Their form of utopian thinking recreates racialized forms of history, and only the K understands how to mobilize utopia to better combat inequality

After I finished Ghostly Matters, I started a research project that I thought would result in a normal academic book whose purpose was to redefine what utopian thinking and practice had meant and could mean if, for example, slavery and prison abolition or the Jubilee anti-debt movement were examples of it. The impetus for the book was twofold. One was to challenge the twinned triumphalism of the Right’s ‘End of History’ claim and the left’s claim that the political universe had closed shut after the failures of 1968. Both seemed completely out of touch with the remarkable wave of anti-capitalist resistance by diverse peoples across the globe, which remained invisible to many until first the Zapatistas and then more widely the Seattle WTO protests woke them up. And both used the utopian as a rejectionist epithet: ‘That’s not realistic, that’s utopian!’ The other impetus was a desire to pick up where Ghostly Matters ended, with those ‘historical alternatives’ that ‘haunt a given society’, as Herbert Marcuse (1969) wrote; to find the place where, as Patricia Williams (1991) put it, our ‘longings’ are ‘exiled’. Both prompts suggested the need for a more capacious language suitable for what seemed to me a significant historical moment of political–economic retrenchment and resistance to it. I was interested to see if the term utopia could be made to mean something more than the future perfect no-place imagined as a little white nation. When I started the project, the term was still in its ‘discredit’ phase, as you put it. The discourse of utopia had been roundly criticized for its idealism and futurism, but not much for its deeply racialized historiography and its narrowly exclusive set of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical and sociological references. This became very clear in 2000 when, as the academic field of utopian studies was gaining ground, the New York Public Library and France’s Bibliotheque nationale organized a large exhibit, online archive and publication program in 2000 entitled Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. This project, characteristically, established the genocidal settler colonialism that founded the so-called new world as a successful utopian enterprise by absenting entirely what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call ‘the many-headed hydra of the seventeenthcentury revolutionary Atlantic’, those slaves, maids, prisoners, pirates, sailors, heretics, indigenous peoples, commoners and so on who challenged the making of the modern world capitalist system. I went in search of the utopian thought and practice in this zone of exclusion – what I called the other utopianism – with its distinct onto-epistemological affects and its historical roots in slaves running away, marronage, piracy, heresy, witchcraft, vagrancy, vagabondage, rebellion, soldier desertion and other often illegible, illegitimate or trivialized forms of escape, resistance, opposition and alternative ways of life. I did find this other utopianism, for sure, but as a living tradition, not as an academic object or subject. When, over time, there was a sea change in the term’s fortunes, and a mini academic industry developed around it, all interesting and to the better for the concept, we at the Hawthorn Archive were somewhat far away from all that. New arrivals sometimes brought an enthusiasm for the term that old-timers no longer had, but if they stayed it dissipated out of lack of need for it. In other words, the now in your question is everything. Thinking in utopian terms is important and necessary for social struggle, for remembering what one fights for, for giving it language and form. Once you’re already living in what I call in-difference, you don’t need that language in quite the same way.