A Critique From Within: the Early African American Utopian Tradition and Its Visions of A Better Society
2020-06
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A Critique From Within: the Early African American Utopian Tradition and Its Visions of A Better Society
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2020-06
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It should not be surprising that many African-American writers have written in the utopian genre. As novelist Walter Mosley wrote in a 1998 essay titled “Black to the Future,” “Science fiction and its relatives (fantasy, horror, speculative fiction, etc.) … speak most clearly to those who are dissatisfied with the way things are.” While scholars of African-American literature have paid increasing attention to contemporary speculative fiction (as in studies of Afrofuturism), they have overlooked the utopian precursors found in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In turn, while scholarship on utopian literature has steadily recognized uses of the genre outside of the United States and Europe, it still lacks substantial engagement with African-American utopian writing. My dissertation argues that these utopias comprise a rich archive of texts that engage with the history of racism, discrimination, and inequality in the United States—topics that are too often ignored in traditional utopian literature. The failure to recognize these texts is a result of their emergence from the semi-periphery of American utopianism. Unable to fully present visions of a better world unique to them, black writers adopted and transformed the desires of white Americans to make their own utopian desires legible to the public. In the process, they offer an immanent critique of American values and suggest how they might be reformulated to bring about a more just society. Specifically, I examine the utopian contributions of three authors: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and George Schuyler, before concluding with a discussion on reparations as a possible utopian movement for the present.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2020. Major: English. Advisors: Timothy Brennan, Ellen Messer-Davidow. 1 computer file (PDF); iii, 157 pages.
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Lemke, David. (2020). A Critique From Within: the Early African American Utopian Tradition and Its Visions of A Better Society. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216137.
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