Dreaming Alternative Tomorrows: The Civic Imagination
Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students who had come of age reading her books, “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” Neither a generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories, Rowling’s talk described how her earlier experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the Harry Potter books. Linking imagination to empathy, she called out those who refuse to expand their vision: “They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know” (Rowling 2008). As Chapter 3 discusses, Rowling’s “Imagine Better” concept inspired the Harry Potter Alliance’s efforts to forge common cause with various other fandoms.
Rowling’s call to “imagine better” could describe a range of movements that are embracing “a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells good stories” (Duncombe 2007, 9). Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) has similarly questioned the divide between the affective commitments of fans and the cognitive processes associated with active citizenship: “Pleasure, fantasy, love, immersion, play, or impersonations are not concepts easily reconciled with civic virtues such as knowledge, rationality, detachment, learnedness, or leadership” (63). As a consequence, there has historically been a tendency to devalue the role of imagination within the sphere of politics.
As we’ve pursued this work, we’ve increasingly been drawn toward the concept of the “civic imagination,” which we define as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic institutions or problems. Put bluntly, one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Too often, our focus on contemporary problems makes it impossible to see beyond immediate constraints and develop a clearer sense of what might be achieved. One also can’t change the world until one can imagine oneself as an active political agent. For many of the young people we spoke with, the message they received on a daily basis was that what they had to say didn’t matter. These social change organizations work hard to help them learn to trust their own voice. And for some of these young activists—especially those who come from privileged backgrounds—the development of the ability to imagine and feel empathy for others who are living under different conditions is a key stage in their political awakening.
There is no doubt a utopian dimension of this civic imagination—some of what these youth imagine is impossible to achieve. But, as with other utopian models of the past, there is a value in articulating one’s goals and ideals, using them as a yardstick against which to measure current conditions and identifying factors that might block the realization of those “dreams.” Of course, not everyone’s dreams come true, and there is a negative flipside to the civic imagination, which has to do with disappointment, frustration, disillusionment, and rage that may also spark political protest. Here, too, critical discourses—even at their most dystopian moments—often depend on an implicit set of ideals about how power should be distributed. Writing about the “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” gesture, Kedhar (2014) describes the ways that such street theater or as she prefers, street dancing “can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defiant, bold, and empowered, a space in which they have the ability to move freely.”
We are not unique in emphasizing the place of imagination in fomenting social and political change. The term “political imagination” often refers to the ways individuals perceive and understand the political world (Adelson 1971). “Imagination” is used here in the sense of forming a mental image of something that is abstract. But such theories of the “political imagination” may have overlooked the potential role of “imagination” in its additional sense: contemplating things that are not real, or forming a picture in your mind of something you have not seen or experienced. For youth, this focus on potential civic roles is important since, as writers like Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham (2013) suggest, young people are often excluded from playing an “actual” or “meaningful” role in the processes associated with institutionalized politics. Their agendas are marginalized, and often, as with the current voter suppression efforts that make it harder for American youth to register to vote through their schools, they are disenfranchised. Yet our cases show that young people are learning to identify and frame political issues in language that speaks to themselves and their peers.
The Institute for the Future reached a similar conclusion about the value of imaginative citizenship when participants at the inaugural ReConstitutional Convention, held in 2013, penned a manifesto for what they call the “public imagination”:
Any democracy requires a thriving public imagination, in order to make visible, sharable, and understandable to all the people new ideas, new models, new potential policies. We cannot make any kind of collective decision unless the collective can understand what is at stake, and envision where it may lead.… We must strive to understand the private imaginations of others, whose reality is defined by different lived experiences, and assumptions. (“Framework: Public Imagination” 2013)
Their document describes a movement from private imagination toward its realization in forms that can be shared with a wider public. That process often depends on images already familiar to participants from other contexts—images drawn not from political rhetoric but popular fantasy. Many of the youth we interviewed feel ownership over these popular myths but struggle to make connection with symbols associated with traditional civic life.
Civic Agency and Ethical Spectacles
Andrew Slack, the young community organizer who has been a key leader of the Harry Potter Alliance, explained the price of falling back on alienating and stagnant rhetoric as a means of teaching the emerging generation about democratic values: “It affects how people feel regarding their civic agency, civic engagement, and civic education—all of these falter and contribute to a systemic empathy deficit that has a destructive effect on every aspect of the democratic process including our collective ability to get beyond political blind spots through imagining new possibilities to effectively respond to our most stubborn problems around inequality, environmental crisis, etc.” (personal correspondence, 2014).
For Slack and other fan activists, the solution comes through mobilizing popular stories as an entry point for political conversations, which brings us back to the zombies at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, the ways Jonathan McIntosh allowed Donald Duck to take down anti-immigration rhetoric, and the use of Harry Potter references to explain the stakes in human rights struggles. Chapter 3 discusses such practices in terms of fannish civics, in which they depend on a deep understanding and emotional commitment to a content world, and cultural acupuncture, in which these remixes tap into broadly shared knowledge about current popular culture trends that might be accessible to a larger audience.
As we have presented our research, some skeptics have expressed concern that “empowerment fantasies” may be displacing empathy for real-world problems; others have suggested that for these young fans—who often come from privileged backgrounds—it is easier to access human rights concerns through allusions to popular culture than through traditional mechanisms of consciousness raising and identity politics. Yet such mechanisms play vital functions even in those groups where people are directly advocating for their own rights and dignity. For instance, to explain his undocumented experiences, in a post on his blog, Erick Huerta—an immigrant rights advocate —explained how he turned to Superman, who was “from another planet … and grew up in the United States, just like me.”