Violent Utopia

“Jovan Scott Lewis makes an important, radical, and critical turn away from histories that exceptionalize the white violence of the Tulsa massacre and cast it as a singular event as opposed to a structural occurrence. Deftly and sensitively moving beyond narratives based on an easy nostalgia, cheap sentimentalism, and knee jerk patriotism, he painstakingly demonstrates that 1921 must be seen as a century-long project of deprivation and dispossession. With this important book, Lewis has given us a harrowing narrative of Black disenfranchisement.” - Peter James Hudson, author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean

“In Violent Utopia, Jovan Scott Lewis cautions that Tulsa’s historic Greenwood community is more than its Black Wall Street legacy. Situating the 1921 Tulsa race massacre within knotty and enduring place-specific geographies of anti-Black and anti-Native American violence, he masterfully outlines the complex structures of dispossession and trauma in which Tulsa’s Black population has been entangled from Indian Removal to Jim Crow to urban renewal to gentrification. With an ultimate interrogation of the possibilities for Greenwood’s twenty-first-century freedom and repair, this book stands out for its original and timely insights that only can be revealed through the mix of tools that Lewis leverages from geography, anthropology, and history.” - Karla Slocum, author of Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West

"Violent Utopia’s findings shed a searching light on Oklahoman history but are not limited to or by it. Whilst humble enough to only define itself as a ‘minor contribution’ to the reparations movement, Violent Utopia’s great strength is an analytical dexterity that studiously balances the dialectical dance of anti-Black violence and Black freedom dreams." - Thomas Cryer, LSE Review of Books

“This thought-provoking book is worth reading. It shows that much can be learned from studying Black communities from a critical race perspective.” - Robert L. Boyd, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Skillfully incorporates the tools of geography, ethnography, and history to investigate issues surrounding reparations and what they might accomplish for the African American community. . . . Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - Choice

"Lewis's Violent Utopia offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its legacies. ... The book is a stellar ethnohistorical model for scholars." - Jajuan Johnson, Journal of Southern History

"Violent Utopia is not only a valuable and groundbreaking addition to the literature of Tulsa’s long-embattled African American community but also a thought-provoking study of history, memory, and identity that will be of considerable value to scholars studying present-day Black communities nationwide." - Scott Ellsworth, Journal of American History