What do you think?
Rate this book
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From 'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
230 people are currently reading
6496 people want to read
About the author
Robin D.G. Kelley
89 books417 followersRobin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
January 12, 2008
I love this book. period. These are some things I love about it: 1. It furthers the work started in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism which i also really like. 2. It is a personal, hopeful book that incorporates theory in a non-pretentious and accessible way. 3. The chapter on black feminism is amazing. 4. I learned about a lot of grassroots organizations and activisms that i didn't know about before.
5. He makes the case that surrealism is a mode of liberatory thought originating in the art and resistance of people of color, and that making poetry and art are acts of liberation that are essential to building successful social justice movments.
This book motivated me, inspired me, and in general, made me really, really happy and excited. If you haven't read it, do.
5. He makes the case that surrealism is a mode of liberatory thought originating in the art and resistance of people of color, and that making poetry and art are acts of liberation that are essential to building successful social justice movments.
This book motivated me, inspired me, and in general, made me really, really happy and excited. If you haven't read it, do.
January 23, 2020
This is a must-read for anyone who wants to achieve a better society. Robin Kelley is one of the few thinkers who is both brilliant and intellectually humble. He covers a lot of depth and timespan in here and does it cogently and beautifully. I will be reading and rereading this one.
Read
December 6, 2011"Sometimes I think the conditions of daily life, of everyday oppressions, of survival, not to mention the temporary pleasures accessible to most of us, render much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present. As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, “When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.” When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling."
that shit is smart and beautiful.
that shit is smart and beautiful.
December 30, 2011
How would you answer the question: What is a radical aesthetic?
After years of puzzling over the aesthetic autonomy of radical movements, I began at the beginning of 2011 reflecting on the political propositions of radical art movements. The inquiry was propelled by reading two books. Luis Camnitzer's study of Latin American conceptualism had an enormous impact on my thinking about how political movements shape those artistic practices that eschew the autonomy of aesthetics that so much dominates mainstream contemporary art. With that thought in mind I picked up Black Sound White Cube by the European art scholars and curators, Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke. I very much appreciated the impulse of Lesage and Wudtke's argument. It proved enormously helpful to think about their interrogation of experimental art categories that systematically exclude black artists. But what I found profoundly absense from their argument was any real politics other than that of inclusion and exclusion. My recent readings in experimental jazz and poetics has provided the much needed political framework for the claims made by Lesage and Wudtke.
When I first began this research project, I asked a number of friends the question mentioned above; What is a radical aesthetic? Across the board, whether artists, scholars, activists, and regardless of class background or ethnicity, friends answered with the classic notion of art that shocks; épater les bourgeoisie. But is that all there is? Is a radical aesthetic reducible to an almost oedipal revolt against the norms of bourgeois ideology?
Reviewing the social and cultural forms invented by radical political movements, one finds over again a different conception of radicality. That conception includes universal access, the protagonism of the oppressed in determining their own destiny, collectivity as the form and content of practice, and the priority of sustainable organization. In other words; revolution.
At the heart of Kelley's accessible and straightforward review of the black radical imagination is an insistence on both; revolt and revolution. This thesis structures the book itself. His essays on black radical politics have an implicit chronology that follow dynamic changes in African American politics, specifically in the United States. These include a review of the impact of Marcus Garvey on African Americans resisting the betrayal of the Federal government and the rise of fascist Jim Crow policies in the south. He looks at the importance of communism and internationalism to black movements and intellectuals during the 1930s and through the early civil rights movement. His chapter on the black New Left of the '60s and '70s charts the complex constellation of organizations and debates that shaped and were shaped by black nationalist ideology and the clarion call of anti-imperialist revolution. More recently, he provides a powerful analysis of the reparations movement and its relationship to internationalism in radical black politics. (Unfortunately this chapter makes no mention of the significant critiques of reparations by American Indian activists.) And, in a short chapter on black feminism, Kelley locates the most radical political claims of all on those feminists who link together the struggles for freedom regarding sexuality and gender as well as anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. In fact, as Kelley argues, it is in the politics of difference that we find a radical politics that insists on liberation of desire as equal to material needs.
From the black feminists like poet June Jordan and the Combahee River Collective, Kelley turns to the black surrealist movement of the international African diaspora. It's in the context of this chapter that Kelley most pointedly articulates his thesis. He writes: "Juxtaposing surrealism and black conceptions of liberation is no mere academic exercise; it is an injunction, a proposition, perhaps even a declaration of war. I am suggesting that the black freedom movement take a long, hard look at our own surreality as well as surrealist thought and practice in order to build new movements, new possibilities, new conceptions of liberation. Surrealism can help us break the constraints of social realism and take us to places where Marxism, anarchism, and other 'isms' in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture" (192).
