Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Reviewed by Rebecca Hankins

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown. Duke University Press, 2021. Paperback 212 pg. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1478010548

Brown’s Black Utopias is one of the most scholarly and comprehensive works exploring Black Utopian futures. Very apt for a Covid-19 pandemic period that has seen the initial overwhelming loss of Black and Brown lives. In light of this mass death, Brown’s study asks — and through this work, answers — “What might Black futures mean, and how might we challenge our imaginations to create futures that are not only different to what we know and what we expect, but even allows us to evolve beyond our physical existence? Packed into these pages is a narrative that encompasses Afro-futurism, death, theology, spirituality, music, philosophers, science fiction, fantasy, and gender, stories that had to be absorbed, analyzed, and contemplated before beginning the review. There were layers after layers of new ideas packed into a narrative that also centered the stories of Black women’s religious and cultural beings in which they constantly sought a physical and metaphysical utopia within an Afro-futurist and Afro-centric framework. 

Cultural critic Mark Dery is credited with coining the term Afro-futurism as “techno cultural aesthetic that blends science fictional imagery, technology, philosophy, and the imagery, languages, and cultures of Africa and the worldwide African diaspora.” Scholar Yusuf Nuruddin also notes that Afrofuturism “includes black science fiction or Afrocentric science fiction, more broadly defined as African American signification about culture, technology and things to come” (or, in the case of alternative histories, “things that might have come” from a reconfigured past). Brown’s adds to our understanding of Afro-futurism that undergirds her work: Brown defines Afro-futurism as “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures […] most notable for resisting disciplinary boundaries” (p17). Moreover, combined with this Afro-centric, interdisciplinary attitude toward futures and counter-futures, the genre of Afro-futurism centers works of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction created by African Americans, Africans and the African diaspora. Afro-centricity embodies works that are often critical writings that focus on race, the institution of slavery, class, gender, oppression, inequality, and sexuality, all woven throughout Brown’s book. 

Brown begins the monograph by discussing her conflicted relationship with her father and his influence on her writing of utopia, which she describes as the (im)possibilities through which “we jump into the unknowable” (6). In Brown’s writing, Blackness is the unknowable of our existence, because Black people are denied “the rights and freedoms associated with being defined as human” (7). Brown points to “particular epistemic and ontological mobility” that comes with such exclusions, a “real power to be found in such an untethered state” (6).  Throughout the book, the author returns to these themes of imagining a future in which humans are free from the constraints of their biological bodies to discover a Black utopia. These stories of utopia are the dreams through which Brown urges us to “seek out black quotidian practices and visions of communality, sociality, and kinship already operating outside the bounds of normalizing imperatives” (10).

Brown’s first three chapters focus on the spiritual and musical aesthetics of Black women, Sojourner Truth, Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Alice Coltrane, and Octavia Butler’s protagonist in the Parable series, Lauren Olamina. She explores the intersection of their religiosity, mysticism, and music, which she defines as “spirit calling,” where they each seek to escape the flesh to become genderless and achieve an ultimate transcendental consciousness. Science fiction has a complex relationship with religion, often eschewing faith in the name of reason: by contrast, Brown shows how these individuals use religion to develop, establish, and reside in utopias that provide spaces of freedom in a world that gave them nothing. Her section on Alice Coltrane brings her music and spirituality out of the shadows of her famous husband John Coltrane in ways that are refreshing and revelatory.

The phenomenon of the universe is material in Alice Coltrane’s worship and music; sound is the energy of creation. Yet Alice resisted manifestation in biological earthly existence; that existence, for her, may have been partly a tool, but it was limiting and to be transcended. Alice’s universal God Consciousness challenges Western notions of consciousness as simply confined to the mechanics of the brain. Consciousness becomes an infinity, an ineffable dimension or level of existence beyond what is considered human. But Alice Coltrane’s contribution also includes the concrete: the creation of community. Like Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Shaker community, Alice’s model could be considered escapist. But escape is an important trope in African American culture, one that insists on an interiority, an inward and infinite expanse of potentiality.

(p. 79)

Chapter four delves into the utopian ideal of how we define the perfect human, so it is not surprising to the reader that Brown looks at eugenics. This chapter exposes the works of the biologist Julian Huxley and the science fiction author H.G. Wells, and their discourses of “crude racism” that is anti-Black and antisemitic. Through these discourses, these authors sought to define who  is worthy of existence, i.e., superior vs. inferior humans, a racial hierarchy. Huxley and Wells’ ideas of utopia were also about liberal imperialism that encouraged and pushed sterilization practices to bring about world order through a caste system. Brown notes that in Wells’ view, “racialized peoples may not be by nature defective enough to sterilize or exterminate, but they definitely are by nature not equal to Europeans” (pp. 123-124). This chapter also includes discussions of materialism and speciesism that embed an understanding of inequality, race, gender, class, and evolutionary development that intersects with Huxley and Wells’s ideas of worthwhile biological life. 

