Purchase Imagination: A Manifesto here. All proceeds go to Muni Gaza.
In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future. A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.
Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable―but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.
Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”
"Only Ruha Benjamin could have written this gift of a book. Science and technology’s most astute social critic, she knows the power of imagination―the incubator of breathtaking beauty and the atomic bomb. Bold, brilliant, and visionary, Benjamin’s manifesto asks us to wage love, to imagine an abolitionist, compassionate, just world against the venal dreams of warmongers and billionaires. An essential weapon in our struggle to save life."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Benjamin makes the case for imagination being a core tool to revolutionary work without getting too lost in the clouds. . . In tones that transport the reader back to sentiments of the wide-eyed openness to possibility “the student” often occupies Imagination’s brevity and makes it clear that it is an activation point. Start here, and then go about the work of imagining the world anew."
-Arimeta Diop, Vanity Fair
