“A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times” is a three-year initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP), and the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab (CRACS Co-Lab) at New York University. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is led by scholars Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, UC Berkeley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities, Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Co-Director, CRACS Co-Lab, New York University, Shannon Jackson, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric & of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Director, EAHI, UC Berkeley, and Debarati Sanyal, Professor of French, Director, CICI, UC Berkeley.
“A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times” seeks to counter the incendiary effects of right- wing discourse by producing a more desirable and just way of imagining the world. The phantasms circulated by those who seek to augment state powers at the expense of collective rights and freedoms appeal to passions of fear and hatred. A counter-imaginary is needed to appeal to another set of passions: the desire for freedom, the passion for equality, the aspiration of justice. We propose an interconnected sequence of collaborations among scholars, activists, artists, and community members, who are increasingly concerned with the censorship and the targeting of fields and policies focusing on gender, race, ethnic studies, migration, diversity, and sexuality. Although informed by social science research into the history of disparate versions of authoritarianism, our project shifts to a distinctively humanistic focus, asking what alternative imaginary is possible, and how we can go about making one. What, for instance, do the arts and humanities have to offer as counters to the new forms of authoritarian power and fascination that have come to saturate so much of the political and cultural life of the United States in recent years?
We pose three sets of questions: (1) what is new about the authoritarians we face now, and what narrative accounts for the current conjuncture?; (2) what counter-imaginary could effectively oppose the force of right-wing phantasms, and how might communities collaborate to produce new kinds of knowledge and sustain and affirm their values and ideals in the face of new restrictions, including censorship, criminalization, and surveillance?; (3) what strategies can work for interconnected arts and academic communities under pressure to carve out both critical and creative spaces seeking to affirm racial and gender equality and freedom? We will partner with universities and arts institutions in key areas of the United States to develop an anti-censorship network that will support the exploration of anti-authoritarian imaginaries, including new expressions of freedom and equality that will be disseminated across different sites. Our aim is to develop an expansive network of educators, artists, scholars, and activists that builds an archive and shares resources and strategies among those whose working conditions, dignity, and creative freedom have been thwarted by new restrictions. A workshop series will be dedicated to creating spaces for “public thinking,” critical reflection, and collaborative imagining in order to produce a counter-imaginary against and beyond the new authoritarianism in Austin, Texas; NYC, New York; Miami and Gainesville, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. We aim to connect Bay Area artistic and academic institutions in collaborative activities, more closely tying the university with its publics by illuminating the creative, transformative, and regenerative work that links these communities together and with key partners in different regions in the United States. A subgrant to the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab at New York University will be key to constructing a counter-imaginary to forms of authoritarianism that mobilize anti-Black racism. It will support a collaborative program, “More-Than-Perfect: Explorations of Black Senses of Future,” which brings together Miami and New York-based Black artists, scholars, educators, and activists to share and learn about social subjugation as well as critical, creative, and emancipatory Black mobilization across the Western Hemisphere. We plan to publish the results of Denise da Silva’s work along with all the other aspects of our meetings and workshops through the new website, videography, working papers, and the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory. An open-access journal housed at UC Berkeley and published by Duke University Press, Critical Times has consistently featured work that tracks the resurgence, accounts for the force, and opposes the spread of today’s far-right political movements.