Reviewing the relationship between the French surrealists and Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Kelley argues that the very terms of surrealism change as a result of that encounter. The pursuit of the marvelous and the revolt of language and desire cements together an aesthetic movement with an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist imagination. Kelley goes on to describe the impact of surrealism on African American poets, writers and artists not one of revelation, but of recognition. Black intellectuals did not discover surrealism. Surrealism discovered them. And in the process it provided a way of practicing a defamiliarization of the status quo that is the very essence of living under the conditions of racism and colonization.
It's also important to note that while Kelley insists on this link between revolt and revolution in understanding the black radical imagination, he subscribes to a definition of the latter that privileges collectivity and the communal struggle for self-determination within an anti-capitalist, internationalist horizon. Thus, it is not to say that revolt becomes the place where radicality retreats to petite bourgeois individualism or entrepreneurialism. Nor is it a place where ideas exist severed from experience and struggle. In other words, for Kelley, the radical imagination proposes an aesthetics of everyday life that is also profoundly different from the very terms which continue to dominate mainstream analyses of contemporary and experimental art. (See the recent Anthology of Conceptual Writing, for a perfect example of this.)
I would strongly recommend Kelley's book to any artist, activist or student of history, politics and culture. The book is relatively short and intended for a popular audience. It provides the necessary context for understanding the stakes in radical cultural and political practices. At the same time, Kelley is an honest critic of those histories while never abandoning his own commitments to a radical politics that embraces both poetic revolt and revolution. His book helps us to defamiliarize our reading of mainstream accounts of culture, art and politics. A necessary intervention if we're going to have an honest and robust discussion about tactics and strategies for making a new world of justice and freedom.
After years of puzzling over the aesthetic autonomy of radical movements, I began at the beginning of 2011 reflecting on the political propositions of radical art movements. The inquiry was propelled by reading two books. Luis Camnitzer's study of Latin American conceptualism had an enormous impact on my thinking about how political movements shape those artistic practices that eschew the autonomy of aesthetics that so much dominates mainstream contemporary art. With that thought in mind I picked up Black Sound White Cube by the European art scholars and curators, Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke. I very much appreciated the impulse of Lesage and Wudtke's argument. It proved enormously helpful to think about their interrogation of experimental art categories that systematically exclude black artists. But what I found profoundly absense from their argument was any real politics other than that of inclusion and exclusion. My recent readings in experimental jazz and poetics has provided the much needed political framework for the claims made by Lesage and Wudtke.
When I first began this research project, I asked a number of friends the question mentioned above; What is a radical aesthetic? Across the board, whether artists, scholars, activists, and regardless of class background or ethnicity, friends answered with the classic notion of art that shocks; épater les bourgeoisie. But is that all there is? Is a radical aesthetic reducible to an almost oedipal revolt against the norms of bourgeois ideology?
Reviewing the social and cultural forms invented by radical political movements, one finds over again a different conception of radicality. That conception includes universal access, the protagonism of the oppressed in determining their own destiny, collectivity as the form and content of practice, and the priority of sustainable organization. In other words; revolution.
At the heart of Kelley's accessible and straightforward review of the black radical imagination is an insistence on both; revolt and revolution. This thesis structures the book itself. His essays on black radical politics have an implicit chronology that follow dynamic changes in African American politics, specifically in the United States. These include a review of the impact of Marcus Garvey on African Americans resisting the betrayal of the Federal government and the rise of fascist Jim Crow policies in the south. He looks at the importance of communism and internationalism to black movements and intellectuals during the 1930s and through the early civil rights movement. His chapter on the black New Left of the '60s and '70s charts the complex constellation of organizations and debates that shaped and were shaped by black nationalist ideology and the clarion call of anti-imperialist revolution. More recently, he provides a powerful analysis of the reparations movement and its relationship to internationalism in radical black politics. (Unfortunately this chapter makes no mention of the significant critiques of reparations by American Indian activists.) And, in a short chapter on black feminism, Kelley locates the most radical political claims of all on those feminists who link together the struggles for freedom regarding sexuality and gender as well as anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. In fact, as Kelley argues, it is in the politics of difference that we find a radical politics that insists on liberation of desire as equal to material needs.
From the black feminists like poet June Jordan and the Combahee River Collective, Kelley turns to the black surrealist movement of the international African diaspora. It's in the context of this chapter that Kelley most pointedly articulates his thesis. He writes: "Juxtaposing surrealism and black conceptions of liberation is no mere academic exercise; it is an injunction, a proposition, perhaps even a declaration of war. I am suggesting that the black freedom movement take a long, hard look at our own surreality as well as surrealist thought and practice in order to build new movements, new possibilities, new conceptions of liberation. Surrealism can help us break the constraints of social realism and take us to places where Marxism, anarchism, and other 'isms' in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture" (192).
