Anti-Utopias
Ursula K Le Guin recently said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In the US, the rich elite are getting richer, while police continue to kill black and brown people; and so we do not live in a dystopia, we live in an anti-utopia— a foreclosed utopia in which the common horizon has been removed. In this instability we see the possibility for rupture, (on both the left and the right), as seen with the #blacklivesmatter movement, Syriza, Podemos, and Gezi Park. What do we want? Who is that ‘we’? A marginal adjustment to the status quo, or something more extreme? If we had the emotional space to dream, what would we dream?
This panel will explore our capacity to imagine alternatives to existing paradigms. If we cannot imagine a new reality will we ever see it?
Moderated by Allison Burtch, with Salome Asega, Seda Gürses, and Eva Franch i Gilabert.
“It’s not that everything feels impossible, it’s that we are constantly trying to reimagine the limits of the possible.”
Further Reading
STARHAWK // Dreaming in the Dark
ALICE WALKER // A Poem Traveled Down My Arm
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER // Parable of the Sower