by Oppositional Conversations Editorial Board
In a journal entitled Oppositional Conversations does the term “contestation” seem redundant?
Imagine two hands palm to palm rubbing against one another and creating friction. The contact in that friction can produce heat, or traction, or exchange. Imagine now two fists meeting knuckle to knuckle, banging into and bouncing off one another. Contestation can come from the difference between these two motions of contact. It is both the space between two palms touching and the collision of knuckle meeting knuckle. Contestation can be fluid or can come from a place where there is no give. It can come from being trapped between two irreconcilable positions battling for supremacy.
We wondered what would be produced if we framed contestation as something other than a compulsion to resolve conflicting claims, desires, or views. Contestation on its own can simply be a state of being, a place where disagreement lives. Contestation is a space that many of us occupy as a location from which to pose questions. In this issue we attempt to inhabit contestation as constituting an unresolved continuum of exchange that might lead to more than a compromised reconciliation or the stagnation of incommensurability.
Disagreement is one of the driving forces of our editorship. Our disagreements are often generative. They spark fires of creativity, the thrill of inquiry, a flow of ideas. In our call for papers, we opened the door and invited contributors to engage with the notion of contestation. Our authors come from a range of disciplines. They consider contestation in relation to harm and redress, Black feminism, land reform in South Africa, embodied research, the electoral process in Ecuador, and patterned scales of morphology. Feel free to engage with these articles in whatever order appeals to you.
From the inception of this journal, we envisioned a strong, engaged relationship amongst readers, authors, and editors. We invite you to join us in the conversation.
—The Editors
O. Hugo Benavides
Zine Magubane
Maurice Stevens
Cally L. Waite