An abstract nude woman sits on the beach touching her right foot with both hands.
Essay
By Invitation
Hope Two Ways

While on sabbatical at Stanford, I have frequently been in touch with two of my cousins who are refugees in Uganda where they await the possibility of migrating to the United States under a newly opened program that allows sponsors here to support the resettlement of refugees they know. In calls to Addis Ababa where we are from, to suburban Virginia and Seattle, where my parents, aunts and uncles live and to Kampala, we often discuss the many roadblocks to the possible migration of my cousins—the very limited slots afforded by the new program, the discretion of immigration bureaucrats, the possible outcome of the next presidential election in the United States. Inevitably one party to these conversations will utter the almost ubiquitous Amharic phrase, “Egzihaber Yiawekal” (God knows). This is a resignation to fate, to the idea that our lives are not in our own hands. At the same time, it is an openness to the possibility that fortune might yet smile on us. This is a quiet hope constructed from a sense of the contingency of the human life. Even in the darkest moments, it suggests that some light may be around the corner, the source and meaning of which is beyond our capacities to know or predict. 

I live between this quiet hope of my family and the more assured and audacious hope of the historical actors I study. Garveyism, the topic of my second book, was the largest Black mass movement of the twentieth century, which had members across the United States and the Caribbean as well as in southern and western Africa. It had its height during the interwar period and especially in the 1920s. Combining a variety of ideologies, including Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism, the movement advocated an end to colonial rule, racial equality, and emancipation through the construction of an African empire. There are many complexities and contradictions in the Garveyite project, but one of the reasons I am drawn to the millions of people who became Garveyites is the ways in which they nurtured a widely shared and exhilarating faith that the world they wished to create was not only on the horizon, but already here. As one member from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) put it in the movement’s weekly newspaper, The Negro World, “many speak of a victory to come but I say it is already here.” Writing from Portuguese-colonized Mozambique in the paper O Brado Africano (The African Roar), another supporter insisted “the Negro Republic is a fact today.” 

Each of these statements indicate a form of politics that operates as if the conditions you seek to realize in the world already existed in the present. It could be called prefigurative in the sense that the future is thought to be immanent in the present. It is also performative in the sense that operating as if the world you wish to see is immanent in the present is a means of realizing that very world. The hope at work here derives from an assured sense that we, as agents of self-invention, are capable of remaking our world and are already doing so. Rather than subject to the whims of fortune and fate, these Garveyites positioned themselves (against many odds) as Promethean figures of action. 

The distance between these two modes of hope feels large even when we consider their shared Christian theological assumptions. (While the religiosity of invoking God is perhaps more clear, the recursive temporality of prefiguration has Christian roots, as Uri Gordon has argued.) Yet despite this distance, together the two modes capture something central about human beings. For better and for worse, we are creatures endowed with a distinct capacity for self-invention, or what the political theorist Emma Planinc calls “regeneration.” In small ways and large we are always in the process of making ourselves and our world. Yet if this is true, we are not sovereign. Our plans are rarely realized as we wished them to be. They are reserved, undone, and redirected, by forces larger than us including forces unleashed by the accretion of our past efforts at remaking ourselves. Our very ability to plot a course of action tomorrow or the day after depends on so many contingent factors that if we made them conscious to ourselves at each instance, the weight of them might paralyze us. We live constantly between as if and God knows, between our capacity to act in the world with the hope that the world will correspond to our intentions (as if we are in fact sovereign agents) and an acknowledgment that the play of fate and fortune might yet direct us down unknown and unknowable paths.

 

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Colloquy

Hope: The Future of an Idea

In a troubled age, hope may seem an elusive feeling. Alongside its history as a virtue, a political concept, and a psychological state, it enjoys a vivid presence as a necessary but poorly understood experience in everyday life. To reframe it in the context of this Colloquy, we might ask: how has hope been defined and critiqued? Where does it lie latent or unacknowledged? And how does the work of the humanities depend on hope, and perhaps arouse it? 

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This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century. 

It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach. 

The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives. 

Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.

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