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Seeds of Hope: “Posteritism” and the Political Uses of the Future, 1900–1901
Book chapter

Seeds of Hope: “Posteritism” and the Political Uses of the Future, 1900–1901

Nick Yablon
Remembrance of Things Present
University of Chicago Press
06/12/2019
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226574271.003.0005

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Abstract

This chapter examines how the time capsules of 1900/1 engaged contemporary issues. Allowed to submit pre-sealed messages, contributors were emboldened to express negative as well as positive assessments about the conditions of cities, the legitimacy of imperialist wars, the impact of technology on everyday life, and the persistence of gender, racial, and economic equalities. They thus reveal how groups competed to shape the memory of the present as well as past. Contributors also submitted conflicting predictions for the millennium, from visions of power and prosperity to premonitions of socialist revolution and despotism. While some extrapolated current trends, producing predetermined or “closed” futures resembling those of (social) scientists, others imagined contingent and unknowable futures, in which certain institutions, groups, or racial categories might no longer exist. These “open” futures contradict assumptions about the future’s foreclosure in modernity. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, the chapter also considers predictions as expressions of utopian hope for movements such as eugenics, Christian Science, progressive reform, and the struggle for the rights of women, minorities, and workers Contributors rendered their utopias “concrete” by rooting them in an embodied and affective relationship with their future readers, and in a spirit of responsibility to work actively toward those futures.
 utopias Detroit race ethnicity Social and Cultural History future Ernst Bloch labor movement technology women's rights urban history

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