Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In Freedom Dreams, Robin Kelley writes reverently about political dreaming, arguing for the importance of utopian imagination to the project of political change. Conversely, George Sorel’s work on radical political action moves toward what Edward Shils calls “apolcalypticism” in which the actions of political outsiders are marked by the real, or perhaps merely fantasized, confrontation with the existing social/political order. This paper fleshes out a responding formulation about political imagination by asking, ““How is political imagination on the U.S. left informed, animated and/or limited by historical and putatively ethical understandings about violence and non-violence?” In order to answer this question, I turn to creative work as an archive of political imagination. The read historical pieces such as Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and Betye Saar’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” alongside contemporary pieces like the dis/uptopian novels The Knitting Circle: Rapist Annihilation Squad and Sarai Walker’s Dietland in order to consider the range of different ways that imaginary violence has been used to theorize political possibility.