Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.

Schools are places where the next generation either comes alive with possibility or is crushed by the weight of odds stacked against them. The very place where our imaginations should be fostered is where that potential is routinely smothered.

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

when computer scientists rely on their own limited intuitions to design systems, rather than engage theories that show how identities are “enacted, contextual, imaginative, and infrastructural,” they are likely to perpetuate patterns of discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Gifted = destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.

Transition imaginaries, Escobar points out, are different depending on the history and circumstances of where you live. In the Global South, one of the ways they are framed is Buen Vivir—or “Good Living” and collective well-being (sumak kawsay in Quechua). Emerging from the struggles of Indigenous communities, people of African descent, peasants, a

poetic knowledge—“that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present.”

One of the main ways art can disrupt the carceral imagination is by refuting the eugenic classification and fragmentation of people—desirable or deplorable, worthy or disgraced, precious or superfluous. Art can remind us who we are beyond the trappings of privilege or prison.

Sleep Donation invites us to consider dreaming as a social practice: What does it mean to actively produce, donate, transfuse, or even contaminate dreams? How do we know if we are dreaming our own or others’ transplanted dreams?