 July/August 2003
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Dreams into Action Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley, Beacon Press, 2002 Yvonne Pappenheim, a long-time activist for racial justice, was for many years the librarian at Boston’s Community Change. The final chapter of Freedom Dreams opens with a quote from Octavio Paz, “Toward the Poem”: “When history wakes, image becomes deed, the poem is achieved: poetry goes into action.” In this age there is every attempt to kill the dream of a society where human values and needs take precedence over the market economy and all the sins associated with reverence for money and misguided power. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley is refreshing because instead of looking at the horrors of the existing western culture he looks at the possibility of a more human world. Since blacks have been among the most oppressed, their dreams and attempts to implement them can give us hope. This book by the Chairman of the History Department and Africana Studies at New York University was published in 2002 by Beacon Press and is expected to come out in paperback in June. Its succinct 198 pages of text is readable and hopeful. Kelley’s point of view is discernable in the title of a previous book co-edited with Earl Lewis “To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans.” When I asked for it at WordsWorth it was sold out. Kelley has written other books, one with Howard Zinn. Frances Fox Piven calls him “a major new voice on the intellectual left.” He tells of black dreams of escape or Exodus to Africa, to anywhere else, even to intergalactic space. He sees their dreams of paradise “not in terms of materialism but a way of living.” He presents the various forms black dreams have taken: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the influence of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, Robert Williams’ armed defense, RAM—the Revolutionary Action Movement, the dream of reparations, the black feminist movement, and Surrealism which he sees as a most important manifestation of black yearning. He says “the revolts of the colonial world and its struggles for cultural autonomy animated Surrealists as much as reading Freud or Marx.” He tells of the influence of Surrealism,—the quest for the Marvelous—on Aime Cesaire, Richard Wright, and others. In fact, his introduction to a recent edition of Cesaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” is called “A Poetics of Anticolonialism.” Kelley quotes Paul Robeson in Here I Stand: “The power of spirit that our people have is intangible. But it is a great force that must be unleashed in the struggles of today. A spirit of steadfast determination, exaltation in the face of trials—it is the very soul of our people that has been formed through the long and weary years of our march toward freedom.” Kelley says Robeson felt “these dreams of freedom could overturn a market-driven, war-mongering rationality and give birth to a new humanity.” The closing words of the book are: “Struggle is par for the course when our dreams go into action. But unless we have the space to imagine and a vision of what it means to fully realize our humanity, all the protests and demonstrations in the world won’t bring about our liberation.”
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