Concrete Utopianism

The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity

By (author) Gary Wilder

Published: 2022

ISBN: 9780823299874

Page Count: 352

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Description: Through a critique of Left realism, culturalism, and pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, Gary Wilder insists that we place questions of solidarity and temporality at the center of Left political thinking. He makes a bold case for embracing a concrete utopian politics of the possible-impossible adequate to current planetary crises.
Reviews: A bold, ambitious critique of Left political theory, Concrete Utopianism refuses the stale antinomies of pessimism and optimism, the traps of ‘realism,’ progress, even historical time, and instead resuscitates a radical imagination that embraces solidarity and understands the future not as a roadmap but an orientation; not as hope but horizon. Gary Wilder calls on us to think and struggle in the world, with the world, and toward the ‘impossible’ world we desperately need if we are to secure a possible future . . . together.---Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

This is an extraordinary piece of work, at once a political manifesto, a philosophy of politics and history, and an impressive rereading of some major texts that sheds new light on them and their utility for thinking about our present. In turning to Black intellectuals on the same terms as White European intellectuals, Wilder rethinks the canon of what counts as Left thought. Wilder’s readings are eloquent and clear, yet nuanced and complex, and are brought together with a careful and concrete analysis of social movements. One thinks differently having read and absorbed what Wilder writes.---Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study

This. . . eminently readable deep dive into theory, praxis, and utopianism is worthwhile for scholars and activists alike. Highly recommended. - Choice Reviews
Table of Contents: Preface | ix

Introduction: The Opposite of Pessimism Is Not Optimism | 1

I. Refiguring Politics
1. The Possible- Impossible: Dialectical Optics and Uncanny Refractions (Here, Now, Us) | 17
2. Concrete Utopianism and Critical Internationalism: Refusing Left Realism | 35
3. Practicing Translation: Beyond Left Culturalism | 62
4. Of Pessimism and Presentism: Against Left Melancholy | 86
Intermezzo
5. Solidarity | 109
6. Anticipation | 122

II. Unthinking History
7. Time as a Real Abstraction: Clock- Time, Nonsynchronism, Untimeliness | 139
8. Dialectic of Past and Future | 157
9. It’s Still Happening Again: Ontology, Hauntology, and Ellison’s Dialectics of Invisibility | 191
10. A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant’s Poetics of Nonhistory | 221

III. Anticipating Futures
11. The World We Wish to See | 263

Acknowledgments | 291
Notes | 295
Index | 363
Details: ISBN-13 9780823299874
Published: 2022-08-09

Trim: 6.000in x 9.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: By (author) Gary Wilder
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).