Vol. 22.1, published in July 2022, takes literature, poetry, science fiction, and fantasy seriously as vehicles for peace philosophy. The editor’s introduction, framed by Angela Y. Davis’s memory of the moment King was shot — the sudden collapse of someone who had seemed invulnerable — sets the issue’s central preoccupation: the relationship between mortality, courage, and the practice of nonviolence. What does it mean to be human in a world that requires superhumanity of its most committed peacemakers? The issue approaches that question from multiple angles — speculative fiction, televised utopia, young adult narrative, biography, and political philosophy — insisting throughout that literary and imaginative forms are not decorations on top of peace theory but constitutive of it.
The feature article, Amir Jaima’s “The Untold Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Cyborg,” carries the issue’s thesis most boldly. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and the critical race framework of João Costa Vargas and Joy James, Jaima argues that Black heroism in American culture is structurally forced into the impossible — the Black candidate for heroism must be either sub-human or superhuman, never simply human. King’s historical arc is told as a speculative narrative: beginning with the 1956 Montgomery bombing, when an anonymous network of Black scientists offer King covert body armor, Jaima traces King’s transit through invulnerability (the 1958 Izola Curry stabbing, the 1962 Roy James assault) toward his eventual, deliberate choice to shed the technology and reclaim his mortality. The story is woven from historical fact and controlled fiction, blending King’s own words — especially the “I See the Promised Land” speech delivered the night before his death — with invented scenes to argue that King’s embrace of vulnerability was itself the most radical act of nonviolence: a death of the spirit refused, and a human death accepted. Jaima’s piece demonstrates the power of “literature as philosophy,” practicing the issue’s thesis rather than merely announcing it.
The issue’s feature discussion is a transcribed book launch event for José-Antonio Orosco’s Star Trek’s Philosophy of Peace and Justice: A Global, Anti-Racist Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022), organized by Concerned Philosophers for Peace and moderated by the editor. Orosco, joined by Andrew Fiala, Jennifer Kling, and Maurice Hamington, argues that Star Trek is not merely a source of philosophical illustrations but a sustained, self-consistent argument for a particular vision of humanity: rational, cooperative, capable of learning from history, and committed to what Gene Roddenberry called IDIC — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. The conversation ranges across Star Trek’s complicated relationship to militarism (Fiala’s question), its treatment of refugees and the Prime Directive’s tension between noninterference and humanitarian obligation (Kling’s question), and the resonance between Star Trek’s moral storytelling and Feminist Care Ethics (Hamington’s question). Orosco’s most pointed argument is that Critical Race Theory is not optional equipment for peace studies but a necessary tool: any utopian future that does not reckon with the legacies of white supremacy and colonialism is not a vision of peace but a fantasy of forgetting. King’s famous intervention — persuading Nichelle Nichols to remain as Lt. Uhura after the first season — becomes a hinge point: King recognized that Star Trek’s vision of an integrated future was worth fighting for in the present. For Orosco, Star Trek’s deepest lesson is that the battle for peace is also a battle for the imagination of the future.
Three book reviews complete the issue. Tom Hastings reviews Rivera Sun’s The Crown of Light (Rising Sun Press Works, 2021), the fourth installment in Sun’s Ari Ara young adult series, offering a grandfather’s endorsement grounded in decades of nonviolence training. Sun’s narrative centers on a Peace Force modeled on the real-world Nonviolent Peaceforce — itself the living descendant of Gandhi’s Shanti Sena — and Hastings praises her ability to embed sophisticated conflict transformation theory, restorative justice practice, and the philosophy of unarmed civilian protection into fiction that never feels rhetorical. Krishna Mani Pathak reviews Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Tagore & Gandhi: Walking Alone, Walking Together (Aleph Book Company, 2021), a scholarly account of what Mukherjee calls “the most creative encounter in the making of modern India.” Pathak finds particular value in Mukherjee’s patient attention to the men’s correspondence, their substantive disagreements — on swadeshi, Non-cooperation, the burning of foreign cloth, Gandhi’s claim that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine punishment for untouchability — and the deeper friendship that survived every rupture. The lesson Pathak draws, pointedly, is for contemporary academic and political culture: that critical dialogue conducted in genuine mutual respect is itself a model of the world both men were trying to build. Court Lewis reviews Michael H. DeArmey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), noting DeArmey’s ambitious expansion of Kantian cosmopolitanism to address what he calls “transnational evils” — genocide, slavery, torture, terrorism, and the destruction of the Earth. Lewis focuses on DeArmey’s three-tiered theory of dignity, which grounds moral worth not only in rational autonomy but also in ends-directed life processes and in the capacity to care for others, and on DeArmey’s commitment to bottom-up, community-building solutions alongside top-down policy reform. Taken together, the three reviews mirror the issue’s larger argument: that peace literacy requires expanding our sense of what counts as philosophical source material — to include the television series, the literary imagination, and the bonds of friendship that nurture peaceful aspirations at the frontier where fantasy engages fact.
The Acorn Journal 