Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (New Texts Out Now)

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (New Texts Out Now)

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (New Texts Out Now)

By : Ariella Aïsha Azoulay أريئيلا أزولاي

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (AAA): The lies. Not the lies being told by people, every once in a while, but what I call imperial lies, those that are materialized in institutions: archives, museums, states; captured by key political terms: citizenship, sovereignty, democracy; embedded in practices: preservation, collection, study; in qualities and dispositions: curiosity, connoisseurship, creativity; and even in what seems so basic as the tenses: i.e., past, present, and future. Unlike lies being told, which to a certain extent one can refute, with these imperial lies the situation is infinitely more complex since they are materialized in realities. They become part of the shared world upon which even those who oppose their materialization and were present “as it happened” and could witness how they came into being, have no choice but to interact with them. After all, the world is made of them, and they are not just words. 

Example? Think about the state of Israel. The majority of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine were expelled in 1948, and a lie that their homeland would belong from then on to others was declared, proclaimed, imposed, legalized, inculcated, narrated, repeated, and recognized. Newborns were baptized as its citizens—“Israelis”—and grew up without knowing about the world that had been destroyed, and those who were evacuated were forced to assume a new status determined by categories which were themselves lies—“refugees,” “infiltrators,” “stateless”—but had already become part of the international legal system. Most of them were confined for several decades in refugee camps and put under military rule, in ways which only helped the consolidation of those realities. It is not about one or ten lies; it is about a new world that was created in the place of the one that was destroyed. 

Potential history is an attempt to revise and reconfigure the key political terms in order to liberate history from its confinement to a past, which has been separated from the present. It is an attempt to narrate history as belonging, in a variety of ways, to a continuous present. Potential history refuses to take imperial sovereignty or the institution of the museum as a fait accompli and tries to highlight the ongoing struggles with which they are entangled, against non-imperial and worldly formations of political organization and making art. In other words, potential history is an intervention in the prevalent and hegemonic discourses of history and political theory, art and human rights, whose point of departure is a refusal to recognize the realities imperialism manufactures as irreversible, even when they are seventy or three hundred years old. In place of imperial sovereignty, I propose in the book the category of worldly sovereignty and, instead of relating to art making as objects based, I reconstruct it as constitutive of people’s rights and mode of being in the world. Thus a potential history of a worldly sovereignty in Palestine which existed prior to its destruction in 1948, implied in the ongoing struggles against the institutions of imperial sovereignty (Israel, in this case), enables us to approach phenomena like the March of Return not merely as an act of protest against the conditions of the concentration camp that Gaza is, but as an attempt to reverse imperial history.

Imperial democracy, a regime that is predicated on differential body politic, is the model.

Though Palestine—and the return—plays an important role in my new book, it is not a book about Palestine. The same is true for photography—it plays an important role but is not the subject of the book. The book is an attempt to provide a potential history of five hundred years in which Palestine, but also photography and modern art, are late reiterations of imperialism’s major enterprise—the impairment of worlds and their replacement with standardized political structures that facilitate the implementation of disastrous political regimes. Imperial democracy, a regime that is predicated on differential body politic, is the model. In the book I am particularly interested in how this has been achieved through liberal formations of knowledge associated with museums, art, and human rights.   

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AAA: When I migrated to the United States about seven years ago, I felt that I needed to delve into the political infrastructures of this place, “America.” This felt urgent, since there is almost nothing that one thinks or does here that do not partake in the reproduction of the robbery of lands and expropriation of the indigenous population on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the ongoing project, embedded in a variety of institutions and practices, of the radical racialization of American life. This is how slavery and its afterlives became a constitutive element in my work and essential to the book’s reconfiguration of a cluster of key political terms. The book contends that the notion of the past is an imperial invention, so obviously the idea was not to become an historian of slavery or imperialism, but rather to offer their potential history through the category of reparations. The affinities that I observed between the denial of reparations and restitution here, and the denial of return in the context of Palestine, became central to the book. What may seem unrelated cases cease to be that once you approach them through the materiality of a shared world and the perspectives of world-making and world-destroying practices. This has enabled me to reconfigure rights outside of the eighteenth-century tradition that culminated in the UN 1945 declaration, and to offer a non-imperial conception of rights embedded in shared worlds. I sought to imagine, reconstruct, and conceptualize rights out of the way people claim them, rather than out of written declarations, philosophical treatises, or the existing histories and theories of human rights. All these, I have tried to show, share some problematic assumptions about rights and freedom, in so far as they were conceived in imperial contexts, by actors who took part or tacitly collaborated in the systematic destructions of the worlds of others. The Palestinian man captured in a photograph as he is resisting deportation—not the protocols in which the “right of return” is claimed or denied— became my companion, or “text book” for studying rights. Alongside this photograph and that man, there were different authors, such as DuBois and his notion of the general strike, Saidiya Hartman and her “critical fabulation,” Ghassan Kanafani and his notion of return, Sylvia Wynter and her discussion of 1492, or Houria Boutledja and her elaboration on the “indigenous of the republic.” 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AAA: Potential history was the anti-imperial proposition for which I was searching a long time before I found myself writing it. Inspired by so many great books that offer counter histories while shaking the ground on which history—the discipline and the genre of research and writing—is premised, this book is an attempt to re-configure this shaken ground and argue that what these authors are doing is not “counter history,” which would be an affirmation of history, but rather a “counter to history.” Assuming that history is an offense against people’s aspirations to protect the world destroyed by racial capitalism and imperialism, counter to history is a provocation that states: all that which has been achieved through violence is not history, i.e., not over, does not belong to the past. I wish that anyone who is interested in imagining a possible life outside of racial capitalism and imperialism would take this book in her hands and will work with it to continue this kind of work. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AAA: I am working on a new film that focuses on looted objects displayed or stored in European and American museums. My idea is to present these objects as the “missing documents” of allegedly “undocumented” migrants, i.e., people whose movement has been blocked and their life endangered for not having the right documents. It is going to be a kind of potential history of these looted objects that problematizes and seeks to transcend the status conferred on them as art objects. Instead, I am trying to foreground the attachment of these objects to the people from whom they were expropriated and claim that the rights of these people are inscribed in these objects. Holding unrightfully these objects, rather than persecuting people and treating them as “undocumented,” their right to live in the vicinity of their objects should be advocated and recognized.

