This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Ursula K. Le Guin’s anti-war novella The Word for World is Forest.
Written during the Vietnam conflict, The Word for World is Forest depicts a distant world invaded by human beings who are desperate for natural resources. It tells the tale of an alien culture that resists the invasion, but is forever changed by the decision.
The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures calls for abstracts for a multidisciplinary virtual symposium that aims to bring together activists, organizers, and scholars to consider the ways in which Le Guin’s tale can help us to diagnose social injustices in the present moment, and to imagine the ways we can catalyze solidarities to achieve more just futures.
Rather than strictly academic discussions or literary critiques, we are looking for presentations that take Le Guin’s novella as a basis for understanding themes such as oppression, patriarchy and toxic masculinity, racial justice, resistance, colonialism/imperialism, nonviolence and armed struggle, environmental justice, intersectional solidarity in the world today. We are especially interested in how the tale might help us develop strategies for mutual aid and community organizing against injustice today.
The symposium will be held on-line over Zoom on Friday, October 14, 2022.
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words by midnight (Pacific Time) Friday, September 9, 2022 using the submission form below.
The TrekWars@OSU collective (Dr. Randall Milstein, Dr. Joseph Orosco, and Dr. Jason Scully) gathered together again to discuss the best science fictions stories of 2021. We chose to talk about those sci-fi narratives that most impacted us in some way, either by engaging in innovative storytelling or by engaging us in thinking about future possibilities in new ways.
Our choices for best science fiction for 2021 were:
We all agreed that the science fiction product that most underwhelmed us was : Dune 2021.
Along the way, we noticed that the theme of rendering care to young people was a growing theme in a lot of science fiction stories this year. We also discussed whether science fiction in the last thirty years has been hemmed in by a cyber punk aesthetic (blended with a neoliberal capitalist reality) that makes it very difficult to imagine, in Jason Scully’s words, a future of “exuberance”.
Let us know what you think. Did we miss something you think helps us grow a radical imagination (quite frankly–there was a lot)? (You can also watch our Best of Sci-Fi 2020 here.)
I was listening to the interview with Questlove on NPR the other day. He was talking about the new documentary he produced (Summer of Soul) on the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 and discussing the performance of the group, The Fifth Dimension. The Fifth Dimension, for me, is always connected with the songs from the musical, Hair, namely “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” so I always associated them with images of the largely white, hippie, Woodstock generation. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who made this association. In the film, lead singer Marilyn McCoo talks about how important it was for them to perform at the festival:
“MARILYN MCCOO: We were constantly being attacked because…
CORNISH: Marilyn McCoo, a member of The 5th Dimension – she teared up while watching footage of their performance.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “SUMMER OF SOUL”)
MCCOO: Sometimes we were called the Black group with the white sound. We didn’t like that. That was one of the reasons why performing in Harlem was so important to us – because we wanted our people to know what we were about.”
Hearing this made me go back to listen to the songs again and to see if I could find any videos of them from the era. And what popped out at me was that The Fifth Dimension can definitely be thought of Afrofuturist in 1969, and those songs from ‘Hair” as being infused as messages from what Robin D.G. Kelley calls the Black Radical Imagination.
In terms of the Afrofuturist aesthetic, check the the original video for “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”:
I’ve also been reading Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams” (2002) and came across this important passage:
“Progessive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does; transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.”
Kelley thinks music is an important component of social movements because they give life to this poetic/radical imagination:
“When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets–no matter the medium–who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.”
With all of this in the background, I have started to hear “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” in a new way, as part of the tradition of those freedom dreams from the Black Freedom Movement: spirituals, blues, jazz, and soul. Especially when you look at the lyrics, these songs are definitely in that utopian tradition of imagining a different world in order to provide hope and soothe pain in the struggles of the present.
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius
Aquarius
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Oh, let it shine, c’mon
Now everybody just sing along
Let the sun shine in
Open up your heart and let it shine on in
When you are lonely, let it shine on
Got to open up your heart and let it shine on in
And when you feel like you’ve been mistreated
And your friends turn away
Just open your heart, and shine it on in
During the Occpy Wall Street, groups of activists organized a spaced called the people’s library. Thousands of books and magazine were organized to be available for free to whomever wanted to come to the encampment and find literature and radical scholarship that could help them make sense of Occupy or the issues behind the movement. The People’s Liberary inspired dozens of other projects in across the country where local activists tried to make books and other media available as part of collctive liberation efforts When the encampment in Zucotti park was finally demolished by the police, most of those books were confiscated and ended up in the landfill.
