Hawthorn Archive

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Visiting Professor in the Birkbeck Department of Law, University of London. Her most recent books are The Workhouse (with Ines Schaber), Ghostly Matters, and Keeping Good Time.

• Introduction I. the scandal of the qualitative difference II. a means of preparation III. the exile of our longing IV. perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object List of Images and Items Acknowledgments Notes

"The Hawthorne Archive is the 'Where's Waldo?' of theoretical treasure hunts. Avery Gordon's not-so-imaginary archive is a multi-media jig-saw puzzle, a plurivocal mystery story, an epistemic chameleon of present tenses, shimmering hints, fragmentary indices, and stumbling stones that keep moving. This is a curatorial masterpiece whose 'utopian margins' are as imperfectly futuristic, fleeting, and incommensurable as history itself." -- --Patricia J. Williams James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia University School of Law "The Hawthorne Archive offers an expansive theory of utopia in the form of a literary experiment. In this beautiful assemblage of the thoughts and deeds of vagabonds, anarchists, fugitives, deserters, idlers, radicals, storytellers, and artists, Avery Gordon, the keeper of the archive, creates an innovative and dazzling account of global efforts to live and create the "what might be." The Hawthorne Archive opens a path for thinking through an extended engagement with the documents and ephemera of utopian thought, which is defined broadly as a standpoint for living in the here and now that refuses the brutal dispositions of racial capitalism. It is a serial work whose iterations of radical and anarchist thought unfold in a speculative engagement and imaginative encounter with historical documents, social movements, novels, visual art, film and photography, and the ephemera of refusal. This archive of letters, essays, dialogues, images and documents becomes a collective utterance of the struggle to create another world inside this one. The Hawthorne Archive is an exercise in run-away thought; it is a blues, a manifesto, a love letter, and a freedom dream." -- -Saidiya Hartman Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route