Alex Zamalin - Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism

BLACK UTOPIA

BLACK UTOPIA

THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA FROM BLACK NATIONALISM TO AFROFUTURISM

ALEX ZAMALIN

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54725-3

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ISBN 978-0-231-18740-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-231-18741-1 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-54725-3 (ebook)

LCCN 2019009399

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Cover image: 2018 Heirs of Aaron Douglas / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Corcoran Collection (museum purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., the EvansTibbs Collection), National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

For Alison, Sam, and Anita

CONTENTS

T his book would have been impossible with the ongoing support of many people. I would like to thank my editor, Wendy Lochner, who continues to provide encouragement for my work, and all of the wonderful people at Columbia University Press, whose thoughtfulness and dedication vastly improved the finished manuscript. I would also like the anonymous reviewers who took time out of their schedule to sharpen its scope and final arguments. To my colleagues and students at University of Detroit Mercythanks for giving me an opportunity to share my ideas, and for providing many in return. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Barry, Max Burkey, Erin Dwyer, Mike Doan, Joanne Lipson Freed, James Freed, Arthur Getman, Ami Harbin, Mary-Catherine Harrison, Michelle Jacobs, Jon Keller, Matt Kirkpatrick, Kevin Laam, Stephen Manning, Susan McCarty, Dave Merolla, Genevieve Meyers, Mark Navin, Nicholas Rombes, Rosemary Weatherston, and Rodger Wyn. Thanks, as always to, my extended familyGrace Hamilton, Frona Powell, Ron Powell, Aaron Powell, Liz Powell, Arnold Zamalin, Marina Zamalin, Emil Zamalin, and Raya Zamalin. Finally, this book was only possible because of the love of my family. To Alison, Sam, and Anita, thanks for being a constant light in my life, and for always being there.

B lack American reflections on the idea of utopia contain some of the most powerful political ideas in the American tradition. Black utopians and antiutopians detailed new visions of collective life and racial identity. They outlined futuristic ways of being. They warned about the disastrous ways of contemporary life, while espousing radical notions of freedom. They speculated on the ideal conditions for fulfilling human desire, while exploding its extant meanings. Human potential was given a new lease on life. Justice was transfigured. They theorized what was scientifically improbable and a new black citizen that seemed impossible.

But reflections on utopia contained a competing impulse. Emancipatory ideas blinded utopians and antiutopians to investments in hierarchy. The wish to create a new world stifled the messy process of democratic deliberation and critical self-examination. Sometimes power became intoxicated upon its own license. And fear roamed undeterred.

Perhaps because of this, we are told today that utopian thought should be dismissed. For critics, it is either politically immature or morally dangerous. It should therefore be placed in the dustbin of history. Black Utopia makes an opposing argument. Through an intellectual history of its major defenders and critics, it insists that combining black utopias unseen transformative possibilities with an awareness of its limitations can invigorate contemporary political thinking.

FIGURE 0.1 Sir Thomas More

We live in dark times. Ethnonationalism, xenophobia, and racism are on the rise globally. Environmental collapse is around the corner. Economic inequality remains unabated. The threat of armed conflict and war is real. Rather than retreat from reflections on black utopia, now is precisely the time to excavate it for its forgotten vision.

UTOPIA IN HISTORY

The term utopia suffers from excessive familiarity. But few understand utopias intellectual lineage. As a radical act of philosophical speculation, utopia coincides with the birth of Western political thought. Some may be familiar with Sir Thomas Mores literary masterpiece Utopia (1516), which richly described a highly planned society so unreal that it gives u-topia its meaning as a no-place. Others may know something about Francis Bacons novel New Atlantis (1627), which depicted it as one of the mindof the beauty of intellectual advancement and scientific knowledge. If a perfectly planned space or idea has been integral to utopias life, nineteenth-century utopian socialists like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Saint-Simon made utopia about repairing a suffering body. For them, the solution was a healthy societyintentional communities that minimized the degrading perils of unjust industrial work. Despite being decried as unscientific and unaware of historical class struggle by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848), utopia even found its way into their communist society, where each could live according to their abilities and needs. The figure of the ghost that, they said, was haunting Europe and was used ironically to express ruling-class fears of communism became quite real in their unwillingness to articulate what a society without class antagonism would entail.

Modern utopian texts had their forbearer in the first major text of the Western tradition, Platos Republic . It told the shadow dwellers of the Athenian city that those who had seen the sun knew that justice was possible only if three classesthe philosopher kings, guardians, and workersachieved an organic division of intellectual and physical labor and philosophers ruled through reason. Yet even nonutopians couldnt fully escape utopias presence in their thought. Consider Thomas Hobbess indivisible authoritarian system of government in Leviathan , Jean-Jacques Rousseaus general will, Immanuel Kants universal history with the cosmopolitan purpose of lasting peace, or Emma Goldmans anarchist defense of community without a state.

Some utopians deny their utopianism. And Americans are perhaps the most egregious in this. One of the American political traditions founding mythsfrom The Federalist papers to the US Constitution, from Lincolns civic republicanism to twentieth-century progressivismis its antiphilosophical, purely political worldview. Americans are far too serious for their own good, so this argument goes, privileging the pragmatic stuff of statesmen grappling with real politics rather than European experiments in metaphysics.

But all knee-jerk aversions should raise red flags. They are usually defensive rather than descriptive. After all, America never escaped utopianism: utopianism was integral to its name. Calling the nation America, as opposed to its proper geographic area of the United States, gestured toward some futuristic transcendent civic religion. American political culture would be defined through a democratic ideology and a belief in exceptionalism. And both myths inspired the conviction of individualistic upward mobility. This mythology was so powerful it convinced people they could do better and otherwise.