We recently sat down to talk to someone who is working in Albuquerque New Mexico to build a project with similar goals and aspirations. Fiadh is an activist who has created the The People’s Library of ABQ. She has been an anarchist organizer in many different spaces for a while now, but within the last year decided to create a lending library of radical books and zines. The People’s Library ABQ describes itself as “a community project of leftist theory anarchist history and radial education. We have books about queer, feminist, antiracist theory, indigenous resistance, transformative justice, philosophy and revolutionary thought”
We sat down with Fiah to discuss her inspirations for the project and to learn how it works, and how she would like it to grow in order to offer works that inspire the radical imagination to a broader audience.
You can watch the full interview at our YouTube channel:
Dear Commissioners Augerot, Malone, and Jaramillo:
This June, you issued a statement in response to the historic protests across the globe reacting to the killing of George Floyd. You recognized that communities were gathering together to “give voice to the centuries of inequality, exploitation and abuse suffered by Black and African American people in our country” and added, “The demands for change cannot go unanswered.” As part of your commitment, you dedicated yourselves to listening to the concerns of disadvantaged communities and to examining the ways in which the County might participate in historic racism. You promise that “All systems that reinforce oppression and racism must be thoroughly examined, changed where needed and rebuilt in coordination with the people that have been historically disenfranchised.”
I suggest that one of the tasks the Board needs to consider is renaming the County.
Benton County is named in honor of US Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who served in federal government for some thirty years from 1820 to 1850. He was instrumental in the promotion of settlement of the Oregon Territory. Though he never set foot in Oregon, he is considered someone whose political career was dedicated to the cause of opening the West for Americans.
However, Senator Benton was a notorious white supremacist. His championing of the Oregon Trail was so that white Americans could displace Native American tribes who he considered “savage” and “uncivilized.” He thought that Western expansion was a good idea in order for European and Christian ideals to spread to Asia and transform those cultures. Though he did work to end slavery in the United States, it was not because he considered African Americans equal to white people, but because the issue threatened the stability of the Union.
In 2017, Oregon State University, responding to student concerns and protests, initiated a review of building names on campus, including Benton Hall. I was the co-chair of the committee involved in organizing the review process. A team of professional historians investigated the background of Senator Benton and the naming of the building. While OSU chose to remove Senator Benton’s name from the building for reasons other than his historical legacy, historians found the legacy of Senator Benton to be “controversial and discomforting” because of his support of Native American removal and a white supremacist promotion of Manifest Destiny. This report can be found at:
One way to remedy the harm to Native Americans caused by Senator Benton would be to rename the County after the Kalapuya people who were displaced by the United States from this area in 1855. There is precedent for this in Oregon, since ten of thirty-six counties are named after Native American tribes or use Native American names. The Board should consider consulting tribal historians and officials from Grand Ronde. Nearby Lane County is also involved in a process of reviewing its name for similar reasons.
If the Benton Country Board of Commissioners is truly interested in “dismantling” and “deconstructing” Oregon’s history of systemic oppression, then it should cease to honor one of the politicians who dedicated most of his life’s work to laying the foundations for it.
We want to offer another view. “Dystopia” is a powerful but overused term. It is not a synonym for a terrible time.
The question for us as politicalscientists is not whether things are bad (they are), but how governments act. A government’s poor handling of a crisis, while maddening and sometimes disastrous, does not constitute dystopia.
Today’s empty city streets capture the feeling of a dystopian time. Getty/Roy Rochlin
Dystopia is not a real place; it is a warning, usually about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, but real-life governments can be “dystopian” – as in, looking a lot like the fiction.
Defining a dystopia starts with establishing the characteristics of good governance. A good government protects its citizens in a noncoercive way. It is the body best positioned to prepare for and guard against natural and human-made horrors.
Good governments use what’s called “legitimate coercion,” legal force to which citizens agree to keep order and provide services like roads, schools and national security. Think of legitimate coercion as your willingness to stop at a red light, knowing it’s better for you and others in the long run.
No government is perfect, but there are ways of judging the imperfection. Good governments (those least imperfect) include a strong core of democratic elements to check the powerful and create accountability. They also include constitutional and judicial measures to check the power of the majority. This setup acknowledges the need for government but evidences healthy skepticism of giving too much power to any one person or body.
Federalism, the division of power between national and subnational governments, is a further check. It has proved useful lately, with state governors and mayors emerging as strong political players during COVID-19.
