Book details
- Title: Imagination A Manifesto
- Author: Ruha Benjamin
- Narrator: Janina Edwards
- Genre: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Society & Current Affairs, Politics, Society & Current Affairs, Politics, Society & Current Affairs, Psychology
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company / Highbridge Company
- Publication date: 2024
- Page count: 208 pages
- Audiobook length: 4 hours 16 minutes
My review of Imagination
Every year, rather than making resolutions that I won’t keep, I set my intention for the year by choosing a word. This year‘s word is imagination. That’s why I chose Professor Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination as my bridge book for the year—the book I started in 2024 and finished in 2025. Just over 4 hours and under 200 pages, Imagination is a thoughtful exploration of not only our own imaginations, but how our society creates collective imaginaries.
Benjamin begins the book by asking whose imagination gets to define our collective imagination. She cites Thomas Berry’s assessment that “We are in between stories.” The Old Stories are defined by colonialism, ableism, racism, and white supremacy. We must therefore imagine New Stories of collective wellbeing. But Benjamin‘s view of imagination is not inherently positive. She also examines the ways in which we’ve used our imaginations to harm, punish, incarcerate, and kill each other.
Her discussion of eugenics is particularly insightful in light of recent controversial ad campaigns. This weekend, I reread her chapter on Imagining Eugenics and realized how much my thoughts on those ads were informed by her ideas. In her discussion, she explains the difference between negative and positive eugenics–an idea that many people online struggled with. What many people didn’t understand was how an ad for jeans advocated for eugenics. Many saw the gene/jean pun as merely a joke, and Sydney Sweeney as simply a hot model. But as Benjamin shows, you do not need to explicitly advocate for eugenics in order to use eugenic imagination.
“Imagination, we might say, is the invisible circuitry that connects the world out there to our inner worlds. So, we cannot just be critical of oppressive systems without also examining how our own private thoughts and desires reflect and reproduce a dominant imagination that values some lives over others. We must, in a sense, continuously deprogram ourselves, challenging the hierarchies that place us above or below, and decode the imaginative justifications that make those social hierarchies seem natural, durable, and deserved.” Page 64, paperback edition
Benjamin uses the example of game developers. Game developers do not need to advocate for the elimination of a particular group of people for eugenics to penetrate the imagination they use to build the games. A space where “fun is the battlefield” also imagines a space where some people have more value than others and where white players cosplay Black identities. Eugenics is not text but subtext, embedded in the frameworks on which the imagined worlds of the games are created, nearly as invisible as the mortar that binds bricks together in the real world. This represents the problem with the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad. It’s not that AE is explicitly advocating for eugenics, but rather that American Eagle is imagining a world in which Sydney’s genes are as good as AE’s jeans.
Ultimately, Benjamin’s focus is getting us to a society with abolition, equity, and liberation at its core. She talks at length about the role justice plays in building our collective future. Her discussion of Breonna’s Garden is particularly poignant.
Benjamin encourages us to imagine the future where imagination is a powerful antidote to apathy. The final section of the book is called Imagination Incubator. Here, Benjamin includes activities and questions that you can answer either individually or as a group. Not surprisingly, one activity focuses on the concept of Acorn that Octavia Butler uses in Parable of the Sower. If you lead an organization that is building for the future, especially if you work in the nonprofit space, I encourage you to buy this book, have your team read it, and work through the questions that Benjamin asks in the Imagination Incubator section. Or better yet, book her to speak at your event.
You should read Imagination if:
- You are feeling hopeless about the future
- You believe that we should listen to tech CEOs less
- You know artificial intelligence uses em dashes because real writers use em dashes
How to read Imagination
With your imagination, of course! You can order of Professor Benjamin’s website.