Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

these communities are also amputated from the collective imagination of the nation.

His precise wording, This is you, works like a portal, beaming Serena into a future where she is a world champion.

There exists a multibillion-dollar Soft Power (Dream) Industry, which is in the business of crafting and selling powerful myths that lull us into various states of zombielike consumerism—swiping, subscribing, and submitting to its narrow vision of belonging.

This solidaristic imagination is born not of individualism, but of interdependence, what disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls inclusive world-building. “I am because we are, we are because I am,” goes the South African philosophy of ubuntu. This is more than “accommodating” people’s differences on the edges. It requires recogn

disregard for “premodern” peoples and their inventions is precisely why we face a planetary crisis,

Ivan Illich’s 1973 invitation to move “from industrial to convivial societies.”

This is a good reminder that we shouldn’t shine a light only on the deadly imaginations and social orders that are killing us but experiment and play with new prescriptions, visions, and forms of social organization.

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.

The most effective means to refute the prevailing ideologies is to do so collectively—crafting new stories, images, ways of interacting, and investments in those who have been denigrated and discarded. To think about the collective also means being okay with less focus on exceptionalism and instead giving all students opportunities to stretch their