The Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes our contemporary condition as a “bad world”—not irredeemably evil, but one in which the structural conditions for a good order of life have been undermined worldwide. Unending geopolitical and civilizational conflicts, a deepening trust deficit in Western political systems, the gathering effects of climate crises, and the recurrence of disasters across the globe confront individuals with the insignificance of their own power. Meaning is no longer made at the scale of the person but outsourced to global flows that exceed any single life. If pessimism appears less a temperament than the ambient condition of individual existence, it is because the world itself seems to have foreclosed on a promising future.

Optimism has long been an object of critical vigilance in theoretical production. Scholars like Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman have cautioned, indispensably, against optimism’s entanglement with liberal individualism and its compensatory fantasies. These interventions teach us that desire for the future can itself be an obstacle to flourishing, and that the future is often a screen for normative politics rather than a site of genuine transformation.

Yet vigilance need not harden into foreclosure, for the critique of optimism has never been the whole story. Alongside it runs an alternative vision for which optimism names neither compulsory positivity nor willed blindness, but a sustained investment in what the future might hold. It registers an openness to change that is neither naive nor passive, but a form of world-making in its own right. To reclaim optimism today is not to deny the “badness” of the world, but to insist that the future remains a site of contestation rather than a closed horizon. It is to affirm that the desire for a different world, however contested, is itself a political and existential necessity.

If that investment is to be articulated against the grain of a “bad world,” however, it cannot rest on subjective feeling alone. It must be located in the patterns, structures, and conventions that give shared shape to new possibilities—in short, in form. For this reason, this panel pursues the rethinking of optimism through form. Aesthetic forms per se may be precisely where optimism is articulated, tested, and renewed.

Our central questions include: how do forms of various kinds precipitate the articulation of optimism, with a vision that spans the world, especially the Global South? In what aesthetic moments does optimism become thinkable again? What formal features (like rhythm, seriality, endings, repetition, genre, voice) give it expression? Might optimism itself take the shape of formal contestation: a resistance, within a work, to whatever cancels positive conceptions of the future or disavows the expectation of a good turn? And can the comparative study of forms across languages and traditions loosen optimism from its liberal-normative frame?