma of World Literature, I am sympathetic to Emily Apter’s arguments against the increasing monolingual hegemony of World Literature, especially as David Damrosch and Martin Pichler have been institutionalizing it at Harvard with the formation of an annual world literature sum- mer institute, on the one hand, and MOOCs (Massive Open On- line Courses), on the other. This liberal retrenchment serves to fix “literature” in its eighteenth-century meaning of imaginative fiction by excluding the theoretical notions of écriture and tex- tuality that have been hallmarks of Comparative Literature since that discipline helped to usher French theory into the North American academy in the 1970s. This retrenchment is part of the larger, dual backlash we are currently experiencing against