Carol Bebelle, The World as It Is … The World as It Could Be: A Cultural Continuum for Consideration

ForeseeableFutures #12

Position Papers from Imagining America

Foreseeable Futures became an Imagining America (IA) position paper series in 2000, publishing keynote addresses from the annual conference along with responses from oftentimes younger artists and scholars in the IA community. Just one year old, IA was explained to the world by then IA Faculty Director Julie Ellison: “Imagining America helps focus the combined energies of higher education and the public arts and humanities on building the commons.” Over twenty years later, this description still describes the heart of IA, a national consortium currently hosted by the University of California, Davis, that brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, students, community leaders, and cultural organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more caring, just, and liberatory ‘America’ and world.

With a pause in publication for IA’s second term at Syracuse University and the first term at UC Davis, we are pleased to restart this valuable public scholarship platform with Carol Bebelle’s essay, The World as It Is … The World as It Could Be: A Cultural Continuum for Consideration. There is not a better suited person to propose how we might build the commons. Co-founder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center and cherished New Orleans culture keeper, Carol is a longtime IA friend, leader, thinker, and doer who has consistently proposed that the way to heal the world is through ‘WE-Making.’ For Carol WE-Making is a lived practice of radical hopefulness where community connections, culture, artmaking, and storytelling help humans realize that we must be fully present for one another to survive and thrive in the world. Carol has consistently brought this wisdom and practice to the IA community for over two decades, demonstrating how we all have something unique to offer and to learn from one another.

Carol shared this message through a poem ‘Weaving Our We’ on the opening plenary of the 2014 IA National Gathering in Atlanta, Georgia. Nearly a decade later, IA awarded Carol the Randy Martin Spirit Award and invited her to present her Cultural Continuum theory formed through 25 years of leadership at Ashé Cultural Arts Center. Foreseeable Futures #12 is Carol’s written reflection of this work presented at the 2022 National Gathering in New Orleans. Carol invited friends and collaborators Jack Tchen, Tia Smith, and Adam Bush to provide a response to her position paper. Lidya Araya, another longtime collaborator invited by Carol, provided the beautiful artwork and design. Combined, this inspiring group of artists and scholars, actively strengthening the commons in their own communities, exemplify the cultural continuum of Imagining America.

• Edited by Erica Kohl-Arenas and Stephanie Maroney

• Responses by Adam Bush, Tia Smith, Jack Tchen

• Artwork and Design by Lidya Araya