Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement - Softcover

Wolcott, Victoria W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226836800 ISBN 13: 9780226836805

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Living in the Future reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.

Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated.

Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Victoria W. Wolcott is professor of history at the University of Buffalo.
 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226836800
• ISBN 13: 9780226836805
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland