Brown Jayna Brown

Black Utopias (eBook, PDF)

Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 222
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Januar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781478021230
• Artikelnr.: 66283159

Autorenporträt

Jayna Brown is Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, also published by Duke University Press.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
Part I: Ecstasy
1. Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the
Ecstatic  23
2. Lovely Sky Boat: Alice Coltrane and the Metaphysics of Sound  59
Part II: Evolution
3. Our Place is Among the Stars: Octavia E. Butler and the Preservation of
Species  83
4. Speculative Life: Utopia Without the Human  111
Part III: Sense and Matter
5. In the Realm of the Senses: Heterotopias of Subjectivity, Desire, and
Discourse  137
6. The Freedom Not to Be: Sun Ra's Alternative Ontology  155
Conclusion  177
Notes  179
Bibliography  195
Index  205