The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins - Hardcover

"The Hawthorne Archive is the 'Where's Waldo?' of theoretical treasure hunts. Avery Gordon's not-so-imaginary archive is a multi-media jig-saw puzzle, a plurivocal mystery story, an epistemic chameleon of present tenses, shimmering hints, fragmentary indices, and stumbling stones that keep moving. This is a curatorial masterpiece whose 'utopian margins' are as imperfectly futuristic, fleeting, and incommensurable as history itself." -- --Patricia J. Williams James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia University School of Law "The Hawthorne Archive offers an expansive theory of utopia in the form of a literary experiment. In this beautiful assemblage of the thoughts and deeds of vagabonds, anarchists, fugitives, deserters, idlers, radicals, storytellers, and artists, Avery Gordon, the keeper of the archive, creates an innovative and dazzling account of global efforts to live and create the "what might be." The Hawthorne Archive opens a path for thinking through an extended engagement with the documents and ephemera of utopian thought, which is defined broadly as a standpoint for living in the here and now that refuses the brutal dispositions of racial capitalism. It is a serial work whose iterations of radical and anarchist thought unfold in a speculative engagement and imaginative encounter with historical documents, social movements, novels, visual art, film and photography, and the ephemera of refusal. This archive of letters, essays, dialogues, images and documents becomes a collective utterance of the struggle to create another world inside this one. The Hawthorne Archive is an exercise in run-away thought; it is a blues, a manifesto, a love letter, and a freedom dream." -- -Saidiya Hartman Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects. In this innovative, genre- and format-bending publication, Avery F. Gordon, the "keeper" of the Archive, presents a selection of its documents-original and compelling essays, letters, cultural analyses, images, photographs, conversations, friendship exchanges, and collaborations with various artists. Gordon creatively uses the imaginary of the Archive to explore the utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present, zeroing in on Marxist critical theory and the black radical tradition. Fusing critical theory with creative writing in a historical context, The Hawthorn Archive represents voices from the utopian margins, where fact, fiction, theory, and image converge. Reminiscent of the later fictions of Italo Calvino or Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, The Hawthorn Archive is a groundbreaking work that defies strict disciplinary, methodological, and aesthetic boundaries. And like Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, which established Gordon as one of the most influential interdisciplinary scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent years, it provides a kaleidoscopic analysis of power and effect. The Hawthorn Archive's experimental format and inventive synthesis of critical theory and creative writing make way for a powerful reconception of what counts as social change and political action, offering creative inspiration and critical tools to artists, activists, scholars across various disciplines, and general readers alike.