Browsing by Subject "Radicalism"
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Item Open Access Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World(2021) Kārkliņa, AnastasiaMy dissertation, Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World, examines abolitionist imagination in the cultural production of black American writers, creatives, activists, and thinkers. From its inception in the nineteenth century, abolitionism has evolved from a social movement to abolish the institution of chattel slavery to a political tradition. Presently, abolition is as a critical method of understanding the genealogy of contemporary practices of racialized social management as an extension of racial subjugation that originated during the era of plantation slavery in the United States. Because the concept of abolition fundamentally grapples with the question of radical social transformation, it also raises a set of questions about the dual tension between hope and despair, optimism and pessimism, fugitivity and enclosure. At its core, abolition is about sustaining the capacity to imagine an otherwise, despite and in spite of violence, captivity, and coercion. With this in mind, this dissertation asks: what is the role of radical imagination in not only envisioning the destruction of existing social structures but in conjuring up and bringing forth abolitionist futures?
In the growing body of academic literature on the subject, abolition is most often considered from the perspective of political theory. In media, contemporary abolitionists are often portrayed as radical militants, who desire violence and destruction. These accounts of abolition do not sufficiently consider the creative impulse that is inherent to abolitionist thought. Black creative imagination, I argue, is fundamental to abolitionism as in itself a form of social critique that draws on speculative imagination to deconstruct reality. In this project, I turn to creative imagination expressed in the twentieth- and twenty-first century black-authored literary and artistic texts that envision the abolition of the social world by imagining alternative futures and speculating about new ways of being in the world. By engaging a range of aesthetic forms across several genres and mediums, I trace abolitionist thinking in black speculative fiction, contemporary multi-media art, and digital activist culture precisely in order to suggest the importance of taking seriously the imaginative potential of abolitionism.
The examples of imaginative cultural criticism, as it pertains to abolitionist thought, can be located in the science fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois and in the horror fiction of Jewelle Gomez, in the contemporary mixed-media art of Titus Kaphar and Harmonia Rosales, as well as in digital art produced by digital users on social media platforms. These creative works uncover the ways in which abolitionist imaginary makes an appearance in black cultural and intellectual production that is not immediately considered to be ‘political,’ let alone abolitionist. Nevertheless, as I suggest, it is precisely these obscure creative works of abolitionist imagination that can help understand the many contingencies of abolitionist thought in the present day and, more precisely, help answer the question of what it means to locate and engage in the practice of radical hope in the face of insurmountable violence in slavery’s afterlife.
Item Open Access The Death and Life of the American Novel: Radicalism and the Transformation of U.S. Literature in the 1960s(2020) Mitchell, Justin DavidThe sixties have long been regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American novel. In the seventies and eighties critics tended to assume that the era dealt a deathblow to social realism and, by extension, the dream of the Great American Novel. Today the prevailing view is that no such thing occurred; on the contrary, as black, feminist, and queer voices took center stage in American life and fiction during the sixties, the novel enjoyed something of a renaissance. While this assessment of sixties literature holds true, it needs to be expanded to account for how the novel diversified in other important ways. The Death and Life of the American Novel: Radicalism and the Transformation of U.S. Literature in the 1960s shows how sixties novels, including those by women and people of color, shifted the locus of political life away from the industrial proletariat to figures previously deemed superfluous to class struggle—housewives, welfare mothers, outlaws, students, and queer bohemians. This shift revealed possibilities for revolutionary agency overlooked in traditional proletarian literature and orthodox Marxism. In the sixties, novelists discovered the feminine domestic sphere, the culture industry, and the administrative state as axes of false consciousness and radicalization. Framing their work in terms of its diverse explorations of political subjectivity not only brings to light how they found new ways to represent class struggle’s imbrications with racial and sexual identity, but also how they engaged critically with twentieth-century social protest movements.