Brown continues to discuss humans that are only capable of self-awareness through avoidance of how knowledge is formed, that is, through epistemic disobedience. She expounds on this through the works of Sylvia Wynter and a thorough reading of Samuel Delany’s Babel 17 and The Einstein Intersection. Wynter’s works move us to the wonders of experiencing ourselves through a freedom of subconscious awareness that makes us human. However, Brown wants to move into what she determines are extrahuman entities, explored in Delany’s works through sexuality, gender, and body modification, the world of heterotopia. These worlds explore transgender and transsexuality that encourage those beings to explore wherever their passions and desires take them The chapter also includes discussions of materialism and speciesism that embed an understanding of inequality, race, gender, class, and evolutionary development that intersects with Huxley and Wells’ ideas of worthwhile biological life.

The final two chapters of Black Utopias delve more into Delany’s ideas of the extrahuman that move us to think differently about whom we could become, where the body and its elements that confine are erased. These chapters have led us to Brown’s “central exploration of how desire and its fulfillment both form and diffuse the individual self” (p. 138). She spends the chapter connecting Delany’s Trouble on Triton with this central theme while pulling in the extensive work of the eighteenth-century utopian  Charles Fouriers. As in Delany’s work, Fourier posits that sexual desires must be fulfilled, whether with multiple partners, genders, or species. While digesting this discussion, Brown also inserts philosopher Michel Foucault’s complex and elusive ideas of utopia and heterotopia. For Foucault, heterotopias are sites where “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Brown traces how Delany creates his own notion of heterotopia, operating “at the level of the body” (p. 146).  

In the chapter on the musician Sun Ra we have the extreme opposite of Delany, Fourier, and Foucault’s push for the fulfillment of bodily needs: a complete ascetic life that saw desires and passions distract one from transcendence to other purer planes of existence. Discipline and strict rules of training and denial were the only means of traveling to other planets for Sun Ra. This life represented an alternative ontology that allowed Ra’s music, poetry, and performances to reach utopia “that helps us recalibrate, or expand, conventional models of black political radicalism” (p. 157), very much in concert with the Black women in previous chapters. Ra embodied the true meaning of the word radical that saw his life relating to and affecting the fundamental nature of utopia, a liberatory blackness, a total loss of self into nothingness, the void. Brown writes:

For Ra, being human is a state of ignorance and not a status we should be fighting for. Instead, black people should embrace our conditions of alienation, dislocation, and exclusion. […] Peace, freedom, and equality are unachievable for black people here on earth as the human they refer to is the earthman, another order of being altogether. Black people have to let go of the idea of the human, which Ra sees as inseparable from the liberal terms that have defined it. The human dimension is therefore a limited notion of existence.

(171)

The conclusion leaves us with questions to ponder that are related to our sense of knowing, being, breathing, and living that are no longer relevant. What is our future with the planet and its other creatures, plants, and beings? Is this all there is to our existence? Will our survival depend on genetic mutations or move us into pure consciousness without the confines of the body? We are seeing these realities played out in recent films, books, TV, and online sites. Sophie de Oliveira Barata’s The Alternative Limb Project “explores themes of body image, modification, evolution, and transhumanism.” Star Wars and other science fiction films have always included diversity of species from planets throughout the Galaxy, giving us a glimpse into what the future holds. Last year’s The Book of Boba Fett featured a group called The Mods who modified their bodies with droid components. Brown’s book offers an argument for sentience, being that is outside the “human centric ontological framework” (p. 178).

Jayna Brown is the Professor of Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and this work reflects her position. Black Utopias is an excellent text for graduate education or honors coursework in Black Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies, Religious Studies, Queer Studies, Utopian Studies, and Film Studies. Brown’s book engages and challenges the ideas of noted philosophers and political scientists while centering women, queer theorists, and Black futurists. Each chapter can be used as a course that further explores ways of being, human destruction, dominance, control, Black liberation, and the utopian ideal.

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Works Cited

Barata, Oliveira. The Alternative Limb Project, https://thealternativelimbproject.com/, accessed 4/14/2023.

Dery, Mark. (1994). Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (ed.). Duke University Press.

Nuruddin, Yusuf (2006). Ancient black astronauts and extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic science fiction as urban mythology, Socialism and Democracy, 20:3, 127-165, DOI: 10.1080/08854300600950277

Pratt Institute Libraries, What is Afro-futurism? https://libguides.pratt.edu/afrofuturism, accessed 4/10/2023.

Yaszek, Lisa (2006). Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future, Socialism and Democracy, 20:3, 41-60, DOI: 10.1080/08854300600950236

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Rebecca Hankins is the Wendler Endowed Professor and a certified archivist/librarian at Texas A&M University. She has been at Texas A&M University since 2003, receiving tenure in 2010 and promoted to Full Professor in 2019.  She is housed in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures in the School of Arts and Sciences and teaches courses on Africana literature and popular culture, memory and mythmaking, Islam, and the use of primary sources in research methodology. Her most recent work is titled, “Towards a Global History of Islamicate Science Fiction,” co-authored with Muhammad Ahmad, Ph.D., in the Bloomsbury Handbook on Muslims and Popular Culture, 2023.

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