Reviewing the relationship between the French surrealists and Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Kelley argues that the very terms of surrealism change as a result of that encounter. The pursuit of the marvelous and the revolt of language and desire cements together an aesthetic movement with an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist imagination. Kelley goes on to describe the impact of surrealism on African American poets, writers and artists not one of revelation, but of recognition. Black intellectuals did not discover surrealism. Surrealism discovered them. And in the process it provided a way of practicing a defamiliarization of the status quo that is the very essence of living under the conditions of racism and colonization.
It's also important to note that while Kelley insists on this link between revolt and revolution in understanding the black radical imagination, he subscribes to a definition of the latter that privileges collectivity and the communal struggle for self-determination within an anti-capitalist, internationalist horizon. Thus, it is not to say that revolt becomes the place where radicality retreats to petite bourgeois individualism or entrepreneurialism. Nor is it a place where ideas exist severed from experience and struggle. In other words, for Kelley, the radical imagination proposes an aesthetics of everyday life that is also profoundly different from the very terms which continue to dominate mainstream analyses of contemporary and experimental art. (See the recent Anthology of Conceptual Writing, for a perfect example of this.)
I would strongly recommend Kelley's book to any artist, activist or student of history, politics and culture. The book is relatively short and intended for a popular audience. It provides the necessary context for understanding the stakes in radical cultural and political practices. At the same time, Kelley is an honest critic of those histories while never abandoning his own commitments to a radical politics that embraces both poetic revolt and revolution. His book helps us to defamiliarize our reading of mainstream accounts of culture, art and politics. A necessary intervention if we're going to have an honest and robust discussion about tactics and strategies for making a new world of justice and freedom.
April 29, 2025
It really feels like I’ve read this book before which I think means that it’s been a foundational text for so many of the people + organizers I admire that it’s seeped into so much of my learning and organizing over the last decade. This is a classic in my eyes, a text that feels timeless and so necessary for the political moment we’re in now and the one we were in when Kelley wrote it 20+ years ago. He weaves history, visions of the future and sobering realities of the present so seamlessly. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a sense of purpose and direction in this moment.
July 9, 2021
Robin D.G. Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams” is a call for the expansion of revolutionary thinking, dreaming, and envisioning. It’s rooted in Kelley’s belief that exercising radical imagination is a necessary condition for Black liberation specifically, and humanist liberation generally.
Kelley organizes this book around the analyses of various Black radical social movements and their ability to produce, capture, and spread revolutionary dreams / imagination. The basic question this book poses and frames as the preview of Black radical imagination is, “what type of society do you want to live in?” In evaluating and answering this question, Kelley traces the various Black social movements throughout the African diaspora—along with their accompanying ideologies and objectives—and pulls out their specific “radical imaginations.” He discusses the “Exodus” movements of the 19th Century, Garveyism, socialist / communist organizing, Pan Africanism, and the various combinations therein. This book excels as both an account of the history of various radical Black movements, as well as an analysis and descriptor of underlying radical ideologies and objectives (such as nationalism, internationalism, socialism, Pan Africanism, and Surrealism).
In evaluating the above movements, ideologies, and objectives, Kelley touches on many fascinating points of history and discussion, including the following: What does the world look like post-Revolution? What is the role of reparations and how should it be framed? Should revolutionary Black Nationalists seek to build an exclusively Black state, or a predominantly Black nation with non-Black minority populations? Where should members of the African diaspora focus their revolutionary nation-building efforts, the land that they currently occupy (i.e. Republic of New Afrika), or on the African continent via repatriation? These are all major questions that require imaginative thinking and in-depth analysis.
Finally, Kelley passionately discusses the philosophy and theory of “Surrealism,” which he believes is a movement that has more revolutionary potential than other formulations (including Marxism) due to its imaginative impulses. Surrealism is a strategy of revolution of the mind, while Marxism is mere revolution of productive forces. Kelley, in analyzing the Black Surrealist tradition of in the works of Aimé Césaire and Richard Wright (among others), notes that Surrealism is less a revolution in itself and more so a recognition of what already exists in Black culture and traditions. Ultimately “Freedom Dreams” is Kelley’s own contribution to the Black Surrealist tradition, as it compels its readers and pushes its intended audience (Africans worldwide) to dream of a new world, free from all systems of domination, pulsating with the traditions of liberatory Black culture.
Kelley organizes this book around the analyses of various Black radical social movements and their ability to produce, capture, and spread revolutionary dreams / imagination. The basic question this book poses and frames as the preview of Black radical imagination is, “what type of society do you want to live in?” In evaluating and answering this question, Kelley traces the various Black social movements throughout the African diaspora—along with their accompanying ideologies and objectives—and pulls out their specific “radical imaginations.” He discusses the “Exodus” movements of the 19th Century, Garveyism, socialist / communist organizing, Pan Africanism, and the various combinations therein. This book excels as both an account of the history of various radical Black movements, as well as an analysis and descriptor of underlying radical ideologies and objectives (such as nationalism, internationalism, socialism, Pan Africanism, and Surrealism).
