Event overview
The Centre for Critical Global Change warmly invites you to a public lecture by Prof Gary Wilder (CUNY) on his "Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity"
Never before has it been more important for Left thinking to champion expansive visions for societal transformation. Yet influential currents of critical theory have lost sight of this political imperative. Provincial notions of places, periods, and subjects obstruct our capacity to invent new alignments and envision a world we wish to see. Political imagination is misread as optimism. Utopianism is conflated with idealism. Revolutionary traditions of non-liberal universalism and non-bourgeois humanism are rendered illegible. Negative critique becomes an end in itself. Pessimism is mistaken for radicalism and political fatalism risks winning the day.
In this talk based on his book "Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity" (Fordham University Press, 2022), Gary Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism. These traditions offer precious resources to relate cultural singularity and translocal solidarity, political autonomy and worldwide interdependence. They develop modes of immanent critique and forms of poetic knowledge to envision alternative futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past ways of being, knowing, and relating that persist within an untimely present; or charged residues of unrealized possibilities that were the focus of an earlier generation’s dreams and struggles; or opportunities for dialectical reversals embedded in the contradictory tendencies of the given order. Concrete Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing what Wilder calls a politics of the possible-impossible.
Prof Wilder's talk will be followed by a response from Dr Francisco Carballo (Politics & International Relations), plus Q&A and discussion.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Jun 2024 | 4:30pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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