Table Of ContentIMAGINING
GLOBAL
FUTURES
Editors-in-Chief Deborah Chasman & Joshua Cohen
Managing Editor and Arts Editor Adam McGee
Senior Editor Matt Lord
Digital Director Rosie Gillies
Audience Engagement Editor Ben Schacht
Manuscript and Production Editor Hannah Liberman
Assistant to the Publishers Irina Costache
Fellowship Coordinator Jasmine Parmley
Contributing Editors Adom Getachew, Lily Hu, Walter Johnson, Robin D.
G. Kelley, Paul Pierson, & Becca Rothfeld
Contributing Arts Editors Ed Pavlić & Ivelisse Rodriguez
Black Voices in the Public Sphere Fellows Maya Jenkins & N’Kosi Oates
Editorial Assistant Helga Edström
Finance Manager Anthony DeMusis III
Printer Sheridan PA
Board of Advisors Derek Schrier (Chair), Archon Fung, Deborah Fung,
Richard M. Locke, Jeff Mayersohn, Jennifer Moses, Scott Nielsen, Robert
Pollin, Rob Reich, Hiram Samel, Kim Malone Scott, & Brandon M. Terry
Interior Graphic Design Zak Jensen & Alex Camlin
Cover Design Alex Camlin
Printed and bound in the United States.
Imagining Global Futures is Boston Review Forum 24 (47.4)
“Freedom Dreaming” is adapted from the twentieth-anniversary edition of
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley (Beacon
Press, 2022). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
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or email [email protected]. © 2022, Boston Critic, Inc.
CONTENTS
Editors’ Note
Adom Getachew, Deborah Chasman, & Joshua Cohen 5
My Grandfather Was a Virus
Caio Kaufman 8
Escape from the Closed Loop
Eli Friedman 10
Dreams of Green Hydrogen
Daniela Gabor & Ndongo Samba Sylla 26
Decolonizing Food
Raj Patel 41
A World Without Borders
Harsha Walia 54
Freedom, Not Benefits
Heather Berg 71
Designing the Future in Palestine
Noura Erakat 84
Kaitiakitanga
Sascha Stronach 101
Labor’s Militant Minority
Mie Inouye 111
The Lifeblood of Iranian Democracy
Nojang Khatami 124
How to Fight Digital Colonialism
Toussaint Nothias 139
Extending “Southern” Urbanisms
AbdouMaliq Simone 149
If Not Here, When?
Julie Michelle Klinger 161
Beyond the Nation-State
Aslı Bâli & Omar Dajani 178
Freedom Dreaming
Robin D. G. Kelley 196
Contributors 213
EDITORS’ NOTE
Adom Getachew, Deborah Chasman, & Joshua
Cohen
the global present is wracked by crisis. War in Ukraine and
Ethiopia draws on. Climate change becomes ever more dire. Public
health remains fragile, and the toll of human displacement continues
to rise. Boston Review’s volume on Global Dystopias appeared five
years ago, but the title may seem even more resonant today. Should
we resign ourselves to despair?
On the one hand, the challenges we face represent the exhaustion
of twentieth-century political formations—the arrangements that got
us here in the first place. On the other hand, they have prompted
a remarkable upsurge in popular mobilization on behalf of a more
just world. Here, this volume contends, our imagination of global
futures must begin.
Twenty years ago historian Robin D. G. Kelley wrote of the
“freedom dreams” at the heart of the Black radical imagination. To-
day we are witnessing a revitalization of those energies. The 2020
5
uprisings in the United States—the largest protests in the nation’s
history—demonstrate the vitality of multiracial opposition to police
violence and the carceral state. The young people leading Nigeria’s
#EndSARS movement have forged their own decentralized move-
ment against police killings and a hollowed-out democracy. Digital
activists in India successfully defended net neutrality while farmers
continue to fight corporate exploitation. And in Iran women are at
the forefront of the greatest outpouring of antiauthoritarian protest
in a decade.
Inspired by these and many other visions of popular politics
around the globe, this volume draws together a diverse range of
contributors to suggest alternative trajectories, novel institutions,
and promising avenues out of the dead ends.
The futures they imagine are necessarily multiple. Some focus
on global cooperation in building renewable energy infrastructures,
abolishing border militarization, and reining in the exploitative power
of international finance. Others counterpose indigenous movements
in the Global South to the hegemony of the Global North, looking to
their distinctive histories and conditions both as experiences that must
be reckoned with on their own terms and as models that nevertheless
hold lessons for the fight for justice everywhere. One contributor casts
doubt on the nation-state as the inevitable result of decolonization
and the only possible institutional form of self-determination; another
describes the ways that cities in the Global South are fashioning new
ways of living together. Several explore resistance to new forms of
power over workers—forms that are decisively reshaping the contours
of international struggles for labor justice.
Getachew, Chasman, & Cohen
Collectively these essays provide reason for hope, and resources
for action, amidst today’s apparent impasses. Refusing both a retreat
into nihilism and a leap to the utopian, guided by organizers and
activists as well as everyday acts of survival, they locate real openings,
map possible horizons, and glimpse promising paths forward. The
future is global, they make clear, and it is up to us to achieve it together.
Imagining Global Futures 7
MY GRANDFATHER WAS A VIRUS
poetry by Caio Kaufman
Some say he arrived on a bat’s wing, stopping
here and there to nibble on a finger.
He swept into naïve airfields—
(Not his choice really but he caught the blame.)
Less than a water drop in a trade wind,
They asked if he crossed by accident or skill.
His arms were a shuffling set of gears.
His guts were a tangled set of springs.
His tenements were the tenements.
The cellblocks were his homestead,
the frayed fabric was a field for his needling.
The streets were not safe with him lurking about.