In evaluating the above movements, ideologies, and objectives, Kelley touches on many fascinating points of history and discussion, including the following: What does the world look like post-Revolution? What is the role of reparations and how should it be framed? Should revolutionary Black Nationalists seek to build an exclusively Black state, or a predominantly Black nation with non-Black minority populations? Where should members of the African diaspora focus their revolutionary nation-building efforts, the land that they currently occupy (i.e. Republic of New Afrika), or on the African continent via repatriation? These are all major questions that require imaginative thinking and in-depth analysis.
Finally, Kelley passionately discusses the philosophy and theory of “Surrealism,” which he believes is a movement that has more revolutionary potential than other formulations (including Marxism) due to its imaginative impulses. Surrealism is a strategy of revolution of the mind, while Marxism is mere revolution of productive forces. Kelley, in analyzing the Black Surrealist tradition of in the works of Aimé Césaire and Richard Wright (among others), notes that Surrealism is less a revolution in itself and more so a recognition of what already exists in Black culture and traditions. Ultimately “Freedom Dreams” is Kelley’s own contribution to the Black Surrealist tradition, as it compels its readers and pushes its intended audience (Africans worldwide) to dream of a new world, free from all systems of domination, pulsating with the traditions of liberatory Black culture.
May 15, 2007
Uhm, in a really nerdy way, I believe this to be one of the best introductions to a nonfiction book ever. Ever.
October 5, 2007
Beautiful book on the importance of dreaming to cultural change.
January 24, 2025
Food for the soul. Grounded in scholarship and history without losing the wings of dream-life. Amazing.
----
Xxxix “The Red Deal advances a vision of freedom based not on possession or anthropocentrism but on balance, assembly, and mutuality. […] But every freedom dream shares a common desire to find better ways of being together without hierarchy and exclusion, without violence and domination, but with love, compassion, care, and friendship.”
Xl (author’s daughter) “Better ships than citizenship include friendship, relationship, or even a pirate ship, where unauthorized, motley formations are bound together to disrupt notions of the private, of property, of wealth and its concentration. […] The power of the love letter is that it is written without the guarantee of a response.”
Author responds: “And what are radical social movements if not love letters?”
<>
Xlviii. And what had happened to hope and love in our politics?
Xlix. And some of the radical movements I write about in the pages that follow have done awful things in the name of liberation, often under the premise that the ends justify the means.
7 I did not write this book for those traditional leftists who have traded in their dreams for orthodoxy and sectarianism. Most of those folks are hopeless, I’m sad to say.
8 […] one of the basic premises of this book is that the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge.
10 Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology […] never paying attention to, say, the ecstatic.
136 “I want the same thing I did thirty years ago when I joined the Civil Rights movement and twenty years ago when I joined the women’s movement, came out, and felt more alive than I ever dreamed possible: freedom.”
Barbara Smith, The Truth That Never Hurts
155 Sexuality may be one of the few conceptual spaces we have to construct a politics of desire and to open our imagination to new ways of living and seeing.
156 What the old-guard male militants really need to do is give up the mic for a moment, listen to the victims of democracy sing their dreams of a new world, and take notes on how to fight for the freedom of all.
163-4 Paul Garon “[…] through its fidelity to fantasy and desire, the blues generates an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Rimbaud called ’true life.’”
178-9 Cesaire explains, “I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism. … I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
185 […] I was reminded of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who wrote in his Interesting Narrative (1792) that the world from which he was stolen was “almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets [where] every great event … is celebrated in public dances … accompanied with songs and music.”
197 If you read this as a completely thought-out, rational argument, you’ve missed the point.
207 Rukia Lumumba […] “I know for a fact that we can live in a world where joy is abundant and everyone feels safe.”
---
Xxii, 214. Grace Lee Boggs “grow our souls.” Organizing model
Xxx-xxxi music to listen to incl Black Joy Experience album
Xxxv-xxxvi “my mother’s wisdom.” Complicating vision and demands by acknowledging the suffering of others, decolonization as social practice.
Xxiii. Vs romanticizing violent revolution
9 Read Cesaire’s essay “Poetry and Knowledge” (1945)
15, 24, 126 “an oppressed “nation” without a homeland. Compare/contrast left Black nationalism (also Garvey) to Zionism.
16-7, 19, 35. Exodus and Psalm 68, v 31 as Hebrew scripture narratives for Black freedom struggle
20-23, 179-80. Ethiopia and African American return to Africa visions made complicated
47 Read Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”
56, 174-5 DuBois, Cesaire comparing Nazism and colonisalism
57 (also 91) “Unfortunately, neither DuBois nor Robeson nor anyone else with a continuing commitment to the Left had anything to say about Stalin’s atrocities […]”. Not actually true (true about those he names but makes invisible anarchists and Trostkyists and Third Campers).
