PORTALS OF
IMAGINAL PRACTICE
This collection began like many things do, with conversations. These conversations over coffee, on walks, in between familial crises and celebrations, on breaks in workshops, and over Zoom calls explored how to cultivate practices of imagining beyond white body supremacy culture and colonialism. These conversations revealed our shared longing to breathe life into radical hope and possibility without bypassing the brutal realities and struggle of power-over culture, both past and present. What emerged was an excitement to share the stories, poems, fairy tales, images, artwork, and incantations collected here in a small sampling of imagination practices.
Whiteness and white body supremacy culture are products of colonialism. 1Supremacy culture needs hierarchies to justify itself. These hierarchies, based on race, gender, ability, and other designated identities of worth and belonging, have been reproduced over centuries through brutality and oppression. Over centuries, colonialism and white body supremacy have continued to assert, expand, and entrench power-over ideology as the dominant culture.
And, over centuries, resistance struggles have continued to refuse the normalization of white body supremacy, the mainstreaming of power-over and authoritarian systems, and the “inevitable” and “natural” progress narrative of colonialism.2
From riots against land enclosures and protests against witch burnings in the early 12th century; to european colonial settlers on Turtle Island (colonialy known as the united states) being jailed, tortured, and killed for refusing to engage in genocidal wars against Indigenous nations in the 14th and 15th centuries; to abolitionist revolts fighting the enslavement of human beings in the 16th century; to present day farmers’ collectives’ guerilla gardens, food revolutions, student mobilizations, and movements for collective trauma healing in the face of genocide and ecological crisis…
There has always been resistance.
This series is an invitation to remember resistance lives in our bodies and collective memories. It is an invocation to remember the magic of collective resistance. This series is an invitation to practice conjuring past and present refusals and imagine future possibilities beyond colonialism and white body supremacy.
There are many brilliant, bold, and beautiful abolitionist imagination practices. We offer one small story-ripple in the various currents of resistance.
Stories and myths drop bodies into present-oriented experiences of past and future. This kind of presence, of being in and with while staying here and now, opens up wild spaces for transformation and healing. This is why story and myth are the heartbeat in many healing practices.
Songs, lyrics, melodies are alive – are the connective tissues and muscles of culture. Songs have the power to transform emotive experiences, perceptions, bodies, and nervous systems. Songs can open portals and alter relationships to space and time – past, present, and future.
Poems can make visible the “invisible” and challenge the “non-existent.” Poetry offers ways to imagine and manifest cultural shape-shifts inside our bodies, in our relationships, in ecosystems and environments.
Art can move in and through the body and body collective in ways that bypass and disrupt colonial-rational language and thought. Art can trouble the boundaries and the very shape of colonialism in emotive and emotive-cognitive ways. Art is the pulse and breath of healing.
Stories and fairytales entertain while imparting moral lessons that listeners metabolize, internalize, and embody; in other words, they are cultural binders. They have been used to uphold, normalize, and mainstream christianity, heterosexuality, gender binaries, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy. Here, we recraft some into anti-racist, anti-fascist stories that attempt to take us beyond coloniality/modernity culture jamming through fairy tales and storytelling.
This series hopes to support fierce, anti-racist, ecologically-abolitionist, cultural imaginations and revolutionary realities that have yet to be fully manifested and also need to be practiced here and now.
Dismantling, uprooting, and composting deeply entrenched tendrils of white body supremacy culture while practicing, planning, and planting for future harvests takes rigorous regular tending, restoration of ecological habitat, and cultivation of hearty and fertile abolitionist rhizomes.
Stories are seeds that bloom possibilities.
We hope these story.seeds rewild dreams, imaginations, and possibilities.
2 For more check out An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Daivd Wengrow and David Graeber.