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. 

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