Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible.

In Black Utopia , Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra's cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. ix)
• Introduction: Utopia and Black American Thought (p. 1)
• 1 Martin Delany's Experiment in Escape (p. 19)
• 2 Turn-of-the-Century Black Literary Utopianism (p. 34)
• 3 W. E. B. Du Bois's World of Utopian Intimacy (p. 49)
• 4 George S. Schuyler, Irony, and Utopia (p. 63)
• 5 Richard Wright's Black Power and Anticolonial Antiutopianism (p. 81)
• 6 Sun Ra and Cosmic Blackness (p. 96)
• 7 Samuel Delany and the Ambiguity of Utopia (p. 110)
• 8 Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence (p. 123)
• Conclusion: Black Utopia and the Contemporary Political Imagination (p. 137)
• Notes (p. 145)
• Bibliography (p. 171)
• Index (p. 179)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Black American life has largely been dystopian, but black American thought includes a serious and longstanding utopian tradition. In Black Utopia, Zamalin (Univ. of Detroit Mercy) reveals and revisits this tradition and its relationship to the questions of liberation, justice, and freedom that are central to African American political thought. One of the book's major contributions is to introduce readers to important American authors who have mostly been lost to history, such as Martin Delany. Zamalin also resituates more familiar figures, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Octavia Butler, as part of the black utopian tradition. In doing both, he shows readers a new way to conceive of the contours of black political thought, expanding the sense of its dimensions. The author also argues that in the present moment, with its unarguably dystopian dimensions, black utopian thinking can help guide and invigorate our own political imagination, to untangle current assumptions about the way the world must be. Black Utopia is an instructive guide for all those who are interested in deepening their knowledge of American history and thinking critically about American politics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. --Susan McWilliams Barndt, Pomona College