J: If the past is an imperial invention – should we engage with the future?

AAA: No, not at all. The “past” is assumed existing through institutions and mechanisms that are made to secure the irreversibility of imperial formations of violence under the assumption that the past cannot be changed. This is not true. We ought to change what was relegated to “the past” and declared as over, while it is actually viciously destroying fabrics of life here and now. The past is the guarantor of imperial actors’ interests. By undoing imperial structures in the present, different ways are being opened by themselves. The abolition of the imperial rights of the few is key for the recovery of worldly life with others.

 

Excerpt from the book

Aïsha

More than a decade ago, when I started the research for this book, I could not anticipate that the nothingness that I know about the Algerian origin of my father would one day have a proper name. Some years ago, already deep into the writing of this book, I came to know this proper name—Aïsha—and adopted it, making it mine. This was the name of my father’s mother, my grandmother, which he never passed down to us, his daughters and grandchildren. His mother’s name at home was always “grandma,” which as a child seemed to me a proper name. I discovered Aïsha as my grandmother’s name only after my father’s death, when I looked at his birth certificate. I was all too familiar with my father’s overt and covert practices of passing for a French. When I first interpreted his action in relation to us, his children and grandchildren, I ignored the meaning of his action in relation to his ancestors. It took me some time before I could recognize that it was more than just a name, that my grandmother insisted and my father gave up on adherence to a name that the whole family was encouraged not to carry when they had been invited to become French citizens, in other words, to give away part of their Arabness. By concealing this name from us, my father betrayed his ancestors. He acted like the male-patriotic Roman citizens in David’s painting, The Oath of the Oratii (in which French revolutionaries would recognize themselves shortly after the 1784 painting was completed), turning his back to the family and siding with the patriotic colonizers who were busy destroying the family’s precolonial world, a world that my grandmother’s name still evokes. 

By not letting the name go—by rejecting my father’s legacy for the sake of renewing the precolonial legacy of the family—I am standing with my ancestors and not against them, trying to reverse my father’s readiness, once and again, to replace the wound of the colonized by converting into a “colonial monger” who turns against himself, his family, and his world. Even though his citizenship was revoked in 1941 and he was incarcerated in one of Vichy’s concentration camps, he still desired to be “one of them.” I wished he had revolted against the breach in his existence forced by the colonizers that impaired his capacity to cherish and care for the world into which he was born, making him incapable of saying aloud his mother’s name and sharing it with his children. But I knew he could not do that. This would have required accepting his identity as an Algerian, the kind of man the colonizers despised, and an Arab Jew, the kind of existence and historical experience that the Zionists in his new “homeland” consistently denied. I do regret that I never had a name for his particular French accent and could never ask him about its origin. For, obviously, what I now recognize as a North African accent could not have been acquired without speaking—at least as a child and with his mother—Arabic.

My father clearly did not want this name to circulate and be associated with our family, to taint the semi-white appearance he worked hard to acquire. He was a clever and creative man who used inventive skills to survive the racialization of non-European Jews who immigrated to Palestine soon after the destruction of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel. Arriving to Israel in 1949 from Paris, he did not miss the opportunity to pass for a French immigrant, rather than the dark-skinned Algerian Jew that he was. His “passing scheme” included us, his children, whom he had sought to whiten even before we were born, when he courted a light-skinned woman as our future mother. 

But dealing with his mother’s name was different. He could not have played with or around this name. He must have hidden and denied it altogether. Aïsha, Aï-sha, Aïeeee-shaaaa, an expression of a sharp pain that erupts with the first syllable (aïeee) and is immediately silenced by the second one (“sha,” a common sound of hushing), as if to appease what could get out of control. He had succeeded in it as long as he lived, but the secret was revealed soon after his death. I have experienced this discovery—the epiphany of an Arab name in the midst of a Jewish-Israeli and Hebrew speaking family—as a treasure. I have celebrated the presence of this unruly name as an invaluable relic from a different pre-imperial world, which has inspired this book from the moment I discovered it. With it my anti-imperial commitment became one with a pre-imperial aspiration to that which existed prior to the moment when thousands of Algerian Jews were invited or forced to understand their Jewishness as irreconcilable with their Arab and Algerian existence and had to alienate themselves from the world they once shared with their Muslim neighbors. 

Embracing Aïsha as my name is an attempt to hold on to the potential preserved in it, a potential that survived a long history, from before the Crémieux decree (1872) to the present form of Zionism and the Israeli state. It is an attempt to reverse the command to posit one’s Jewish identity in absolute opposition to one’s Arabness. For, after all, the Crémieux decree was a French imperial act, which did not simply grant citizenship to one distinct group of non-Muslim Algerians (as it is often described) but started the work, which the Zionists later sought to complete, to make Algerian Jews into such a group of non-Arab, semi-European, and second-grade French citizens. The decree was world-destroying, setting some groups apart from the general colonized population and against constitutive elements of their own identity. From my Aïsha’s eyes, the imperial destruction of the commons in Palestine was exercised in a similar manner: a reiteration of a similar enterprise pursued a few decades earlier, westward along the southern Mediterranean shore.

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New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.