Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series' first concert of the 2024-2025 season is October 19, 2024. If you’ve been to our concerts before, you know we always have small and large group discussions. For this concert, we wanted to have several reading group sessions to discuss some ideas about utopia before the concert.
We’ve had 2 reading group sessions so far. We read Ursula LaGuin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Alexis Pauline Gumb’s “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood, José Esteban Muñoz’s “The Future is Present” from Cruising Utopias and an excerpt from Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water. In our final reading session before the concert, we will be discussing N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” from How Long ‘Til Black Future Month and Pinko’s “The Limits of Accountability” from After Accountability.
In our first reading session, we talked about the myth of the hero. There is linguistic evidence that this narrative of human advancement goes back 5,000-6,000 years in Indo-European culture. It begins with a man who, facing adversity, wields a weapon, and kills someone, thereby conquering his adversity. This conquering hero leads humanity in its evolution through the centuries and eventually culminates into science, technology, and the ability to travel in space. This narrative is captured quite succinctly in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In contrast, Le Guin presents a different path for humanity’s development. According to this theory, human civilizationdeveloped by gathering and collecting—gathering oats and berries, and other useful and/or beautiful things, putting them in carrier bags, taking them home, and sharing them with others. In this narrative, this mythology of humanity’s journey, there is no single goal, no hero, no murders, no weapons. Instead, there are compassionate instances of collectivesharing and love. We discussed this perspective, and then looked at Alexis Pauline Gumb’s beautifully moving and impactful story “Evidence,” which speaks of a future time when people are living in a compassionate world.
In our second reading session, we discussed the Muñoz and Delaney readings. The discussion was more grounded in the reality of our time and perhaps more pessimistic since our reality is so dystopian. We talked about moments in our lives that seemed utopian, or, at least moments that point toward utopia, such as people gathering together on the streets in protests and vigils. Sometimes, these moments feel utopian, although they also many times feel hopeless and oppressive because of the massive police presence. Perhaps we can only find moments of utopia in our lives, such asthe Podemos movement in Spain in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the Black Lives Matter protests. These spontaneous uprisings remind us that we are not alone in desiring a different world. In these moments of gathering, we feel a sense of connection and shared purpose, pointing us toward our utopia.
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