pp. 186-188
Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism, Alex Zamalin
The title of this work illuminates its priorities. Black utopia is the idea under consideration, a previously “unseen” (p. 2) tradition that the author, Alex Zamalin, has uncovered. Black nationalism and Afrofuturism are rendered not as ideas in their own right but as eras that frame the temporal scope of black utopian thinking. They are the space through which black utopian thought moves.
Zamalin writes that the goal of Black Utopia is “as much to understand the boundaries of the black political and cultural imagination as it is to see what lessons it has for contemporary political life” (p. 18). The latter goal is far more successfully achieved. Zamalin identifies the origins of the “black utopian vision” (p. 7) in the mid-nineteenth-century writing of Martin Delany, and he explores the themes and priorities of utopian and antiutopian writing in subsequent chapters on turn-of-the-century novelists such as Sutton E. Griggs and Pauline Hopkins, the fiction writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, the satirical work of George Schuyler, Richard Wright’s Black Power, the art and aesthetics of Sun Ra, and the science fiction writing of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler.
These texts, Zamalin argues, reveal both the value an
To continue reading, see options above.
Join the Academy of Political Science and automatically receive Political Science Quarterly.
Academy Forum | The Transatlantic Relationship and the Russia-Ukraine War
January 9, 2025
4:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. ET
WEBINAR
Virtual Issue
Introduction: Black Power and the Civil Rights Agendas of Charles V. Hamilton
Marylena Mantas and Robert Y. Shapiro
Publishing since 1886, PSQ is the most widely read and accessible scholarly journal with distinguished contributors such as: Lisa Anderson, Robert A. Dahl, Samuel P. Huntington, Robert Jervis, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Theda Skocpol, Woodrow Wilson
view additional issuesArticles | Book reviews
The Academy of Political Science, promotes objective, scholarly analyses of political, social, and economic issues. Through its conferences and publications APS provides analysis and insight into both domestic and foreign policy issues.
With neither an ideological nor a partisan bias, PSQ looks at facts and analyzes data objectively to help readers understand what is really going on in national and world affairs.