Comparative Futurisms
This spring (the details have grown hazy) I began my pursuit of the idea of Judeo-Futurism. From the beginning, I had the model of Afro-Futurism before me as a phenomenon that seemed to have cultural potency. It is a narrative platform that various different thinkers and creators can build on – an open source environment lacking absolute boundaries. The question that followed was, could Afro-Futurism offer a useful template for the development of the superstructure of Judeo-Futurism as a Jewish social movement/tendency/practice.
In order to get to the point where I could look at Afro-Futurism, I felt the need to investigate the development of the idea of Futurism across the usages that preceded Afro-Futurism. Italian and Russian Futurism revealed the development of a kind of superstructure in which visual and literary artists were able to deal with their hopes for the future, their frustrations with the existing order, and their anxieties about the future that were in some cases concealed, and in other cases, allowed open expression. The development of Futurism as a professional activity, as modeled by Alvin and (his frequently uncredited wife) Heidi Toffler, showed that the pace of innovation and social change had a cost that would create its own secondary effects. Futurisms of all stripes, by their nature, were biased towards change. This bias came either from boosterism or from a sense of an obligation to mitigate inevitable change through management efforts.
What distinguished Afro-Futurism from preceding Futurism was the way that it attempted to manage the flow of what seemed like inevitable social changes so that Black people would benefit from that change. Change is neither designed by man or nature to specifically accommodate one group or another. However, the existing structures that organize society generally determine who will experience the most benefits and who will experience the most harm as those changes take effect. Despite the long history of the black community being shut out from the full benefits of change, or perhaps precisely because of it, many in that community have been eager and excited to imagine and realize a place within the new landscape that change opens up.
The specific narrative elements that populate Afro-Futurism are not applicable to Jewish experience. The glorification of a mythological Black Egyptian past is, at the least, problematic from a Jewish point of view. The genealogy of the idea is rooted in anti-Jewish prejudice, a poison at the roots. The cultural success of Afro-Futurism is also built on erasures of Jewish presence. This seemed like a problem to me, but it is actually a distraction.
There is a foundation understanding of Black and Jewish experience in the modern period. Jewish and Black integration, or the failure thereof, in the post-1800s period has many parallels. These are easier to see if we don’t insist on them falling in precise chronological parallel. Jewish efforts at assimilation and accommodation find points of obvious similarity to those same struggles within Black communities. The development of Zionism and Jewish diaspora nationalism finds parallels in domestic Black radicalism, diaspora anti-colonialism and the actual Anti-Colonialist struggle in Africa. Beyond that is the similarity between the disharmony/harmony between diaspora and Israeli Jewry and diaspora and African Blacks. As a result, comparisons between the two groups are actually a source of useful comparison in the creation of Futurisms around their specific communities. Afro-Futurism and Judeo-Futurism address the future along the same lines as each other. Italian and Russian Futurism, as relevant as they may be to understanding Afro-Futurism and Judeo-Futurism, are more broadly construed. They are products of their specific cultural situation, but they immediately sought to have influence outside of their home territory. They imagined themselves as global solutions.
In my article last week, I discussed the problem that I see in fixed narratives. These are arguments like, “illegal immigrants take jobs away from real Americans.” That narrative posits ideas about who immigrants are, what resources and skills they bring to the country, what kind of jobs they take, what the laws are around immigration and employment, who “real Americans” are and what it is they are actually seeking as employment. The noxious narrative is popular today, but it is staler than jokes about why the chicken crossed the road. The poison that it has always carried (and always will) is a mixture of racial and ethnic hate.
The knot that this kind of narrative creates comes from the integration of different anxieties into a monolithic narrative. Economic anxiety is combined with racial and ethnic prejudice and an innocent fear of change that seems unpredictable in its ultimate consequences. The stated issue could be resolved, and yet, the underlying issues would remain. The continued presence of the underlying issues and their historic association with the narrative continues to cause the narrative to appear in the popular discourse and to power political movements that exploit the people who accept the narrative. At certain times the narrative will have a strong presence, and at others, a weaker grip. This is the result of the existence of counter-narratives, such as the truthful narrative that “immigration is a net positive for the overall native-born population’s economic well-being.” Because these two narratives exist in a way where the two orbit each other without resolving the anxieties that underlie the toxic narrative, the beneficial narrative cannot be the means of eradicating the toxic narrative.
In “Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream,” Nurith Gertz shows how the narrative of the Israeli Labor party (center-left) which views Israeli society as an outgrowth and extension of Western liberalism and humanism is locked in a argument with the Revisionist Zionists and their political heirs, the Likud Party and their further right fascist allies. Their narrative is of a Jewish state that is opposed on all sides and lacks any allies. Their promise is that they will defend the Jewish state from their enemies, who are comprised of those who oppose them domestically and everyone else in the world beyond their borders. This is complicated by a third popular narrative, that of the Orthodox/Haredi parties whose view of the unified threat of the world beyond their community is a functional match with the Revisionist Zionist/Likud narrative. The only difference is that they believe that their politics has God’s hechsher and cannot be subject to any compromise. The political history of the state of Israel exists within the relatively closed system of the orbit of these narratives. Even as the nature and organization of Israeli society has changed dramatically since the 1980s, these same narratives maintain their iron grip on the discourse. (Gertz described these narratives and other related rhetorical strategies that have constituted the political dialogue in Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel with greater sophistication than I have provided. As the materials that she uses to draw out the details of this she uses political speeches, political posters and broadsides posted in public, newspaper articles, TV reports and television advertisements, as well as Israeli film and literature, both high and low.)
In Israel (as mentioned above), and in the American Jewish community (“Am Yisrael Chai” vs JVP), the fixed narratives that rule debate, and spoil the prospects for better societies, maintain their strength. Judeo-Futurism can exist carrying forward problematic narratives and narrative clusters. However, it hardly seems worth the effort to me if that is the case. If Judeo-Futurism can become a thing of substance it will be the product of many hands and my part might be infinitesimal. Nevertheless, I think it could be useful. To that end, I will continue to try to understand the origins and the network of Jewish cultural and political thinking in the Modern period and try to undermine the fixed narratives that I feel are doing us hard.