Three kinds of dystopias
Bad governments lack checks and balances, and rule in the interest of the rulers rather than the people. Citizens can’t participate in their own governance. But dystopian governments are a special kind of bad; they use illegitimate coercion like force, threats and the “disappearing” of dissidents to stay in power.
Our book catalogs three major dystopia types, based on the presence – or absence – of a functioning state and how much power it has.
There are, as in Orwell’s “1984,” overly powerful governments that infringe on individual lives and liberties. These are authoritarian states, run by dictators or powerful groups, like a single party or corporate-governance entity. Examples of these governments abound, including Assad’s murderously repressive regime in Syria and the silencing of dissent and journalism in Russia.
The great danger of these is, as our country’s Founding Fathers knew quite well, too much power on the part of any one person or group limits the options and autonomy of the masses.
Then there are dystopic states that seem nonauthoritarian but still take away basic human rights through market forces; we call these “capitocracies.” Individual workers and consumers are often exploited by the political-industrial complex, and the environment and other public goods suffer. A great fictional example is Wall-E by Pixar (2008), in which the U.S. president is also CEO of “Buy ‘N Large,” a multinational corporation controlling the economy.
There are not perfect real-life examples of this, but elements are visible in the chaebol – family business – power in South Korea, and in various manifestations of corporate political power in the U.S, including deregulation, corporate personhood status and big-company bailouts.
Lastly there are state-of-nature dystopias, usually resulting from the collapse of a failed government. The resulting territory reverts to a primitive feudalism, ungoverned except for small tribal-held fiefdoms where individual dictators rule with impunity. The Citadel versus Gastown in the stunning 2015 movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a good fictional depiction. A real-life example was seen in the once barely governed Somalia, where, for almost 20 years until 2012, as a U.N. official described it, “armed warlords (were) fighting each other on a clan basis.”
Fiction best describes dystopia – as in this reference to the landmark dystopian novel, ‘1984,’ by George Orwell. Getty/Schöning/ullstein bild
Fiction and real life
Indeed, political dystopia is often easier to see using the lens of fiction, which exaggerates behaviors, trends and patterns to make them more visible.
But behind the fiction there is always a real-world correlate. Orwell had Stalin, Franco and Hitler very much in mind when writing “1984.”
Atwood, whom literary critics call the “prophet of dystopia,” recently defined dystopia as when “[W]arlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanized, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall.”
Some of this may be, as Atwood added, the “cusp of where we are living now.”
But the U.S. is not a dystopia. It still has functioning democratic institutions. Many in the U.S. fight against dehumanization and persecution of minorities. Courts are adjudicating cases. Legislatures are passing bills. Congress has not adjourned, nor has the fundamental right of habeas corpus – the protection against illegal detention by the state – (yet) been suspended.
Crisis as opportunity
And still. One frequent warning is that a major crisis can cover for the rolling back of democracy and curtailing of freedoms. In Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a medical crisis is the pretext for suspending the Constitution.
In real life, too, crises facilitate authoritarian backsliding. In Hungary the pandemic has sped democracy’s unraveling. The legislature gave strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to rule by sole decree indefinitely, the lower courts are suspended and free speech is restricted.
Similar dangers exist in any number of countries where democratic institutions are frayed or fragile; leaders with authoritarian tendencies may be tempted to leverage the crisis to consolidate power.
But there are also positive signs for democracy.
A sign ‘We are in this together’ is written in chalk on the sidewalk in front of NYU Langone Medical Center during the coronavirus pandemic on April 22, 2020 in New York City. Getty/John Lamparski
In politics, Wisconsin primary voters risked their lives to exercise their right to vote during the height of the pandemic. Citizens and civil society are pushing federal and state governments to ensure election safety and integrity in the remaining primaries and the November election.
Despite the eerie silence in public spaces, despite the preventable deaths that should weigh heavily on the consciences of public officials, even despite the authoritarian tendencies of too many leaders, the U.S. is not a dystopia – yet.
Overuse clouds the word’s meaning. Fictional dystopias warn of preventable futures; those warnings can help avert the actual demise of democracy.
Right now, your Black sisters and brothers are depending on you to make this country a safer place for them to live, work and raise their children. That can only happen if white people hold other white people accountable for behavior which makes Black people feel isolated, stressed out, and in danger.
There is no simple way to do this.
In the long run, we are going to have to change the way key institutions function, the way history is taught, and how resources are allocated, but individual white people do have influence over how their white friends, co-workers, and family members conduct themselves in public
The most important thing you can do is come to the defense of Black people in your neighborhood, on the job, on your team, in your college residence hall or in a store or on the street when they are being racially profiled, intimidated or attacked, whether it is by a boss, a coach, by law enforcement, their teammates or fellow students, or by random people they encounter. In this society, it is the job of white people of conscience to risk their own safety to come to the defense of Black people under attack.
