A panel I organized for the upcoming Anarchist Studies Network conference was accepted! Titled “Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions,” it features a new generation of anarchist historians who I’m very excited to collaborate with. You’ll be able to tune in online for the conference August 24-26.
Here’s the panel abstract:
Prefigurative practices are driven by an anarchist ethics that attempts to “build the new world in the shell of the old.” But just what does this “new world” of the future look like, and how do we get there? This panel explores how visions of the future have shaped anarchist strategy and life across the twentieth century in the territory of the US state. Nikita Shepard argues that engagements with the future have been central to queer anarchist thought and practice for over a century, fundamentally shaping visions and practices of sexual and political liberation. Jacqui Sahagian explores how deindustrialization influenced the prefigurative practices and utopian visions of anarchists and artists in Detroit during the late twentieth century. Spencer Beswick explores competing visions of prefiguration and dual power in the 1990s through Love and Rage’s critique of the infoshop movement and their positioning of the Zapatistas as a vision of the future. Richard Saich looks at the 1999 Battle of Seattle and uses the slogan “this is what democracy looks like” to understand the turn-of-the-century anarchist approach to prefiguring the future. Collectively, these papers attempt to use historical analysis to engage with enduring questions of anarchist political theory.