Still from An Ecstatic Experience by Ja'Tovia Gary, 2015. | Image: Courtesy of Erin Christovale/Black Radical Imagination. Like wildflowers after rain, the phrase radical imagination is popping up everywhere. Last year, artists in Portland organized Radical Imagination Gymnasium; in February Culver City's Agape Center held Abolition and the Radical Imagination, a discussion featuring Angela Davis, Fred Moten, Melanie Cervantes, and Robin D.G. Kelley; the Radical Imagination Project recently hosted a Free School in Halifax; and Black Radical Imagination, a program of experimental shorts co-curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George, screened at MOCA in mid-March.
In a city that values imagination as a profit-boosting tool and in our era dominated by market logic -- when any response to the invitation imagine is inevitably colored by plastic rainbows of consumer fantasy -- it seems we have a new term to describe the capacity to foster unorthodox thoughts and make them real.
The radical imagination is alive and well in Skid Row, said Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) founder John Malpede at the Culver City conversation. If it weren't for this radical imagination and resistance, Skid Row would have been bulldozed long ago.
Workout #1: Visionary Fiction by Walidah Imarisha, from the Radical Imagination Gymnasium, a project by Erin Charpentier, Zachary Gough, Travis Neel, and Patricia Vazquez Gomez. | Photo: Courtesy of Radical Imagination Gymnasium.
What's so great about preserving Skid Row? Herein lies the crux; for radical imagination is not only a matter of dreaming possible futures, it's the capacity to collectively imagine and practice ways of being together that refuse the assumptions and ideologies of the status quo. In the case of Skid Row, that means declining the logic of profit, which consistently criminalizes poverty and devalues the biggest recovery community anywhere in an effort to maximize a real-estate bonanza.
For 30 years the LAPD that we love, as Davis described it, has used theater and other arts to put the narrative of the neighborhood in the hands of neighborhood people. The resulting celebrations of mutuality, cooperation, and care, which both example and value status quo-challenging social relations, make it harder to replace existing poor residents with wealthy working people [who] shouldn't have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of [the] homeless.
Although the phrase radical imagination is only now becoming common -- due largely to the influence of Robin D.G. Kelley's book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003) and Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish's Radical Imagination (2014) -- the power it describes is hardly new. It is, writes Kelley, a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration date, no trademark, while Haiven and Khasnabish point to Ancient Greek debates on imagination as a political force, and to the Romantic poets, who saw imagination as a key means of resisting and critiquing the status quo.
L.A. Poverty Department performing at Abolition and the Radical Imagination. | Photo: J.P. Owen Driggs.
More recently, and in our own back yard, radical imagination flourished with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Founded in Chicago in June 1905 and active in L.A. by March 1906, the Wobblies rejected not only electoral politics and centralized authority, but also, as historian-poet-surrealist Franklin Rosemont has written: the various middle-class forms of Marxism that held sway at the time.
Fighting class war with direct action, the IWW established a network of Mixed Locals across the U.S. and Canada. Comprising of white industrial workers as well as the people of color, unemployed, unskilled, immigrant, and migratory workers rejected by mainstream labor, the Mixed Locals often lacked industrial muscle. What they had instead was solidarity, a vital sense that we're all leaders, and commitment to forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
The nerve centers of the network were hundreds of Wobbly Halls where, according to Rosemont, the Wobs planned new organizing drives and walkouts; wrote poems, songs, leaflets, pamphlets and articles and almost every evening, enjoyed good entertainment. With Halls at Second and Los Angeles streets, Eighth and S. San Pedro, and Fourth and State, the entertainment in L.A. may well have included There is Power in a Union sung by its author, IWW poet and sometime-San Pedro longshoreman Joe Hill.
Sheet music for Joe Hill's The Rebel Girl, 1915. | Image: Wikipedia/Creative Commons License.
Although the Wobbly songbook remains in print, and troubadours like Tom Morello follow in Hill's wake, it's not the power and longevity of its songs that make the IWW such a good example of radical imagination in action. Rather, it's the fact that their production and reproduction were integral to the development of shared visions of the future. In addition, with an uncompromising commitment to solidarity across lines of difference, the Wobblies brought those imagined futures, unlike pie in the sky, into the present. As Malpede said in a recent interview: The radical is grounded in what's really going on.
But what is really going on? Despite the work of the IWW and its descendants, doesn't capitalism's continued ubiquity suggest that imagination more often functions to preserve status quo than to bring about radical change? The question why? could keep philosophers busy for years, but it's worth noting that a primary tool for preservation involves putting old jam in new jelly jars. In other words, while the surfaces of things change all the time -- from pop to hip-hop say, or from Republican to Democrat -- the underlying distributions of power do not.
