[Peace] Billy Keniston to talk about Utopian Thinking, Tuesday Dec. 2nd 6:30-8 @ IMC

[Susan Parenti via Peace]

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> Lecture/Workshop: "On the Necessity of Utopian Thinking: Lessons from the Struggle against Apartheid"Tuesday, Dec. 2nd from 6:30pm-8pm
> Lecture from Billy Keniston, Author of Choosing to be Free
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> During the dark repression of apartheid, Rick Turner helped to envision "an ideally possible society." He insisted that the struggle to change society must be about more than just appealing to the rulers to make concessions. We need to, in his words, "think more clearly than the state allows" about the kind of society we actually desire.
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> Join us for a discussion of the particular vision that Rick Turner had for a free South Africa. What of this vision is still applicable for us today, in the United States? How would our own ideas of an ideal society be different? What happened such that the system change in South Africa in 1994 didn't move in the direction of an ideal society?
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> This talk is designed to draw from Keniston's book, Choosing to be Free, in order to facilitate a discussion of contemporary lessons for activists and scholars. 
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> As detailed in Keniston's Choosing to be Free, Turner was one of South Africa’s most original and powerful thinkers and is remembered today as a remarkable teacher and activist. For almost ten years, from 1968, when he returned to South Africa from his studies at the Sorbonne, to 1978, when he was shot by an unknown assassin, Rick Turner played an important role in the opposition to apartheid, especially by provoking whites to expand their vision of what South Africa could be. Believing in the "necessity of utopian thinking," he wrote a short book, The Eye of the Needle (1972), that sought to envision a very different kind of society. It has become a classic of its kind. For the authorities Rick Turner was a constant source of annoyance, a threat and anomaly that had to be dealt with. What was most dangerous about him was that his life and thought failed to fit within the dominant narrative of his time. Never a member of the ANC or the Communist Party or any political party for that matter, he propounded a vision for the transformation of South Africa that was both independent and radical.
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> Here in America, our problems are very different from the society Turner confronted, and yet the need for Utopian thinking is no less important. What would be an ideally possible society for you?
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