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Black Utopias
Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2021
About this book
Engaging with the work of Black musicians, writers, and women mystics, Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as an occasion to explore new states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture.
Author / Editor information
Jayna Brown is Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
“Black Utopias is replete with flashes of insight, important provocations, and an urgent ethical and political thrust. Jayna Brown models a patient search for intellectual kin adequate to the nightmare world of the present and its dead and deadening ideologies. She reminds us of the extent to which so much Black political thinking begins from a profound negation of the fundamental tenets of Western models of subjectivity. Ambitious, bold, and bracing, Black Utopias forcefully reorients conversations around utopia and Afrofuturism. A field-defining work.”
-- Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
“What does Black speculative practice feel like under the skin? What does it sound like? Where does it take us? Jayna Brown studies centuries of strange Black diviners and offers a map over the universe that is not about the stars but about a Blackness that births and rebirths life in contradicting quantum multiplicity. Where does it get at you (under the skin)? How do you hear it calling you? Let's go.”
-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony
"As the book unfolds, the pleasure Brown finds in her archival encounters with Sojourner Truth and musicians Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane is as palpable as the book’s pressed pages."
-- K. Avvirin Gray Women's Review of Books
“Among texts that examine Black embodiment—that examine our existence beyond and transcendence from the horrific bounds of State-sanctioned supremacies—Black Utopias stands out.... Regardless of your field, this is a must-read about Black existence and alternate states of freedom.”
-- Jennifer Brown College & Research Libraries
“Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias is an innovative interdisciplinary text that brilliantly uncovers a rich current of radical otherworldly utopianism within Black life, thought, and expressive culture.... It is absolutely essential reading for students and scholars of sf, utopia, critical humanisms, and posthumanism.”
-- Jalondra A. Davis Science Fiction Studies
“There are books that captivate you fully, that illuminate you, challenge you, that pierce through you with such clarity and imaginative force, opening mind and soul beyond the definable, the settled.... Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias is such a book.”
-- Kristina J. Kolbe Ethnic and Racial Studies
“Throughout Black Utopias, Brown commits to multiplicity and contradiction. We see this in her non-hagiographic approaches to preachers, musicians, writers, and literary figures. . . . It is in this politicization of the vibrational and sonic that we experience the depth of Blackness’s radical potential.”
-- Amber Jamilla Musser Journal of Popular Music Studies
“Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias . . . is personal and universal, critical and charitable, and continuously creative. . . . Brown succeeds in inviting readers to an imaginal realm of a less constrained ‘reality’ than what many people—and especially academics—presuppose.”
-- Daniel Boscaljon Literature and Theology
"The project of Black Utopias 'is a way of residing in spaces of ambiguity' where the line between madness and prophetic vision cannot be confidently drawn. It is very worthwhile to follow her lead into exploring that uncanny space in this innovative, well-researched piece of scholarship."
-- John Rieder SFRA Review
"From Sojourner Truth to Sun Ra, Brown argues for the recognition of Black utopias based in feeling, connection, devotion, and a decentering of the human. It is a fascinating, nuanced, and well-argued examination of utopia. . . . Brown’s project is ambitious."
-- Tracy McMullen American Music
-- Tracy McMullen American Music
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Acknowledgments
vii -
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Introduction
1 - PART I: ECSTASY
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1 Along the Psychic Highway Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic
23 -
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2 Lovely Sky Boat Alice Coltrane and the Metaphysics of Sound
59 - PART II: EVOLUTION
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3 Our Place Is Among the Stars Octavia E. Butler and the Preservation of Species
83 -
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4 Speculative Life Utopia Without the Human
111 - PART III: SENSE AND MATTER
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5 In the Realm of the Senses Heterotopias of Subjectivity, Desire, and Discourse
137 -
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6 The Freedom Not to Be Sun Ra’s Alternative Ontology
155 -
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Conclusion
177 -
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Notes
179 -
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Notes
195 -
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Index
205
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 11, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9781478021230
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
224
eBook ISBN:
9781478021230
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
