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In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people-untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress-celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I: Ecstasy
1. Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic 23
2. Lovely Sky Boat: Alice Coltrane and the Metaphysics of Sound 59
Part II: Evolution
3. Our Place is Among the Stars: Octavia E. Butler and the Preservation of Species 83
4. Speculative Life: Utopia Without the Human 111
Part III: Sense and Matter
5. In the Realm of the Senses: Heterotopias of Subjectivity, Desire, and Discourse 137
6. The Freedom Not to Be: Sun Ra's Alternative Ontology 155
Conclusion 177
Notes 179
Bibliography 195
Index 205
About the author
Jayna Brown is Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and author of
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
Engaging with the work of Black musicians, writers, and women mystics, Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as an occasion to explore new states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture.
