Black Utopias

aw_product_id: 
28948593999
merchant_image_url: 
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9781/4780/9781478011675.jpg
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
19.99
book_author_name: 
Jayna Brown
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
Duke University Press
published_date: 
26/02/2021
isbn: 
9781478011675
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > History > Regional & national history > Americas
specifications: 
Jayna Brown|Paperback|Duke University Press|26/02/2021
Merchant Product Id: 
9781478011675
Book Description: 
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.

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