Dreaming Free, Together
A Review of
Imagination: A Manifesto
Ruha Benjamin
Paperback: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024
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Reviewed by Maryanne Hannan
If we take as a given, that change is necessary to guarantee a better future for everyone, and if we can admit that we do not have ready solutions, then a good place to start is Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto. A good place, but not an easy place. Benjamin, a professor at Princeton University and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab there, takes a hard, detailed look at the problems and offers a path to answers, practical advice on how to “incubate” ideas collectively. This book is part of the Norton Short series, offering “Brilliance with Brevity.” Imagination certainly delivers.
At the outset, Benjamin quotes Thomas Berry’s idea that we are in-between stories now, an assumption which gives added weight to our current decisions. We have to get things right, or we will perpetuate the injustices of “colonialism, capitalism, ableism, white supremacy, nationalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy.” A lot to undo. These -isms presume a hierarchy, with some groups inherently superior. She follows Berry in identifying religions, governments, corporations and universities as central supports for these old stories. We have to look past these institutions for solutions; we have to look to ourselves. “We have met the enemy and it is us” needs to become “we have found the solution and it is us.”
As the book’s title indicates, Benjamin privileges imagination as the seat of human creativity. In the book’s preface, she invokes the word imaginary meaning “collective projections of a desirable and feasible future” and uses the term sociological imagination as the “capacity to link individuals’ personal problems with broader social processes.” Imagination then is not simply sitting down with a box of chalks or a pen and letting one’s thoughts and dreams go wild, although such freedom is a necessary precursor. Much as Jesus explained, Benjamin would prefer two or more gathered in the pursuit of justice.
And not two tech titans either. They are already gathering and planning a future where imaginary enhanced super people of the future thrive, and where the end justifies the means to achieve this post-human goal. Benjamin urges readers to stay attuned to these fantastic proposals, which like the eugenics of old, rely on survival of the fittest (or richest) and fail to alleviate the human suffering all around us. These “techno-utopianists” seek to solve the world’s major crises of poverty, climate change, endless wars with more investments in racist, ableist, patriarchal, energy-intensive, top-down solutions, completely ignoring the collective wisdom and freedom-dreaming of the rest of us.
Benjamin also acknowledges how rusty many of us are in coming up with new ideas, a new story. It is not easy to envision another kind of world when, to some extent, so many of us are in collusion with what power and greed hath wrought. She writes “to reimagine the world, we may need to reimagine ourselves” and, in the process, lose some benefits of the old story. No change in the world, without first a change in ourselves.
She takes up an issue she has previously written about, prisons “the same tired punitive responses… to social and economic crises,” and offers other possibilities. She addresses the many harms of our scored society in education with harmful tests and suppression of play and banking, our for-profit lending system. Even the gaming culture comes up for examination. This sentence alone is worth reading over and over: “A eugenic way of imagining the world, wherein some places and people are deemed inherently inferior and thus requiring domination, has justified colonialist expansion, slavery and genocide.” Insidious, persistent, and destructive.
Still, she points to ongoing examples of new visions of hope and resilience, many of them local initiatives, such as seed banks to preserve the biodiversity of our food. She heralds the practical wisdom and expansive redefinitions offered by Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism, both of which take as a starting point our interconnectedness with earth and each other. Both offer different paths into indie creative ventures and social and political change.
Rather than high-tech, she calls such alternatives Lo-TEK designs, “agile instead of fixed, constructed to work symbiotically and sustainably with complex ecosystems.” Examples are “living bridges” made of rubber tree roots and “pyro technology,” with its many uses of improving soil and fire protection. High tech employs “extraction and domination,” whereas the alternative is “regeneration and interdependence.” Such initiatives also combat widespread “play deprivation,” necessary to reverse since play is a precursor to fostering imagination and freedom.
There is a lot to absorb in the 142 pages of text and over 30 pages of notes and a full index. But Imagination: A Manifesto really delivers, on a practical level, in the final chapter “Imagination Incubator” and Appendix. These sections are the equivalent of Cliff notes for holding a mini-conference on dreaming the future and sometimes, when necessary, for groups within churches, universities and other sites where past evils must be confronted before moving on. It would be perfect in any open-minded group setting, classroom, book club, or study group.
Benjamin directs readers/participants to distinguish between possible futures, plausible futures, probable futures and preferable futures, encouraging specificity. She suggests warm-up activities, writing exercises, everything necessary for a group to use when it is ready to get real with imagination. She speaks of the three dimensions of sacredness, Inner (caring for the sacred in ourselves); Outer (in others); Beyond (caring for the “sacredness of which we are a part”). The Appendix is especially succinct, with thirteen discussion prompts, seven in-depth project-based questions, and some final speculative prompts.
Within the pages of this book, most people will find something humbling, something surprising, something discouraging, something hopeful, but most importantly, something that encourages them to join with others in seeking change, dreaming free.
Maryanne Hannan
Maryanne Hannan has an M.A. in English and in Classics, Latin Literature, both from University at Albany, State University of New York. She taught Latin for many years and was Associate Editor at Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry for its inaugural issue in 2017. She lives in upstate New York and is the author of Rocking like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.
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