Book Review: Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism, by Alex Zamalin

• Author: Emma Stone Mackinnon
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Date: 01 August 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720913079
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(4) 700 –711

© The Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism, by Alex

Zamalin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 192 pp.

Reviewed by: Emma Stone Mackinnon, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge,

Cambridge, UK

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720913079

Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia identifies and chronicles a tradition of utopian

theorizing within African American political thought. Each of the eight brief

chapters engages with an entry in what Zamalin terms “the black utopian

tradition” (or in the case of the second chapter, a set of entries), moving

chronologically from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth

and including works more commonly classed as black nationalist, Afro-

futurist, or simply fantastical. Through an imaginative use of utopianism, he

argues, the relevant texts comment on and critique conceptions of agency and

freedom. Some of these works present utopian visions, while others offer

antiutopian ones. Some are self-consciously political-theoretical texts, while

others stretch the category not just of political theory but also of text itself.

They are united, he argues, by a shared “utopian strain of hope” (7) and by

offering a “fantastical meditation on untapped possibilities already embedded

within society” (10).

In the supposed opposition between utopianism and realism, one might

expect Zamalin’s book to side with the utopians, but, while he opens by tak-

ing issue with critics of utopian thought (1–2), this is no straightforward argu-

ment in favor of utopian theorizing. In imagining both utopias and anti-utopias,

Zamalin presents the texts he considers as working against, rather than sim-

ply complementing, other forms of utopian imagination. The works, as he

presents them, serve to contest certain Enlightenment narratives of progress

and modernity, and challenge ideas of the state of nature and the noble sav-

age, while directly resisting conjectural history through alternative conjec-

tures of their own. In doing so, he argues, they posit different and disparate

notions of freedom. In this way, Zamalin brings forward a particular tradition

913079PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720913079Political TheoryBook Reviews

book-review2020