Black Utopias

“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

“Black Utopias offers readers a number of different insights: on the one hand, it proffers a useful reminder that speculative thought and aesthetics span a spectrum of mediums. . . . On the other hand, the book shows us that contemporary Afrofuturism emerges not only from twentieth-century science fiction and superhero comics, but, equally, from a long African American tradition of utopian thought and practice.” - Smaran Dayal, The Black Scholar

"Black Utopias is a wide-ranging work, moving as it does from the early nineteenth through the late twentieth century, and encompassing the lives and works of a diverse group of religious leaders, novelists, and musicians. . . . Black Utopias is a sophisticated and stimulating book. . . ." - Natalie Zacek, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

"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."

"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