67, 94-6 Mao and China as attractive to Black leftists
70 armed self-defense in US south
79 why necessary
133 limits to reparations campaigns
158-60 surrealism’s promise
169-70 Cesaire surrealism “more of a confirmation than a revelation.” […] “permanent readiness for the Marvelous.”
192 compare & contrast surrealism and marxism
----
Xxxix “The Red Deal advances a vision of freedom based not on possession or anthropocentrism but on balance, assembly, and mutuality. […] But every freedom dream shares a common desire to find better ways of being together without hierarchy and exclusion, without violence and domination, but with love, compassion, care, and friendship.”
Xl (author’s daughter) “Better ships than citizenship include friendship, relationship, or even a pirate ship, where unauthorized, motley formations are bound together to disrupt notions of the private, of property, of wealth and its concentration. […] The power of the love letter is that it is written without the guarantee of a response.”
Author responds: “And what are radical social movements if not love letters?”
<>
Xlviii. And what had happened to hope and love in our politics?
Xlix. And some of the radical movements I write about in the pages that follow have done awful things in the name of liberation, often under the premise that the ends justify the means.
7 I did not write this book for those traditional leftists who have traded in their dreams for orthodoxy and sectarianism. Most of those folks are hopeless, I’m sad to say.
8 […] one of the basic premises of this book is that the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge.
10 Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology […] never paying attention to, say, the ecstatic.
136 “I want the same thing I did thirty years ago when I joined the Civil Rights movement and twenty years ago when I joined the women’s movement, came out, and felt more alive than I ever dreamed possible: freedom.”
Barbara Smith, The Truth That Never Hurts
155 Sexuality may be one of the few conceptual spaces we have to construct a politics of desire and to open our imagination to new ways of living and seeing.
156 What the old-guard male militants really need to do is give up the mic for a moment, listen to the victims of democracy sing their dreams of a new world, and take notes on how to fight for the freedom of all.
163-4 Paul Garon “[…] through its fidelity to fantasy and desire, the blues generates an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Rimbaud called ’true life.’”
178-9 Cesaire explains, “I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism. … I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
185 […] I was reminded of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who wrote in his Interesting Narrative (1792) that the world from which he was stolen was “almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets [where] every great event … is celebrated in public dances … accompanied with songs and music.”
197 If you read this as a completely thought-out, rational argument, you’ve missed the point.
207 Rukia Lumumba […] “I know for a fact that we can live in a world where joy is abundant and everyone feels safe.”
---
Xxii, 214. Grace Lee Boggs “grow our souls.” Organizing model
Xxx-xxxi music to listen to incl Black Joy Experience album
Xxxv-xxxvi “my mother’s wisdom.” Complicating vision and demands by acknowledging the suffering of others, decolonization as social practice.
Xxiii. Vs romanticizing violent revolution
9 Read Cesaire’s essay “Poetry and Knowledge” (1945)
15, 24, 126 “an oppressed “nation” without a homeland. Compare/contrast left Black nationalism (also Garvey) to Zionism.
16-7, 19, 35. Exodus and Psalm 68, v 31 as Hebrew scripture narratives for Black freedom struggle
20-23, 179-80. Ethiopia and African American return to Africa visions made complicated
47 Read Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”
56, 174-5 DuBois, Cesaire comparing Nazism and colonisalism
57 (also 91) “Unfortunately, neither DuBois nor Robeson nor anyone else with a continuing commitment to the Left had anything to say about Stalin’s atrocities […]”. Not actually true (true about those he names but makes invisible anarchists and Trostkyists and Third Campers).
67, 94-6 Mao and China as attractive to Black leftists
70 armed self-defense in US south
79 why necessary
133 limits to reparations campaigns
158-60 surrealism’s promise
169-70 Cesaire surrealism “more of a confirmation than a revelation.” […] “permanent readiness for the Marvelous.”
192 compare & contrast surrealism and marxism
February 3, 2021
This was a beautiful book that served as something of a literature review of Black radicalism for me. It is definitely a jumping-off point for me to further explore topics such as surrealism, Negritude, Black nationalism, and Black feminism. I will continue to digest this book for a while. One quote that stood out to me was "Fantasy imagination, dreaming–these are the characteristics that distinguish surrealism from the kinds of social critiques at the core of leftist politics. In fact, it is quite possible that black dissatisfaction with socialist realism had to do precisely with the suppression of key elements of black culture that surrealism embraces: the unconscious, the spirit, desire, humor, magic, and love."
I do feel that these elements are sometimes missing from the politics of some mainstream leftists. I myself would like to find a way to further embrace the power of dreaming in my politics. I want to let love, art, music, humor into my politics. This will not stop me from pursuing incremental change or data-driven analysis. But it will allow me to do so with a different spirit of change and possibility, and an eye to what else is needed to truly be free.