But secondly, you have to police the language of white people around you. Everyone has the right to hold views about important subjects you might disagree with so long as they don’t use threatening or abusive language, but the minute someone in your family, on the job, in the locker room, or at the local bar uses the “N” word or an equivalent reference to Latinos, Muslims, Jews or Gay people, you need to say “Hold It. You can’t say that word around me. If you say it again, I am not only leaving this gathering, I am filming you saying it and putting it on social media”
The normalization of racial epithets in private leads directly to racial intimidation in public.
It’s time white people of conscience risk being hated to make Black people in America feel safe.
Think that’s rough? What’s rougher is what this country will be like if we DON’T do that.
What’s striking about Democratic proposals for police reform, aside from the awful optics provided by Pelosi and Schumer (best forgotten), is that proposals that would have seemed to most people pretty bold and forward looking a few weeks are already being met by charges that they don’t go far enough (they don’t). But the “obviousness” of this awareness shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Instead we should recognize a real win for all the folks involved in the protests – a shift in mass consciousness so that now the real conversation isn’t about whether chokeholds should be legal (duh, no), but what “defining the police means,” what that would like in action, what new resources and types of “first responders would take the place of police,” etc.
There’s a new spirit of possibility in the air, new worlds being not just imagined, but discussed, and to this we owe the protestors – the kids on the ground – a world of gratitude.
If we want to have a society where life expectancy and infant mortality are not at the bottom of advanced nations, and where 50% of the wealth doesn’t accrue to the top 1 percent, we have to gradually shift public funds from prisons and policing to education, health care, and affordable housing.
As we have learned from this Pandemic: NO ONE is safe when poor people and people of color are packed together in crowded residences, deprived of preventive health care, and concentrated in the most dangerous and lowest paying occupations.
As protests continue in every city, town and hamlet, we need to commit ourselves to “demilitarizing” our law enforcement apparatus and investing in a broad array of measures that improve public health and expand economic opportunity.
It is gratifying to see a broad range of leaders in business and government proclaim “Black Life Matters” and commit themselves to an honest effort to confront their own complicity in the promotion and preservation of racism and white supremacy, but without major changes in how law enforcement functions, and how public funds are distributed, these efforts at moral reformation may have little lasting impact on how we actually live
in our communities.
During WW2, over 127,000 Japanese Americans were put into internment camps.
The Japanese American community lost $400 million, which would be $5 billion in today’s money. I don’t give a damn if Japanese Americans got a pathetic amount of reparations (if they were still alive), you never recover from someone uprooting your family and throwing you in jail. You can never make a thing such as that right.
The good old days were not good for everyone.
Racism creates two parallel worlds one for white people
and another for nonwhite people, a world where you have to be
exceptional, and nearly perfect, to have the life of an ordinary white person.
For Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Black people, the fear that white people have now due to Trump, we have known that fear, and sadly many of us are numb to it.
The only difference with this particular leader is he is messing with white lives now. He is going to destroy the white middle class. He’s going to destroy your colleges. He’s going to destroy your tenure. He’s going to dismantle your K-12 schools. He’s going to dismantle labor laws. He’s going to make you choose between getting your teeth fixed and paying your light bills. He’s going to make you choose between paying your rent and staying home to raise your child, which seems unreasonable, for a person, not working class, not Black or Latinx. Those problems are coming for you under Trump.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this US is much worse for you if you’ve never been enslaved in the US, lynched in the US, excluded from jobs and/or housing in the US, because of your race, murdered for reading, murdered for owning a business, had your whole life taken from you and your family locked away, because white people are afraid. I’m sure if you’ve never experienced this on US soil, this America is terrifying for you.
I’m sure my great-great-great-great-great grandfather was terrified too when they brought him over here in chains on a boat, so I understand.
I know you may think I am exaggerating, that’s because you live in an entirely different America than I do.
Many of us not protected by white supremacy have had the displeasure to come upon your grandparents.
You don’t need to warn us about things that happened outside the US. We have lived nightmares in this country under your leaders. Leaders like Washington, Lee, Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, and Polk have murdered us, kidnapped us, stole our land, lynched us, and interned us. You don’t need to point to anywhere else, you can just point to the horrible things that happened to nonwhite people here.
You can say, “Please, don’t vote for Trump, because I don’t want to be treated the way the US has had no problem treating nonwhite people for the 243 years existence of this stolen country.”
