Beneath and Beyond the Forty-Fifth American Presidency

Abstract

Mesmerized by its antic spectacle and its reinvigoration of hoary pathologies of an American past that will not pass, much resistance-discourse about the forty-fifth U.S. presidency does not foreground the key fact that it is the emanation of a global neoliberalism unique to the twenty-first century. Arguing for an imaginative political vision that extends beyond the horizon of coming election cycles, and past the borders of the nation-state, the essay evokes a venerable African American intellectual tradition as it looks upon the forty-fifth presidency as an opportunity to refuse pessimism and embrace internationalist, pragmatic utopianism.