I do feel that these elements are sometimes missing from the politics of some mainstream leftists. I myself would like to find a way to further embrace the power of dreaming in my politics. I want to let love, art, music, humor into my politics. This will not stop me from pursuing incremental change or data-driven analysis. But it will allow me to do so with a different spirit of change and possibility, and an eye to what else is needed to truly be free.
November 16, 2025
Robin D. G. Kelley writes a huge summary of so many political groups ranging from the reconstruction to the seventies and eighties thst there can be little discussion other than how one connects to the next. Kelley does connect them to each other though, and his thoughts about the problems at hand thst inspire the dreams these groups have are smart. More than anything, I think more focus, close reading, would make a stronger argument that more could come from.
Read
September 10, 2021An exhilarating intellectual history of the Black radical imagination. I wish I could have read a multimedia annotated version, or at least a hyper-linked one. FREEDOM DREAMS is a treasure trove of other texts and imaginations to visit with next, and I'm glad Kelley gave me a glimpse into his own.
March 6, 2023
One of my favorite ethnic studies/political science books. Dreamings for the collective
September 20, 2023
Any scholar who takes on utopia as a serious concept of study has my love
July 6, 2021
real wise, some of the ideas had radiated out of this book thru people and reached me before i read it ! provides some good history on Black radical visions & movements, some of the more interesting bits of movement history imo were in the sections on nationalist movements and communist / labor ones. the real prizes in here are the sections on internationalism and surrealism. in "third world dreaming," he talks about the huge influence that chinese, cuban, and other revolutions had on radical Black spaces in the 60s and 70s, and its discussion of maoism is verrryyyy cool. then the surrealism section was really just magical, and generally makes the case for revolution led by creativity and imagination — not as a gushy stand-in for direct action or violence, but as a necessary grounding and guide. makes me want to get more in harmony with my OWN creativity more lol .... and also learn a little more about surrealism
July 17, 2017
Kelley argued that the failures of African American social movements does not invalidate their dreams, and that African-Americans have joined social movements out of hope as much as they have to fight oppression. He points out that it is important to point out what sort of world people struggle for, and that tradition is rich within black radical movements. He thus insists on both the revolt and the revolution. Mostly taking place in the post Civil War years, he begins in chapter one by looking at the exodus traditions of black dreams for a better place, both in Liberian colonization schemes to Marcus Garvey’s back to Africa movements, though it was limited because of highly patriarchal notions to the Harlem Renaissance and Great Migration. Though each time, these movements eventually hit realities and needed to reformulate what was happening, they provided a dream to persue. Chapter two looks to the interplay of American Communism with black movements, where Black American Communists like Dubois, Robeson, and McCay pushed race to the forefront and made it priorities as opposed to previous glossing over by the white left under the umbrella of class. Internationalism and Third World struggles were at the core of Black Communism.
Chapter three looks to the Amiri Baraka, the famed jazz musician and black intellectual, and the Revolutionary Action Group of the 1960s, which embraced Maoism and international struggles, particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ghana, Kenya, and China, and rejected reactionary black regimes. While Kelley says that Black nationalists are often painted as the simple buy black campaigns and riots, they were a lot more into looking to anti-colonial movements for inspiration. Chapter four moves to the attempt to build the Republic of New Afrika in the Black Belt of the South, with the idea that Black America was a colony within the United States and should fight for landed freedom. It also deposited that the notion of black evolution from Civil Rights to nationalism obscures that it was already happening in Northern cities in the 1950s. Chapter five looks to Black Feminism, which sought to build what we call today intersectional analysis, where race and gender and sexuality are all taken into account when discussing power, looking to groups like the Combahee River Collective. Chapter six then argued that surrealism helped shape black radical imagination, as art and poetry are key for articulating a better world and what freedom actually looked like and continues to.
Key Themes and Concept
-Freedom dreams what motivates people.
-Political and artistic visions of freedom and how they interplace.
-How race interplays with gender and class.
-Every social movement failed because power structures remained intact, yet their dreams inspired the next generation.
Chapter three looks to the Amiri Baraka, the famed jazz musician and black intellectual, and the Revolutionary Action Group of the 1960s, which embraced Maoism and international struggles, particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ghana, Kenya, and China, and rejected reactionary black regimes. While Kelley says that Black nationalists are often painted as the simple buy black campaigns and riots, they were a lot more into looking to anti-colonial movements for inspiration. Chapter four moves to the attempt to build the Republic of New Afrika in the Black Belt of the South, with the idea that Black America was a colony within the United States and should fight for landed freedom. It also deposited that the notion of black evolution from Civil Rights to nationalism obscures that it was already happening in Northern cities in the 1950s. Chapter five looks to Black Feminism, which sought to build what we call today intersectional analysis, where race and gender and sexuality are all taken into account when discussing power, looking to groups like the Combahee River Collective. Chapter six then argued that surrealism helped shape black radical imagination, as art and poetry are key for articulating a better world and what freedom actually looked like and continues to.
