Imagination: A Manifesto

by Ruha Benjamin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Ruha Benjamin builds an immensely compelling and insightful narrative around the concept that our imaginations already know what a better world looks like. It’s a reminder that we can do what we set our minds too, and that imagination is a perfectly fine building block to start from.

“Start here, and then go about the work of imagining the world anew.” —Arimeta Diop, Vanity Fair

In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination.

The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324105015
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/04/2025
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	382,191
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies and the founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University, and a MacArthur Fellow. The author of the Stowe Prize–winning Viral Justice, as well as Race After Technology and People’s Science, Benjamin lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

"A short, punchy book designed to kick-start expansive thinking about society’s most pressing collective problems.… In the tradition of the best manifestos, Benjamin encourages readers to think through seemingly audacious suggestions."

Science - Victor Ray

"A short, punchy book designed to kick-start expansive thinking about society’s most pressing collective problems. . . In the tradition of the best manifestos, Benjamin encourages readers to think through seemingly audacious suggestions."

Science Magazine

★ 12/18/2023

Benjamin (Viral Justice) posits in this wide-ranging treatise that “collective imagination” will be a key force behind the creation of an emerging new social order. Arguing that the world is “between stories” (quoting historian Thomas Berry) and thus ready to discard dead ideas of racism and nationalism and dream new social arrangements into being, Benjamin asserts that “it matters whose imaginations get to materialize as our shared future.” She cautions that society is in danger of being ensnared by the quasi-utopias on offer from tech titans, where the well-off escape problems rather than solve them and technology is used to police and surveil regular people. Benjamin goes on to critique other realms of failed imagination, including America’s education system (“a site of spirit murder”) and prison system. She highlights projects that, in her view, direct collective imagination toward more just and humane outcomes, ranging from experiments in data sovereignty in Barcelona to a virtual reality art installation honoring Breonna Taylor’s life. Throughout, Benjamin’s roving narrative moves nimbly between topics to make her case (at one exemplary point she pauses her analysis of a documentary on creative writing programs for prisoners to note how it reminds her of a line from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: “Could a creature without a human spirit create such heart-wrenching paintings?”). It’s a powerful exhortation for society to point its dreams toward the collective good. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Benjamin makes the case for imagination being a core tool to revolutionary work without getting too lost in the clouds. . . In tones that transport the reader back to sentiments of the wide-eyed openness to possibility “the student” often occupies Imagination’s brevity and makes it clear that it is an activation point. Start here, and then go about the work of imagining the world anew. "

Vanity Fair - Arimeta Diop

"Only Ruha Benjamin could have written this gift of a book. Science and technology’s most astute social critic, she knows the power of imagination—the incubator of breathtaking beauty and the atomic bomb. Bold, brilliant, and visionary, Benjamin’s manifesto asks us to wage love, to imagine an abolitionist, compassionate, just world against the venal dreams of warmongers and billionaires. An essential weapon in our struggle to save life."

Robin D. G. Kelley

"Ruha Benjamin reminds us that in our collective imaginations we already have everything we need to make the world we want to live in. Imagination is a lovely volume with a meditation on the power of being human: we can dream, if we only believe that we can."

Tressie McMillan Cottom

2023-12-06
Princeton sociologist Benjamin takes Toni Morrison’s advice to “dream a little before you think” and runs with it.

In this brief treatise, imagination is both a noun and an imperative, and the author’s usage is “unruly.” In essence, Benjamin invites readers to consider a different world, one that the imagination of others tells us is the best of all possible worlds. It’s fruitful, for instance, to imagine not an America in which exceptional “unicorns” of color are marked as evidence that the educational system is colorblind, but instead one in which a new system of education is created to “cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity.” Just so, Benjamin writes, we need to collectively imagine ways to combat such things as racism, climate change, economic inequality, and the like. Sometimes the author’s language is a touch jargony, unless you like rubrics such as “transition imaginaries,” but more often she’s refreshingly direct: “We can transform the hostile environments that try to trap us—whether they are literal cages, barbed wire–encircled playgrounds, or bullet-friendly classrooms. We can imagine otherwise.” The author also examines efforts to put this kind of imagining into practice, such as a board game that turns Monopoly on its head by teaching the values of economic cooperation, and an imagined border in which steel walls give way to binational cities. One of Benjamin’s experiments, as she describes it, was a delightful remaking of daily life in isolation via beekeeping. “Not only do bees teach us that collaboration is how we survive, that decision-making should be collective…but also that we don’t have to choose between working hard and creating beautiful, sweet things.” Benjamin closes with a set of writing and thinking prompts that will enliven curricula and dinner-table conversations alike.

A provocative manifesto indeed, and one that deserves a wide audience.

Kirkus Reviews