Revolutionary Optimisism

Back in the early 2000s, when I first taught David Harvey’s freshly minted Spaces of Hope in my geography and feminist/queer undergraduate classes, I remember the challenge of introducing critical geographic thought—with its relentless emphasis on crisis—to young people who, despite the turmoil around them, radiated hope and optimism. At the time, I was teaching at two public universities: one in central Pennsylvania and the other in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. I commuted between these locations and taught across a diverse student body—many first-generation, working long hours to fund their education, some facing precarious circumstances, and also many caught up in their social worlds and in their fledgling independence as young adult college students. I was often struck by the resilience of their hopeful confidence for their futures. The times seemed plenty dire to me with the US launching another Middle East war, the intensification of violence and terror across Mexico, global financial instability, and the expansion of a far-right extremism that fueled climate denialism, white supremacy, entrenched misogyny, homophobia, and anti-immigrant hatred. And yet my students expressed beliefs that they should continue to study, develop their analytical skills, and head into this messy world with confidence.  My own critical pessimism aside, I have found that students enjoy deliberating hope, no matter if the world appears to be collapsing in their midst.

Somewhat early in my own career in the early 2000s, and while developing my courses on social and ecological justice, solidarity, and intersectional feminism, I often struggled to find discussions of capitalism and its intersecting cruelties that could build upon the student’s dogged optimism, or at least not quash it. Much of the contemporary critical geographic and Marxist literature’s emphasis on crisis often overwhelmed students who found the analyses to be pessimistic about their generation’s commitment to progressive change and justice.  I don’t think that was the intention of many of those analyses although that was often the effect as students were turned off when they perceived a nostalgia for a former revolutionary student spirit, say from the 1960s. They hungered for creative discussions of new kinds of solidarities that tapped into their digital worlds and that imagined different kinds of political collectivities and affective communities that were not distilled down to economic class and what they found to be outdated notions of a revolution. Within that context, you can imagine my relief when David Harvey took up the project of hope and optimism in Spaces of Hope. As soon as I could, I listed it, or some portion of it, on most of my syllabi over the next decade. Even the title was a welcome addition. The word “hope” diluted the “crisis” titles.

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In the book, David Harvey combines critique with optimism as he moves beyond only diagnosing capitalism’s brutalities to urge readers to imagine alternatives to global capitalism and ways that local level projects can combine into transformative possibilities. He grounds his call for radical optimism in a reworking of Antonio Gramsci’s famous dictum, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” and insists that scholars, students, and social justice activists commit to turning their intellectual optimism into a source of hopeful and collective action. To do this, Harvey makes a shift in his own political thought as he releases his former insistence that the only effective resistance is one that resembles “working men of the world unite.” Instead, he advocates for creative and optimistic thinking—class solidarity is still part of the recipe for building alternative worlds and better futures, he explains, that is forming dialectically, constantly in motion, with innovative thought fueled by hopefulness.  Toward developing this line of thought, he revisits the history of utopian movements—not to romanticize them, but to learn from their limits—and introduces dialectical utopianism: a mode of thinking that embraces the tension between critique and intellectual optimism as fertile ground for creating alternatives to entrenched capitalism and its associated horrors. In the book’s closing pages, Harvey sketches a personal vision of utopian possibility—a particular tribute to his own geography of hope in which he reminds us that utopia is not an abstraction located nowhere and at no time, but a dialectical process of creating possibility, a process in constant motion that when fed by intellectual optimism that that is committed to putting that thought, collectively, into practice makes manifest many and diverse spaces of hope.

And so, over the years, as my students and I deliberated upon Spaces of Hope in consecutive classes for the first decade after its release, Harvey’s call for radical hope resonated with them in both the U.S. and Mexico. For many, activism was part of their daily lives. At Penn State in the early 2000s, the Black Students Caucus organized rallies, sit-ins, and even stormed a nationally televised football game to protest racism on campus—actions that led to the founding of the Africana Research Center. Contemporaneously, feminist and queer students pushed back against censorship, inspiring the creation of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Some of these students were in my classes.  In Mexico, my students participated in and often led marches against neoliberalism, feminicidio, and in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Across these diverse classrooms and contexts—where students often came and went from protests, sit-ins, and occupations—Harvey’s idea of the insurgent architect especially captivated them. Many identified with his profile of the revolutionary optimist who embraces imagination and speculative thinking—not as escapism, but as a vital process for generating real alternatives to capitalism across multiple scales. As Harvey writes:

“Until we insurgent architects know the courage of our minds and are prepared to take an equally speculative plunge into some unknown, we too will continue to be the objects of historical geography (like worker bees) rather than active subjects, consciously pushing human possibilities to their limits.” (p. 255)

In other words, Spaces of Hope engaged and cajoled and offered them ways to articulate critiques while simultaneously advocating for change, for justice, and better futures. They could be the insurgent architects of their collective and hopeful paths.

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Fast forward two decades, and I must confess that I have not taught the book in some time. I have replaced it with some of Harvey’s more recent publications along with other texts, some inspired by the book, that engage critically with hopefulness. Although now, as I have revisited my affection for Spaces of Hope in preparation for this writing, I now believe that the book is even more timely. But for a different and troubling set of reasons. In a recent environmental justice course, one student confessed, “I don’t even know what solidarity is. I don’t think it’s possible anymore.” When I asked how many felt hopeful about their futures and the future of the living planet, only two hands—out of forty—rose.

So, Spaces of Hope moved back onto my syllabus.

While Harvey’s concepts of dialectical utopianism and insurgent architects continue to challenge students and while the optimism of my classes from two decades ago has noticeably ebbed across students who feel more polarized and economically and socially vulnerable in a planet that also is increasingly vulnerable, Spaces of Hope resonates. Some students have found Harvey’s utopian vision and calls for intellectual optimism inspiring, others, strange but brave. One student last year titled their presentation: “An Insurgent Architect’s Guide to Hopeful Futures.”  I still see how, twenty-five years after its first printing, Spaces of Hope continues to offer many powerful tools for applying hopefulness with progressive purpose, as for current and former youth alike, the book reminds us that revolutionary optimism, insurgent architects, and courageous solidarity are never out of date.

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