Joy Belsky Lecture: Hope in the Dark

CSWS is pleased to announce that Rebecca Solnit - writer, art critic, and environmental activist - will present the 2004 - 2005 Joy Belsky Lecture December 2, 2004 at 7:30 p.m. in the Alumni Lounge, Gerlinger Hall. Her lecture, "Hope in the Dark," will examine unremembered histories of progressive victories, the circuitous routes by which the world is changed, the ways culture makes politics, and the grounds for hope today.

Solnit won wide acclaim and recognition for her 1995 book, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. In that book she counterposed the histories of Yosemite National Park and Nevada’s nuclear test sites, examining the political stakes of how landscapes are conceived, the destruction of Native American lands, and the marginalization of Native Americans in the environmental movement.

Solnit has published almost a dozen books over the past decade, including As Eve Said To the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, the National Book Critics Circle award-winning River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, and her newest book, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Critics have warmly welcomed Hope in the Dark. Mike Davis calls it “an extraordinary book,” applauding how her “prose grows poetic wings that enable her to soar to a visionary height.” Studs Terkel appreciates how her book illuminates hope for those “seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope.” The acclaimed writer Barry Lopez will introduce Solnit at this public lecture.

by Jan Emerson, Sept., 2004