Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian Studies

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What does utopian studies have to learn from critical race theory, Black studies, and ideas of Black futurity? While utopian scholars have begun unpicking the colonial entanglements of utopianism’s origins (particularly as a literary genre grounded in pelagic crossings to the New World that have advocated slavery, extractivism, and eugenics to name a few notable examples across the utopian canon), few, if any, have incorporated the perspectives, aesthetics, and theoretical work of Black scholars themselves.1 The following are a few brief remarks organized around keywords (in a nod to Raymond Williams, a fierce advocate of utopian thinking) that attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, with a focus on my own area of utopian study: utopian literary and cultural production in the contemporary period.We might start by considering the literary utopia’s most prolific period, from roughly 1880 to 1915. In a deluge of utopian narratives, many of them penned by amateur writers, we find the emergence of a genre that is thoroughly rooted in industrialized progress. Whatever their perspective on capitalism and waged labor, these works privilege advanced industrialization as the primary means to eliminate poverty and disease, thereby liberating workers into automated futures of post-scarcity abundance. Examples include Edward Bellamy’s highly rationalized system of pneumatic delivery (Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s chemical production of food from waste products (Mizora: A World of Women [1890] 1999), H. G. Wells’s titanic hydro-powered engineering (Men Like Gods [1923]), Edward Bulwer Lytton’s lithic limitless energy, Vril (The Coming Race [1871]), or the ubiquitous electricity that powers Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s clean city (New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future [1899] 2011), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Marchant’s advanced Martian society (Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance [1893]), and Alexander Bogdanov’s advanced scientific culture on the red planet (Красная звезда [Red Star (1908) 1984]). Indeed, many notable dystopian novels begin with the same premise of highly automated societies that focus, rather, on the awfulness of life without purpose (Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future; Or, Socialism a Reality [1887], E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” [1909], Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano [1952]). While they are far from uncritical of the telos of historical progress (most of the works highlight the class and gender inequalities of their own time), utopian novels in this period tend to view the utopian process as one of harnessing historical progress in a more equitable direction; they rarely question the Hegelian premise that history moves through contradictory forces in a dialectical series of stages.In his 2016 book Hope Draped in Black, Joseph R. Winters explores the lasting damage that ideas of historical progress have wrought on Black writers, artists, and thinkers. While notions of racial uplift are loaded with a linear narrative of Black progress such conceptions, he writes, “are mediated by melancholy, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of tragedy” (6–7). Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s landmark critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as well as the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Winters notes thatExamining the relationship between melancholy and hope in Black literary and aesthetic traditions, Winters explores how writers such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison incorporate jazz into their works, using its discordant, improvisational structures to imagine time out of joint (the Derridean deferral of justice announced by the arrival of the specter of old King Hamlet, who returns) (Derrida 1994). Here, Winters writes, “the past can always haunt and disturb the present [so that] the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility” (2016, 25). If we are to contemplate the almost overwhelming task of decolonizing utopian studies, then deconstructing the idea of historical progress unfolding in Hegelian dialectical stages towards Geist is where we need to start; not just in the sense of the Frankfurt School’s disaggregation of hope from optimism which recalibrates utopian possibility as suffused with tragic pessimism (or “hope, yes, but not for us,” as Walter Benjamin phrased it) (qtd. in Mertens 2006, 63), but also in the sense of Black theorizations of racial progress. As Jamaican novelist and critic Sylvia Wynter puts it, the “white utopia” of industrial progress was a “black inferno” (Wynter, qtd. in Yusoff 2018, 23). In ignoring Black experience as a vital historical site for exploring the utopian impulse, utopian studies alienates Black scholars, artists, and writers who denounce, or ignore, utopianism tout court (it is notable, for example, that Joseph R. Winters never once uses the terms “utopia” or “utopianism” in his 300-page analysis of hope).In his 2019 study Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin reminds us of the historic blindness of utopianism to its own presumed whiteness. American political thought has thereby repressed a Black utopian tradition stretching back to the runaway maroon settlements and all-Black towns founded by ex-slaves such as Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta: intentional Black communities whose “utopian strain of hope” can be traced back through African American political thought (Zamalin 2019, 7). Zamalin’s analysis of Black intellectuals writing fantasy literature (including Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Edward A. Johnson) explores how these writers adapted the genre of the literary utopia to their own exploration of future visions of Black dignity, replete with Black self-governance, interracial freedom, Black political possibility, that “dismantled Social Darwinist myths of natural inferiority and superiority that justified Jim Crow and lynching” (Zamalin 2019, 48). Serialized in the Colored American Magazine between 1902 and 1903 while she was editor, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood establishes an alternative continuity via Ethiopianism, an early strand of Black nationalist discourse that took its inspiration from Psalms 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” Its fantastic “back to Africa” plot rejects the highbrow realism associated with Edith Wharton and Henry James introducing Black speculative fiction more than twenty years before George Schuyler published Black No More (1931); with its cyclical return to ancient Ethiopian mythology as the guarantor of Black dignity in the future, the novel has been read by scholars as forming part of Hopkins’s broader editorial and authorial labors of promoting Black consciousness (Daniels 2013, 159).However, it’s not just the content of Hopkins’s Black utopian novel that can help us think about how to decolonize our utopian readings; the text’s formal properties also suggest what a decolonized textual practice might look like. Of One Blood is notable for its odd generic mixings and appropriation of numerous sources—some acknowledged, such as William James’s “The Hidden Self” (1890) (the novel’s subtitle), many more unattributed. Hopkins’s ambivalent treatment of literary genre—mixing “‘modern’ turn-of-the-century realism and older nonrealist forms” (in particular, the Freudian unheimlich as it animates Gothic tropes of temporal disturbances and uncanny returns), but also melodramas and romantic adventure—offers a necessary utopian strategy to “retrieve and recuperate black life from the disorganizing effects of slavery,” as Jalondra A. Davis puts it (2019, 8). This recuperation is also achieved via Hopkins’s appropriation of numerous contemporary sources, which we might read as a politicized strategy of appropriation; what Ira Dworkin (2018) calls Hopkins’s archival “revenge.” In addition to borrowing from popular white periodicals such as Frank Leslie’s Popular Month

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