Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Jayna Brown

May 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Allyson Johnson

About this audiobook

In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people-untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress-celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

About the author

Jayna Brown is professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and the author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern.

Allyson Johnson began her entertainment career in her hometown of Chicago as an Emmy Award-winning child news anchor. A graduate of Brown University, she is a working actress, singer, and audiobook narrator in the New York City metropolitan area.