Radical Imagination: Courage & Intelligence to Change the World - Essay Sample

Introduction

In simple terms, radical imagination is the ability to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be. According to James Baldwin in Craven, Dow, and Nakamura (2017), it is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed. However, radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It concerns bringing those possible futures back to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today (Khasnabish & Haiven, 2012). In their book, Khasnabish and Haiven (2014) sought to study, analyze, broadcast, and promote the radical ideas that emerge from social movements to understand the radical imagination that moved activists. Such radical imagination is what guides the practices of transformative movements around the globe (Movement Strategy Center, 2016).

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To understand social movements further, Kelly (2002) in her critically imaginative book traced historical movements on Black, communist, nationalist, liberalist, and feminist movements. She drew upon famous political leaders such as Marcus Garvey to describe the task of redefining freedom and community without exploitation. In addition, she traces the effect of the Chinese Revolution and Mao Tse-tung on radical Black campaigns. For example, she established that the transnational influences gave hope to Black movements, which began to view the racial situation in the United States as one requiring a response of "force to force" (Kelly, 2002). The movements led to personal and moral improvement on behalf of corrupt colonialism. For Kelly, reparation is vital as it facilitates the revitalization of social justice and it has the potential to change the whole nation. Further, she recognized that radical black feminism was crucial to any truly revolutionary ideology (Kelly, 2002). In particular, for her, black feminism avails the soundest vision of freedom available to people. Kelly concludes the book by giving a brief vision of her Utopian future in which space for freedom is both carved out and supported by a global fund and ideology.

In his book, Robinson (2000) demonstrates that attempts to comprehend black people's history of resistance only through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Moreover, Marxist analyses presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the importance of black people and communities as agents of resistance and change. To support his argument, Robinson (2000) traced the emergence of Marxist doctrine in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive arenas, and the effect of both of these traditions on such significant 20th Century black radical thinkers such as Richard Wright and C. L. R. James. Consequently, he argued that Black radicalism must be associated with the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences Blacks have on western continents.

Just like Kelly (2002), Boggs and Kurashige (2012) in their book assessed the current political, economic, and environmental crisis, and illustrated the way to create the radical change people require to confront new realities. The book is a retrospective to Boggs's participation in some of the 20th Century's social movements, such as the anti-capitalist labor movements of the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Power Movement, and contemporary women rights movements. The authors drew from seven decades of activist experience and a meticulous commitment to critical thinking to redefine revolution for current times. Undeniably, Boggs and Kurashige (2012) create alternative approaches of work, human interaction, and politics that will altogether comprise the next American Revolution.

This approach involves the participation of both activists and the public. In light of this, Ginwright (2008) explored the role of participatory action research (PAR) in fostering civic engagement and community change among youth of color. Drawing from youth PAR projects from six cities who participated in the Research Collaborative on Youth Activism (RCYA), Ginwright (2008) illustrated how the participatory process entails the intersection of art, science, and imagination. In particular, building a collective radical imagination among youth through participatory research needs the researcher to embrace both art and science. Moreover, PAR facilitates a collective radical imagination among youth through poetic knowledge, which refers to that form of knowledge that, for a moment, enables people to transcend the immediate everyday realities that confine their capacity to dream, imagine, and hope. However, poetic knowledge is rarely gained in the confines of the traditional school curriculum. Ginwright (2008) argued that equal in importance to the analytical skills developed through PAR, youth develop a collective radical imagination that is crucial for community and social change. Notably, PAR forces scholars to re-examine what constitutes research and shatters the weak barriers that separate the researcher and artist in each of us.

Research is most useful when young people develop skills both to explain systemic causes of issues that shape their lives and to act to transform those conditions. Such research will demand that people move beyond the universities and professional associations to build new infrastructure that can promote the free exchange of ideas, tools, and individuals required for the greater democratization of knowledge (Ginwright, 2008). Just like Ginwright (2008), in collaboration with the activists they were studying, Khasnabish and Haiven (2014) organized film sessions, public talks, and workshops with the intention of going beyond mere academic ethnographic research. Irrefutably, diversifying activities while conducting research ensures that the individuals being studied learn something out of the process. Hence, Khasnabish and Haven's legacy is a different model of critical education and critical research they referred to as a "solidarity research". Nevertheless, since the book fails to give a clear contribution to the study for the authors and the activists, the study's outcomes remain unclear.

