Description
Book SynopsisThrough a critique of Left realism, culturalism, and pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, Gary Wilder insists that we place questions of solidarity and temporality at the center of Left political thinking. He makes a bold case for embracing a concrete utopian politics of the possible-impossible adequate to current planetary crises.
Table of ContentsPreface | ix
Introduction: The Opposite of Pessimism Is Not Optimism | 1
I. Refiguring Politics
1. The Possible- Impossible: Dialectical Optics and Uncanny Refractions (Here, Now, Us) | 17
2. Concrete Utopianism and Critical Internationalism: Refusing Left Realism | 35
3. Practicing Translation: Beyond Left Culturalism | 62
4. Of Pessimism and Presentism: Against Left Melancholy | 86
Intermezzo
5. Solidarity | 109
6. Anticipation | 122
II. Unthinking History
7. Time as a Real Abstraction: Clock- Time, Nonsynchronism, Untimeliness | 139
8. Dialectic of Past and Future | 157
9. It’s Still Happening Again: Ontology, Hauntology, and Ellison’s Dialectics of Invisibility | 191
10. A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant’s Poetics of Nonhistory | 221
III. Anticipating Futures
11. The World We Wish to See | 263
Acknowledgments | 291
Notes | 295
Index | 363
