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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Utopia and Black American Thought
1. Martin Delany’s Experiment in Escape
2. Turn-of-the-Century Black Literary Utopianism
3. W. E. B. Du Bois’s World of Utopian Intimacy
4. George S. Schuyler, Irony, and Utopia
5. Richard Wright’s Black Power and Anticolonial Antiutopianism
6. Sun Ra and Cosmic Blackness
7. Samuel Delany and the Ambiguity of Utopia
8. Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence
Conclusion: Black Utopia and the Contemporary Political Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Alex Zamalin is assistant professor of political science and director of the African American Studies Program at University of Detroit Mercy. He is the author of African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice (2015); Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance (Columbia, 2017); and Antiracism: An Introduction (2019).
Summary
Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of utopia and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures linked to racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture.
Additional text
Alex Zamalin balances generosity and critique in a careful yet energetic and buoyant manner.
