46. Hope in the Dark | Rebecca Solnit
untold histories wild possibilities
I’ve written about my favourite Rebecca Solnit book before and it led me to this one. Highly recommended by the Guardian as ‘a meditation on activism and hope.’ I stopped reading headlines sometime in 2016, when America decided to dominate all news by appointing that president. I was also finding the relentless coverage of the worldwide slide into fascism and climate emergency quite overwhelming. Rebecca Solnit’s political manifesto, originally published to encourage activists while George W Bush waged war in Iraq, started to see a huge resurgence in sales after the election of Donald Trump.
Two days after Trump’s victory Solnit, who invented the term “mansplaining”1, gave away free downloads of the title. When she announced the giveaway, the feminist writer and historian wrote: “History is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
The book is small but powerful, just 142 pages. Each chapter is itself a story and covers topics Rebecca feels passionately about, change and hope. She has a beautiful way of taking a subject (such as First World War, Apartheid in South Africa), and explaining it in a way that makes you feel hopeful too.
“Who, two decades ago, could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa? Who, four decades ago, could have conceived of the changed status of all who are non-white, nonmale, or non straight, the wide-open conversations about power, nature, economies and ecologies?
There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognise what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital but by dreams of freedom, of justice, and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansplaining — Author Rebecca Solnit ascribed the phenomenon to a combination of "overconfidence and cluelessness.”