Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

by Jayna Brown

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Utopia, Philosophy, Music, Religion, Anti Racist, Theory

212 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 11, 2021

About the author

Jayna Brown is professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. She earned her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. As well as numerous essays, Brown is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern and her most recent, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Brown is coeditor of the journal Social Text and has also been a contributing journalist for NPR's music programming. Her areas of research and specialization include, speculative fictions, music, black expressive cultures, black queer and feminist studies, and our changing media landscape.

Reviews

[Kori · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is mind-blowing, destabilizing, illuminating, and challenging. Brown's study of utopia outside the bounds of the human is so detailed and critical and creative and excited of the possibilities that the musicians, authors, and activists covered in this book put forth.

The prose can be dense, but only because the terms and concepts Brown uses requires the specific jargon that, even if you have limited to zero exposure to Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Ernst Bloch (whose work I have yet to read), communicates the importance of their work to Brown's project, and the utopic possibilities within their theorizing.

Because of this book, I'll be listening to the work Alice Coltrane and Sun-Ra with deeper and more expansive understanding. I'll read Octavia Butler with a more critical eye; H.G. Wells with an even more critical eye; and coast on the parody and exploratory fluidity of Samuel Delany's sci-fi worlds. Highly, highly recommend.

[Jalyn McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a comprehensive exploration of Afrofuturistic frameworks and provocations. This was a real pleasure to read, even when some of the language was a bit challenging. I’m sure the academese was due to Jayna Brown being a literal professor at the Pratt Institute and that, consequently, this book was written for an audience already involved in higher academia as a supplemental or primary text in some way. Admittedly, I learned lots of cool new words sooooo 😁

I loved the questions being asked in this book: what does it mean to evolve past the concept of “human” entirely? What does it mean to obliterate the self in lieu of becoming an amorphous speck effused within the cosmos? Specifically, what do these ideas mean for black people in a hegemonic society?

I also recognized Jayna Brown’s name from being involved in the more recent “Sun Ra: Do The Impossible” documentary. I was still reading this book when I watched the special, so I was really excited to finish. I think I was expecting a bit more of an in depth analysis on Sun Ra since he was the last chapter. I would have loved to read more about her interpretations of his cosmology, as his (and Octavia Butler’s) were among the most interesting chapters to me, and he is very special to me personally.

Overall, this was a perspective-shifting book that proved to be enlightening and a great addition to my personal library. I really like having this book in my collection, and I love looking at it on my shelf. I hope more people read this and get something out of it. Jayna, you are a genius!

[Pam Bedore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jayna Brown's book is an absolute pleasure to read. I came for the two chapters on Octavia Butler, and stayed with great delight for the analysis that preceded and followed.

Brown starts with Sojourner Truth and provides really great historical background on this important figure for Black utopian thought. I really appreciate the sensitive approach to questions of how sexuality, religion, and philosophy intersect for Truth and her entourage.

The two chapters on Octavia Butler are excellent. I listened to the audiobook (very well narrated) and will now order the print copy so I can cite Brown in my own work on Butler. Brown did lots of primary source reading at the Huntington Library, where Butler's papers are housed, and provides fascinating (new-to-me) information about Butler's plans and challenges in continuing her *Parable* series. Once again, it's devastating to think about the books that don't exist because of Butler's untimely death. But Brown gives a very solid sense of where Butler was thinking of going and how that continues her lifelong utopian project.

I highly recommend this book, which I will use in my teaching and research.

[🌸 m a r i a 🌸 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is filled with tantalizingly interesting ideas (the chapters on Sojourner Truth, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra in particular are filled with fascinating research), but it left me wanting more - more historical and biographical information, more elucidating context, and more explanation overall. The topics explored are extremely esoteric and I wish that the author had spent more time helping the reader understand these concepts in more depth. Additionally, a surprising amount of real estate is ceded to the already well-covered ideas of people like Foucault, Fourier, H.G. Wells, etc., at the expense of the artists and thinkers at the heart of the book.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A theoretically rich analysis of Black utopian forms, not only in music but in a wide variety of creative and conceptual forms.

[Mills College Library]

128 B8784 2021

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

highkey life-changing