The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins

A selection of items from the Hawthorn Archive. The Hawthorn Archive gathers the histories and practices of those who have long challenged the modern racial capitalist system but whose challenges have been obscured, including by the history of the utopian itself.

More information on the Hawthorn Archive.

“The Hawthorn Archive is the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ of theoretical treasure hunts. This not-so-imaginary archive is a multimedia jigsaw 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, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University

“The Hawthorn Archive opens a path for thinking in its extended engagement with documents and ephemera of utopian thought. Avery Gordon creates an innovative and dazzling account of global efforts to live in the here and now that refuse the brutal dispositions of racial capitalism and create the ‘what might be.’ It is an exercise in runaway thought; it is a blues, a manifesto, a love letter, and a freedom dream.”
– Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

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