Key Themes and Concept
-Freedom dreams what motivates people.
-Political and artistic visions of freedom and how they interplace.
-How race interplays with gender and class.
-Every social movement failed because power structures remained intact, yet their dreams inspired the next generation.
December 20, 2020
In Freedom Dreams, Robin D.G. Kelley explores the history of the black radical tradition; every organization from the Black Panther Party to the Combahee River Collective and every philosophy from Maoism to surrealism, all under 200 pages. Kelley analyzes and synthesizes so much history into a concise and fluid text that captures the essence of the black radical imagination without acting as a substitute for the whole of it. This book has doubled my curiosity and reading list on the topic.
As readers, we witness Kelley in conversation with all the various movements and the people who lead them. He connects them, criticizes them, and offers insights on how they can be instructive in everyday life. His writing style captures the kinetic energy of the radical movements themselves but sometimes I would get confused by all of the names and organizational acronyms that I would have to reread sections.
I really could not put this book down though and read it in a couple of sittings. This book acts as a portal into black radical movements and shows the necessity of continuing to explore them. I recommend it to everyone.
As readers, we witness Kelley in conversation with all the various movements and the people who lead them. He connects them, criticizes them, and offers insights on how they can be instructive in everyday life. His writing style captures the kinetic energy of the radical movements themselves but sometimes I would get confused by all of the names and organizational acronyms that I would have to reread sections.
I really could not put this book down though and read it in a couple of sittings. This book acts as a portal into black radical movements and shows the necessity of continuing to explore them. I recommend it to everyone.
February 12, 2023
I think this has to be one of the weightiest activism books I've read so far. I suggest getting the 20th anniversary edition simply because of all the additions that provide even greater context.
It took me longer to get through it because the history provided is so rich and dense. I had to go back and re-read/listen to several parts simply because I found myself getting lost in the history. There is a lot of inspiration to be found in these pages, but I'm actually at a loss of how to even begin to describe this book. I'm still reeling from it.
I will have to reread it several more times to take in all of the lessons on "the power of imagination to transform society" and all the inspirational freedom dreams discussed in its pages.
Because if you can't imagine the kind of future you want, you can't even begin to build on it. Like Alice Walker said, "Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming".
It took me longer to get through it because the history provided is so rich and dense. I had to go back and re-read/listen to several parts simply because I found myself getting lost in the history. There is a lot of inspiration to be found in these pages, but I'm actually at a loss of how to even begin to describe this book. I'm still reeling from it.
I will have to reread it several more times to take in all of the lessons on "the power of imagination to transform society" and all the inspirational freedom dreams discussed in its pages.
Because if you can't imagine the kind of future you want, you can't even begin to build on it. Like Alice Walker said, "Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming".
November 30, 2023
Foundational. Top ten books of all time. Can't believe it took me so long to read. If this book were a core and repeated read for the Left, we'd have a vibrant movement today.
As Lenin put it, "Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their “closeness” to the “concrete”, the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal “tail-ism”."
As Lenin put it, "Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their “closeness” to the “concrete”, the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal “tail-ism”."
April 9, 2007
This book is a response to anyone who thinks critical/cultural scholarship endlessly talks about problems without providing solutions, or equates radical politics with gray and dreary socialism. Kelley can't imagine a revolution without Bootsey Collins, and in his account love, hope and dreaming fuel political action within the Black Diaspora.
February 12, 2008
This is one of my favorite books. RDGK is able to sift through history and think about the visions of alternative futures in a deeply hopeful way... his work is beautiful and inspiring.
Surreal and real both at once.
Surreal and real both at once.
November 2, 2008
Captivated from the first paragraph on ... a true visionary. This book made me very happy.
May 26, 2024
A must-read
January 12, 2016
If only I had more stars!
April 13, 2023
What can I say? Robin Kelley is a brilliant thinker, historian, and writer on Black life, living, freedom, and revolution. Freedom Dreams is a powerfully written call to re-examine and re-learn the histories of Black liberation and freedom movements across the diaspora. He importantly calls attention to the aesthetic movement of surrealism, reminding readers how essential art and aesthetic is to any notion of freedom. Kelley starts the book by describing his own relationship to dreaming, drawing from his mother's fantasies and dreams of community, nourishment, and life. He continues by taking the reader on a journey through history, and discusses Black exodus movements, the kind of freedom that Black marxists and socialists called for, the illuminating and radically transformative power of Black feminism, and the case for reparations. This book is crucial for anyone engaging with liberation, Black studies, and Black history, and is recommended for anyone who wishes to delve into the possibilities that the Black radical imagination has to offer.
