By Akriti Mehta
Our webinar series on disability activism under authoritarianism has now come to a close. Hearing from people from such different contexts about the challenges they are facing has been difficult. It is clear that the forces of oppression and injustice are building momentum—authoritarianism is gaining ground from Argentina to UK to El Salvador and across the globe; the level of surveillance we are seeing these days in unprecedented; the precarity and repression that activism is operating under is massive; and the amount of work needed to form meaningful coalitions is immense.
Despair, grief, and rage seem to not only be warranted, but even a reasonable response to this state of affairs. Hope and a belief in a just future world is at best difficult to sustain, and at worst feels like an empty promise.
Despite all signs to the contrary, I believe that a better world, a utopia without injustice and oppression, is possible. Despite knowing all too well the troubles that plague our movements both from within and without, I hold out hope that we can breathe life into this imagined future world. I don’t think it is inevitable nor do I think that optimism alone will suffice. Learning from queer, abolitionist, Black, feminist, and indigenous activists and scholars, I have come to understand hope and utopia in different ways.
José Esteban Muñoz1, a queer activist and academic, draws a difference between believing in an ‘abstract utopia’ and a ‘concrete utopia’. An abstract utopia is just that—an abstracted idea of an ideal world underpinned by an optimism untethered from historical and contemporary struggles. It is the commercialised empty slogans which seem to be everywhere in institutional politics and on social media.
On the other hand, a concrete utopia is founded and grounded in historical consciousness and the current political realities. The belief in a concrete utopia is dependent not on some platitude of “gotta have hope”. It lives in the realm of a difficult, critical, and educated hope which erupts out of and is sustained political engagement with structures of oppression and injustice. Hope, in this way, is not a practice of looking away from the ugliness of the world, or a repression of despair at it.
Mariame Kaba2, an abolitionist activist, wrote that hope is an action. It is not simply some positive, warm, and fuzzy feeling. It does not “preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense”. We can feel both enraged and despairing at the world and have hope in the possibility of a better one. For me and others, hope does not shy away from knowing that sometimes we will fail. Failure and every emotion that comes with it not only does not negate hope, it also does not exempt us from the “responsibility to work to change present reality”1.
Kaba says that “hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day”. It is not an emotion or something we feel. Hope is something we do; it is action, it is work. It is a continual commitment to struggle against injustice in the everyday, even if we don’t see the fruits of this labour in our lifetimes. We build upon those who came before us, and we build so that those who come after us can take our work further. And we hope that if we do this everyday, some day, we will have built the world we desire.
Finally, hope is inherently relational rather than existing in a vacuum within an individual. It emerges from and is sustained by a collective struggle for justice. It is done with others around us, whether in ambitious actions or in small everyday moments. Every action that subverts the demands of a capitalist and imperialist world is a way to sustain and practice hope.
It is in community with others, hearing their stories of resistance, and sharing mine which sustains my hope in a utopian future. From Noah’s insistence on continuing work in exile to Celeste, Joyce, and Shezana’s commitment to activism despite (or maybe because of) constant State violence; from Amir and Akwe trying to provide safe havens from surveillance to Faith consistently trying to ensure cybersecurity is accessible; from Marija and Fredrick trying to change how we resource movements to Deya fighting to change the way we think about resources entirely; from Emilie and Shaharzad working across borders to provide justice and protection to marginalised communities to Loan, Silvestre, and Luciana relentlessly building alliances across movements; and from Paz, Nazlı’s, and Ly Xīnzhèn’s unflaggingly efforts to build communities of care to everyone who attended the webinars because they care about injustice.
It is these examples of continual commitment to building the world I want to inhabit that sustain my hope that it is indeed possible.
To re-visit the webinar series, read the La Yapa series on our website
1 Muñoz, J. E. (2019). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press.
2 Kaba, M. (2018). Hope is A Discipline. Beyond Prisons Podcast.
Featured image: Photo by Akriti Mehta (Mumbai, 22 February 2023)
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