Meditations on a Politics of Futurity: Black Feminist Repertoires for Worldbuilding

Abstract: 

Futurity is the agentive and efficacious quality or state of being concerned with the prospects and possibilities of a future time, event, and renewed and continuing existence. It is an approach, a perspective, and a framework for thought and action. In this talk, I detail a repertoire for political thought and action rooted in Black feminist texts and organizing, that can be used toward a politics of futurity. To do so, I build on the articulation of the politics of care that I developed in the book Reckoning, along with Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation augmented by a notion of political fabrication, and suggest tactics derived from the folkloric character of the Trickster, with the goal of democratic redesign and reconstruction that we can think of as together as worldbuilding. These elements combined provide a set of political tools that can help us to build a 21st century that is as different from the 20th as the 20th century was from the 19th. A politics of futurity demands that we use our practical imaginations to devise theories, systems, and institutions that can better accomplish human flourishing. 

Bio:

Deva Woodly is the author of Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford 2022) and The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford2015). Her next project, The Politics of Futurity, will be an interdisciplinary edited volume examining the horizons of political ideas and organization in the 21st century. Her work spans the sub-disciplines of American Politics, Social Movements, Black Politics, Political Economy and Democratic Theory. Her Book Reckoning received the best book (2022) award from the Race and Ethnic Politics section of American Political Science Association. Over the course of her career she has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Public Choice, and Dissent, among others, and is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Political Science. She received her BA from the University of Virginia and her PhD from the University of Chicago. 

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Refreshments will be available in the Mill Hill Lane Bar/Lounge from 2.30 pm.