April 1, 2024
“The black radical imagination, as I have tried to suggest throughout this book, is a collective imagination engaged in an actual movement for liberation. It is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and losses, crises and openings, and endless conversations circulating in a shared environment.” - Robin D. G. Kelley
This was so good!!! I’ve learned so much about Black liberation movements and Black radicals throughout history just through reading this book. The Black feminist liberation struggle is everyone’s struggle! It was fascinating to read about the influences of both the Cuban revolution and the Chinese Cultural revolution on Black liberation movements. There were many notable figures mentioned such as Angela Davis, Aimé Césaire, Paul Robeson, Jayne Cortez, Malcolm X, & Robert Williams who all played a part in radicalizing others to fight imperialism and racial capitalism. This book has opened up other avenues for radicalism in the form of poetry, music, and surrealist literature. Looking forward to dig into all of them!
This was so good!!! I’ve learned so much about Black liberation movements and Black radicals throughout history just through reading this book. The Black feminist liberation struggle is everyone’s struggle! It was fascinating to read about the influences of both the Cuban revolution and the Chinese Cultural revolution on Black liberation movements. There were many notable figures mentioned such as Angela Davis, Aimé Césaire, Paul Robeson, Jayne Cortez, Malcolm X, & Robert Williams who all played a part in radicalizing others to fight imperialism and racial capitalism. This book has opened up other avenues for radicalism in the form of poetry, music, and surrealist literature. Looking forward to dig into all of them!
May 3, 2019
a beautiful introduction to a broad range of movers and shakers in the radical world.
through black feminism, surrealism, third world retaliation, and the ongoing revolts and reinventions of black americans , robin d.g. kelley maps out a brief bio of resilience. of that deep birthright we all have to be free of chains, in all forms. and not just in the black experience. freedom is universal. our humanity is universal, and when put in this light, even the deepest of pains can not necessarily be healed, but at soothed with aloe (but not covered up, because the wounds are not only still there, but need to be acknowledged. the fight still needs its intentions heard, and its plans executed.
the drawback of freedom dreams i say, would be its briefness, how much it really is just an introduction to many topics, writers, activists, movements etc. but if you are anything like me, this is also a reason for excitement, because my reading list just grows..
through black feminism, surrealism, third world retaliation, and the ongoing revolts and reinventions of black americans , robin d.g. kelley maps out a brief bio of resilience. of that deep birthright we all have to be free of chains, in all forms. and not just in the black experience. freedom is universal. our humanity is universal, and when put in this light, even the deepest of pains can not necessarily be healed, but at soothed with aloe (but not covered up, because the wounds are not only still there, but need to be acknowledged. the fight still needs its intentions heard, and its plans executed.
the drawback of freedom dreams i say, would be its briefness, how much it really is just an introduction to many topics, writers, activists, movements etc. but if you are anything like me, this is also a reason for excitement, because my reading list just grows..
April 23, 2023
Robin D.G. Kelley is one of the most brilliant voices on the Left today, and this book, especially in it's latest 20th anniversary edition, is a stellar piece of writing that will prove valuable to new leftists looking to better understand the Black radical tradition for years to come.
Kelley takes time in this book to outline the vast, complex, and sometimes contradictory Black radical traditions within the U.S., to outline their visions and analysis of the U.S. and how to achieve liberation. He shows us how they envisioned internationalism, reparations, and dealt with questions of solidarity and intersectionality (or the lack thereof). It's an immensely sharp and well written book that is incredibly approachable. I would highly recommend this to leftists of all stripes. White leftists should definitely read this so they can more properly engage with this history, and Black leftists and leftists of color should read this because it is important to their history.
Kelley takes time in this book to outline the vast, complex, and sometimes contradictory Black radical traditions within the U.S., to outline their visions and analysis of the U.S. and how to achieve liberation. He shows us how they envisioned internationalism, reparations, and dealt with questions of solidarity and intersectionality (or the lack thereof). It's an immensely sharp and well written book that is incredibly approachable. I would highly recommend this to leftists of all stripes. White leftists should definitely read this so they can more properly engage with this history, and Black leftists and leftists of color should read this because it is important to their history.
December 2, 2025
I think I was hoping for more of what he did in the last chapter, writing out an imagined future to help me imagine how things could be different in a better way. Most of the book was documenting the history of Black movements imagining a better future. It was more or less a history of civil rights and radical movements, but from the perspective of the creativity of the people who could see through the bleak present to something better, even when they were told it was not possible or likely. He helps frame the history in this inspiring way and highlights the creativity of brave, innovative people past and present. I especially loved reading about Detroit and Jackson MS. I have watched a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs and read some of adrienne maree brown's writing and want to learn more about Cooperation Jackson. I wrote down A LOT of names to look into more, including many surrealists, hip hop artists, activists, and authors.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews