More than a month after the insurgency on January 6, 2021, the images of angry, distorted faces hasn’t left me. I see rage in the Trump signs thrusting from lawns like blue thorns, more than a month after the election; in the raised, violent voice of a man who erupts when I politely ask if he’s next in line.
We know that people who seek to control others are abusers. That’s the definition of abuse. When self-involved thinking festers, it looks like violence, it looks like stifling new imaginings: it looks like threatening democratically elected officials, it feels like a return to the past and the days of mob violence … Dystopias erupt in extensions of rage and authoritarianism.
So in Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin examines freedom, from a range of Black thinkers, from conservative and liberal ideologies. Zamalin’s task isn’t easy. From socialist-leaning thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright to the conservative George Schuyler; to anarchists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Martiny Delany (no relation); to the hard-to-classify Pauline Hopkins and the harder to classify (would you want to?) Sun Ra, Zamalin’s brilliant premise purposefully collapses generations of Black thought. Zamalin argues that the subject of his book has been understudied because “much of black American life has been nothing short of dystopian” — and then he asks a daring question: how? How do people imagine and build without models? Several of the black utopia authors were also activists: Du Bois and Delany created organizations that advanced the struggle; Hopkins was journalist; Edward A. Johnson writes a utopian novel and becomes a member of New York State Assembly. What makes this book worth examining are the vivid, detailed dreams envisioned — and made concrete — despite oppression, despite years of torture.
It could make you lose your mind. Zamalin knows it. The Director of African American Studies and Professor of political science at the University of Detroit Mercy, Zamalin writes with wonder, and when you see these Black public intellectuals who lived during the era of slavery or Jim Crow and who imagined futures so specific and radically different, you’re in awe of how they did it. It’s inspiring, thought-provoking, and much-needed work. Today, when we still witness Black bodies being killed, harassed, and violated, with few repercussions, when Black and Brown people die at higher rates from COVID and have worse outcomes in nearly every aspect of life (employment, infant mortality, imprisonment), we have to challenge ourselves to think beyond, far beyond, our current system … What can we build? What can we create? Literature and art professor Alma Billingslea-Brown argues for images that “project future plans and action; they can shape behavior.” Cultural critic Naomi Klein believes “we need better visions of the future, or at least more of them and different ones.” But students in my Black utopia-themed composition class tell me they have a hard time imagining change or dreaming of a more equal, environmentally sound world.
Zamalin’s utopia argues for “belief in the collective popular will.” The utopian socialist movements of the past may have been silent about race, but Black utopians’ dreams have multiplied; we’re in conversation with utopians of all races, of all genders. We’re thinking about peace and shared power, compassion for those around us, and community-building … We’re recognizing that someone doesn’t have to look like you or think like you for you to just let them be. We’re thinking: If we can visualize, build, and survive dystopias, why can’t we dream of something better?
[Published by Columbia University Press on August 19, 2019, 192 pages, $26.00 paperback]