Session 3A: Novel Paradigms for Hope

Session 3A: Novel Paradigms for Hope
Chair: Wendy Rountree

A Cultural Movement to Increase Hope in the 21st Century
Lida Sharafatmand
University of Malta, Malta

As a response to increasing terrorist attacks at the turn of the 21st century, increased cultural conflicts in identity politics and an increase in artistic expressions that show hopelessness and nullity in public spheres and galleries, a group of artists from several countries came to create a synergy among each other by supporting artistic expressions and creations that show hope and care for people’s happiness. Taking resources from all the existing art movements (classicism, realism, impressionism, minimalism, and so on) we have come to focus our creations and artistic activities to promote a culture of hope and peace. This has been expressed in a text called Humanitarian Art Manifesto which is being signed by artists around the world on an ongoing basis, and launched once a year through coordinated activities in the different countries which the signatories come from.
As the coordinator of this movement and the author if the Humanitarian Art Manifesto text, I shall present a paper on this artistic and cultural movement whose aim is precisely to increase hope and bring refreshing news to public and the media. I will speak about the internal and external challenges and difficulties that we face when exposing and creating our works. The external challenges include confronting publics who have lost hope totally and find our work almost ridiculous, as well as challenging the media to give the ‘good news’ of events to public when the ‘sensational terror news’ seem to be far more attractive. Internal challenges include believing in the hope for humanity inside ourselves (as the artists in this cultural movement) regardless the harshness of reality around the world and facing the truth of whether our work is having an effect to change the circumstances for better and actually stimulate hope in people or not.
The first launch of our cultural movement was in September-October 2004 (in 10 countries), the second one in September-October 2005 (in15 countries), and the third one is due September-October 2006 (in 20 countries).

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This paper uses hope as a lens through which to explore dietary practice among predominantly white, West Coast US self-ascribed ‘hippies,’ ‘drop outs’ and ‘back-to-the-landers’ living in Hawai‘i. Often referred to by them as ‘paradise,’ the area did indeed share many of characteristics of classic visions of utopia, such as an isolated island setting, low population density and fertile land and growing conditions but utopia is more than geographical setting, as my research participants knew in their daily attempts to make manifest the ‘paradise’ they wanted Hawai‘i to be. Less utopian thinkers than doers, and often guided by the adage, ‘be the change you want to see’ (Gandhi), individual practice was valued as the most appropriate route to meaningful social change and the creation of good society.
In this paper I focus on one aspect of individual practice that has significant social implications – diet – which mediated individual self-expression, membership to a community of eaters, connection with other local producers and consumers and a critique of the ‘mainland’/mainstream. Most of the people I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with moved between several different diets over the course of their life, premised on often conflicting understandings of the needs and construction of the human body. What made these people change their diets so frequently? What similarities are there with the ‘fad diets’ and ‘crash diets’ which seem so pervasive on ‘the mainland’? What differences? Through a comparison of local diets (such as food combining, raw or vegan) with scholarship of ‘fad’ diets in the United States, I contend that it is an optimistic future orientation – hope – which crosses both types of dietary practice but one which takes on an added piquancy in this aspiring utopian setting.

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For social transformation, hope may well be more important than freedom. In this essay, I reconsider the concept of hope as not just duration, a temporal metaphor that reaches from now to an imagined then, but also as a space. In addition to being a temporal duration, hope is a sense of spaciousness, an ethical orientation toward the world. In this way, a hopeful epistemology is associated with uncertainty as well as with a different kind of standpoint than that of fear or other contrasting sensibilities. Furthermore, I envision hope not in contrast to despair but in a certain kinship with its other, as two halves of a dialectic I refer to as Calibanic struggle.
In order to illuminate this concept of hope, its relationship with despair and its role in struggle, I situate (Chicana playwright) Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman, within a Latina American intellectual history, especially in the debate between José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” (1971). Through Shakespeare’s figures, we have come to associate Ariel with ephemerality, time and idealism and Caliban with the body, space, and materialist struggle. Even though contemporary Latina/o cultural production privileges the standpoint of Caliban, the forcefulness of hope suggests that these writers of Caliban have not divorced him from Ariel as much as we critics have ignored the influences that the two slaves have had on one another.
By considering Ariel and Caliban’s divergent notions of hope, I analyze the structure of hope in Cherríe Moraga’s play. That is, I ask what Rodó’s Ariel might look like now, in the postcolonial, through Calibanic eyes; and I wonder how the two tempestuous figures might be brought together in a postcolonial ethics of liberatory hopefulness.