Abstract

GATTO, Ezequiel. “We have to invent, we have to make discoveries”: The Future in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Thought . Temas debates (En línea) [online]. 2020, n.40, pp.61-86. ISSN 1853-984X.

This article states that in order to understand some crucial features of Martin Luther King’s thought, a leader whose iconicity goes against a deeper reading of his ideas, is fundamental to analyze the ways he dealt with the future. Instead of considering just the images of future which he talked about, the article comes and goes between those images and other elements not necessarily figuratives in order to understand, at least partially, Martin Luther King’s link with futurity. The article examines discourses, sermons, journal notes and MLK’s three political memoirs, detecting considerations about the future, particularly those regarding crucial problems for politics (images of the future, collective action, affects, enmity, victory, violence, social structures, racial relations, justice), which allows us to say that Martin Luther King subordinated the production of images of future to a broader principle of strategy. This allowed him to take into account changes, creations and unimagined possibilities, while call to an ethics of politics and social action that do not predefine the relation between possible and justice but open that relation through a “principle of creative living”.

Keywords : Futurization; Politics; Violence; Strategy; Civil Rights Movement.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )