Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS vii
3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
4. Introduction: Utopia and Black American Thought 1
5. 1. Martin Delany’s Experiment in Escape 19
6. 2. Turn- of- the- Century Black Literary Utopianism 34
7. 3. W. E. B. Du Bois’s World of Utopian Intimacy 49
8. 4. George S. Schuyler, Irony, and Utopia 63
9. 5. Richard Wright’s Black Power and Anticolonial Antiutopianism 81
10. 6. Sun Ra and Cosmic Blackness 96
11. 7. Samuel Delany and the Ambiguity of Utopia 110
12. 8. Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence 123
13. Conclusion: Black Utopia and the Contemporary Political Imagination 137
14. Notes 145
15. Bibliography 171
16. Index 179