Further, Rickford (2016) traces the intellectual lives of black institutions that are established and dedicated to following the self-determination that the integrationist civil rights movements had failed to avail. Influenced by Third World scholars and anticolonial campaigns, activists were formal education as a successful means of developing young activists devoted to the struggle for black political sovereignty globally. This was a similar approach to participatory action used by Ginwright (2008). In support of the findings in Ginwright's study, the stories that Rickford (2016) uses in his book reveal much concerning Pan Africanism as a social and intellectual movement and as an integral part of indigenous black nationalism. Undeniably, Rickford (2016) uses this movement to explore a significantly fertile period of political, social, and cultural revitalization that attempted to revolutionalize African American life and reimagined an alternate society.

Similarly, Muzio (2017) in her book focused on structural and historical aspects such as colonialism, economic marginalization, racial discrimination, and the Black and Brown power movements of the 1960s. He analyzes how these factors influenced young Puerto Ricans to reject mainstream ideologies concerning political incorporation and join others in struggles against perceived injustices. Just like Boogs, Muzio had been a member of a social movement, El Comite-Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueno. Hence, in addition to her experiences, she conducted interviews with activists and used news coverage to create a picture of how a radical and counterhegemonic political viewpoint evolved organically among the people because of its humanity, humility, and message.

Frazier (2014) refreshes people's understanding of the activities of black radical activists in Cold War politics by focusing on the role of African American intellectuals in projecting China as an alternative global power at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. Frazier (2014) argument is posited against the theme of radical imagining which he defines as a process of ideology that marshals and deploys cognitive faculties, consciousness, and social life for the process of contesting the worlds people inhabit, making and shaping them anew. According to Frazier (2014), the relationship between radical black leaders and the Chinese resulted from their shared interest in dismantling the Western geopolitical hegemony. China's commitment to Third World Marxism offered the black radical leaders support for their struggle against the US, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Olson, Worsham, and Giroux (2015) sums up the ideologies of the previous authors by recognizing that democracy relies on political imagination and collective hope to enable one to move from the personal to the political and back. In addition, they support that translating the private into public concerns more than enlarging the realm of critique and affirming the social. Additionally, it is about public responsibility, the struggle over democratic public life, and the significance of critical education in a democratic society that upholds the public good. In particular, it is about the willingness of those who believe in a democracy, who are mainly intellectuals, to show that something else is possible.

Conversely, according to Hage (2015), people should focus on opening up new spaces for critical thought and reimagining of the political futures stead of participating in oppositional politics that include anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-racist struggles. Hage (2015) makes a strong argument for the necessity to focus radical politics away from an exclusive reliance on sociological critique and towards anthropological questions. Hage's attempt to reimagine the world beyond the confines of oppositional politics and the negation of the other urges people to go beyond the sole reliance on intellectual resources towards paying attention to the politics of emotion.

Cultural Production or Knowledge

In his book, Bourdieu (1994) addresses numerous issues that continue to preoccupy literary arts and cultural criticism in the last 20th century. Such issues include the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and aesthetic value and canonicity. He elaborates a model of the cultural fields that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

According to Bourdieu (1994), to understand a work of art, one must look at both the art itself and the conditions of its production and reception. Notably, this logic characterizes the field of cultural production and the way it relates to the broader fields of class relations and power. Bourdieu's views on cultural production arise from an application of the principles of habitus, capital, and field to the artistic world (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). According to Bourdieu (1994) habitus is the acquired system of generative schemes adjusted objectively to the specific conditions in which it is constituted. In particular, it refers to the set of intuitive dispositions that inform the way to behave in diverse contexts. Notably, habitus is formed during childhood through socialization. Conversely, the field is a system of social positions fashioned by power relations and attributed by a struggle for dominance between its members. Different fields like culture, education or politics exist. The success within each field arises from the capital that a person possesses. Hence, Bourdieu (1994...