Black Utopias

Author : Jayna Brown
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 127 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478021230

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Black Utopias by Jayna Brown Pdf

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.

Author : Alex Zamalin
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 151 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2019-08-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231547253

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Black Utopia by Alex Zamalin Pdf

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.

Author : William H. Pease,Jane H. Pease
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1972
Category : African Americans
ISBN : OCLC:1285471798

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Black Utopia by William H. Pease,Jane H. Pease Pdf

Author : João H. Costa Vargas
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2023-06-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781442203310

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Never Meant to Survive by João H. Costa Vargas Pdf

Never Meant to Survive presents a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Costa Vargas's work presents crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargas's compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.

Author : Jovan Scott Lewis
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2022-08-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478023265

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Violent Utopia by Jovan Scott Lewis Pdf

In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2011-11-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780241959176

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Black Mass by John Gray Pdf

Our conventional view of history and human progress is wrong. It is founded on a pernicious myth of an acheivable utopia that in the last century alone caused the murder of tens of millions. In Black Mass John Gray tears down the religious, political and secular beliefs that we insist are fundamental to the human project and shows us how a misplaced faith in our ability to improve the world has actually made it far worse.

Author : Thomas More
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 113 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2023-12-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : EAN:8596547685586

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Utopia by Thomas More Pdf

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

Author : Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2020-09-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781541788480

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling Pdf

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

Author : Nisi Shawl
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781466837843

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Everfair by Nisi Shawl Pdf

From acclaimed short fiction writer Nisi Shawl comes a brilliant alternate history set in the Congo, where heroes strive for a Utopia and endeavor to live together despite their differences. Now with a foreward from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull. In this re-imagining of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven for native populations of the Congo as well as settlers from around the world, including dream-eyed Europeans attempting to create a better society, formerly enslaved people returning from America, and Chinese railroad builders escaping hard labor. Using the combined knowledge of four continents, Everfair becomes a land of spying cats and gulls, nuclear dirigibles buoyed by barkcloth balloons, and silent pistols that shoot poison knives. With this technology, Everfair will attempt to defeat the Belgian tyrant Leopold II. But even if they can defeat their great enemy, a looming world war and political infighting may threaten to destroy everything they have built. “A book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies... Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. A wonderful achievement.” — Karen Joy Fowler At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author : Richard Pare,Jennifer Minner
Publisher : Black Dog Press
Page : 127 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Exhibitions
ISBN : 1911164112

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Lost Utopias by Richard Pare,Jennifer Minner Pdf

"The pictures in this book bring the argument about reuse and preservation into focus. What is worthy of retaining and what is dispensable? What are the criteria for considering whether a structure should be retained or demolished? How do you define the parameters of taste and utility in making decisions to preserve or destroy? How will future generations regard the destruction of certain structures, will we be considered cultural vandals for not having retained more of the structures that seemed irrelevant at the time? The preservation argument is heightened in the case of the exhibitions sites, as by definition an exhibition is considered a temporary event."--Page 9.

Author : Luis Alvarez
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781477324486

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Chicanx Utopias by Luis Alvarez Pdf

Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.

Author : Sherryl Vint
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781009180061

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The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 by Sherryl Vint Pdf

Provides an overview of ways that utopian thinking has shaped American culture, focusing on the need to remake imperial USA.

Author : Dan Hassler-Forest
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2022-05-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781978826700

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Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism by Dan Hassler-Forest Pdf

Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer. Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe’s work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe’s groundbreaking albums The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer, but also Monáe’s work as an actress in such films as Hidden Figures and Antebellum, as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially-engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe’s performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.

Author : Victoria W. Wolcott
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2024-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438497501

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Utopian Imaginings by Victoria W. Wolcott Pdf

"Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture—with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging—Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.

Author : Karen A. Ritzenhoff,Renée T. White
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-08-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781793623584

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Afrofuturism in Black Panther by Karen A. Ritzenhoff,Renée T. White Pdf

Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-making of Blackness, through an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of Black Panther, discusses the importance of superheroes and the ways in which they are especially important to Black fans. Aside from its global box office success, Black Panther paves the way for future superhero narratives due to its underlying philosophy to base the story on a narrative that is reliant on Afro-futurism. The film’s storyline, the book posits, leads viewers to think about relevant real-world social questions as it taps into the cultural zeitgeist in an indelible way. Contributors to this collection approach Black Panther not only as a film, but also as Afrofuturist imaginings of an African nation untouched by colonialism and antiblack racism: the film is a map to alternate states of being, an introduction to the African Diaspora, a treatise on liberation and racial justice, and an examination of identity. As they analyze each of these components, contributors pose the question: how can a film invite a reimagining of Blackness?