What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Courtney Desiree Morris
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual artist and assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Morris received her PhD in Anthropology at the Universiry of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing a book entitled To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession and political repression from the 19th century to the present. Her work has been published in Asterisx, American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color.
University of California Berkeley, Assistant Professor and Artist