New Suns, Old Shadows: Ethnographies of Race, Struggle, and Hope

In her 1998 classic, Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler argued “there’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Echoing Butler, this session examines how ethnography can illuminate the struggle to imagine and build futures under conditions of enduring racial inequality. Across various contexts, contributors analyze hope not as a universal striving, but as a situated, contested practice, forged at the intersection of race, class, gender, urban, and institutional power. Panelists will trace how “old shadows” persist even as actors labor to produce alternative futures: jailhouse lawyers navigating the courthouse as a site of radical resistance amid decades of criminal legal inequality; housing and neighborhood formations that generate racially stratified imagined pasts and foreclosed futures; intimate marital decisions shaped by competing temporal horizons and life stages; and encounters with white supremacist hate that demand new architectures of collective hope.