Unfuturing

Unfuturing no. 1 (Summer 2024) [PDF]

Utopia has long been the container that has harbored promises of liberatory change. For the dominated, exploited, and oppressed, the radical visions presented in the art and literature of utopia have kept alive the dream of a better world. Stemming from the imagination, utopianism has often positioned itself someplace and somewhere else, holding the future open for us to realize new and different ways of life.

But the future has become increasingly difficult to picture: the compounding crises of climate change, neoliberalism, and resurgent fascism continually redefine the present while suppressing our collective ability to imagine any alternative. The traditional terrain for utopia has buckled for the marginalized in a world where catastrophe and everyday life blend seamlessly. As a political horizon, the future has all but disappeared, giving way to the continual dystopia of our present.

Utopianism has sought to adapt as issues of survival and struggle in (and over) the present have drifted to the center of political practice. Prefigurative politics, ways of claiming and remaking space, and an emphasis on the here-and-now have come to shape both theory and action. As the Out of the Woods writing collective has put it, if there is “no future,” then the radical demand becomes “utopia now!”[1] Another world is no longer something to be realized somewhere and sometime else; if what we write, draw, or produce in between might achieve something, it is the exploration of new forms of solidarity and resistance in our lives today.[2]

Unfuturing invites writers, artists, organizers, and radicals to carry out this task: imagining liberatory change, rooted in the question of what utopianism means when the future isn’t centered, isn’t relevant—we’re trying to survive right now)—or is unimaginable. What creates ruptures in our pervasive sense of dystopia? What places, spaces, or actions give you hope within the present?