Radical Imagination, Radical Equality (NeMLA)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Inspired by Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto, how can we listen to and amplify the voices at the margins that are dismissed or silenced because they are otherwise rejected as naive or impossible for embracing the whole? How can we help each other refrain from “policing the parameters of imagination” (ix) as we are often trained to do, and openly encounter the collective imaginations of others? How can we together learn to take on the challenge that radical imagination begs for radical equality?
In the “Preface” of her work, Ruha Benjamin models a practice of the imagination that is “undisciplined, promiscuous, and porous.” (ix) She writes, “... I refuse to police the parameters of imagination. I want more than anything for your imagination to run wild.” (ix) This running isn’t into any kind of avoidant fantasy world, but involves an intentional listening to and deep analysis of the sufferings and diverse ways of being in our world. It implies, Duha Benjamin clarifies, “collective imagination,” (x) and she sees her work as “a field guide for seeding an imagination grounded in solidarity, in which our underlying interdependence as a species and with the rest of the planet is reflected back at us in our institutions and social relationships.” (8)
Although we seek undisciplined imaginations, such a practice requires an unworking of our dogmatic ways of thinking.
Deleuze and Guattari - microfacism, concept creation
Martin Luther King Jr. - “inescapable network of mutuality”
Jacques Ranciere - equality, consensus, hatred of democracy
Judith Butler - interrelationality, nonviolence
Kristin Ross - commune form
Ursula Le Guin’s worlds
Karen Barad - agential realism, intra-action, entanglement
Rivers Solomon - collective memory, fungal turn
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson - moral clarity does not imply naivety
All abstract submissions must be done through the NeMLA portal link:
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21982
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21982
Vern Walker