Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Kelley opens with a description of his mother and his childhood. He grew up in Harlem/Washington Heights, in New York City, in a difficult, impoverished situation. Despite their difficulties, Kelley’s mother, Ananda, always made an effort to help others, to look for the beauty in the everyday things, and to dream about a utopian world without patriarchy, boundaries, violence, poverty, or racism. Like his mother, Kelley also thinks it is important to dream of utopias, even if they do not exist in reality, because they can inspire political engagement, such as his own.

Kelley then details his own history of activism. As a teenager, he was drawn to a Black nationalism inspired by idealized, utopian images of precolonial African societies. As a college student, Kelley learned that some of these notions about precolonial African society were untrue. Undaunted, he continued to study anticolonial movements in places like Guyana and Grenada, and he was inspired by their struggles and successes. He then describes why he was drawn to “‘small c’ communism” (4), seeing it as a way to use human technology and innovation to end poverty and improve people’s quality of life.

The final piece to his ideological makeup is found in surrealism. Surrealism, an artistic movement that is playful, absurd, and open, makes it possible to imagine different worlds by emancipating the mind. Kelley describes this as a radical position that seeks to completely reform social relations between people along new lines. He links this artistic dream of a total reformation of society to the aims of political radical groups, such as radical feminists, who seek to completely reform gender relationships.

Freedom Dreams is an exploration of these strands of Black liberatory movements—visions of Africa, anticolonial movements, communism, and surrealism—and how they have informed the radically inclusive visions of activist individuals and organizations throughout the 20th century, largely in the United States but also elsewhere in the Black diaspora. Rather than a politics defined by fighting against racism, fascism, and other oppressive ideologies, Kelley challenges contemporary activists to think of what kind of world they want to fight for. To achieve this, Kelley believes they will have to think poetically, meaning to imagine something totally different that does not yet exist and mentally transport people there. He argues that dominant white, cis, straight, male socialist utopias are insufficient and tend to leave marginalized people, those who do not fall into those categories, out. He feels that art, especially poetry and music, make it possible to see another world that is radically inclusive. Finally, Kelley notes that freedom and love are at the core of revolutionary movements and it is critical to understand their political importance. 

The first essay in the collection is about the relationship between ideas of freedom and the continent of Africa in Black radical movements and Black American culture more broadly from the early Americas to the 1990s. Kelley begins with a description of how, in the 1960s and 1970s, the end of the formal colonial era in Africa inspired a new generation of Black scholars and activists, Kelley among them, to look at the cultures and civilizations of the continent for examples of what kind of future they wanted to create. They saw precolonial African societies, such as that of the ancient Egyptians, as more liberated than their own. The association between Africa and freedom coalesced in a belief that Africa is the true homeland for the Black diaspora, to which many wish to return.

Kelley then turns to the theme of Exodus and its role in this vision of Africa and freedom. The term Exodus is closely associated with the biblical story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and slavery and to the promised land. Kelley details how many Black American groups drew on the language of Exodus to “critique America’s racist state and build a new nation, for its central theme wasn’t simply escape but new beginning” (17). One of the groups that Kelley details are the Maroon societies in the Americas, small communities of former enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, and white indentured servants who escaped the plantations to live on the margins of society.

The desire to leave the United States behind as a racist and oppressive nation is and was often in tension with the desire of some Black Americans to be made full citizens. Before the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, Black Americans were not considered citizens, the community debated whether they should stay and fight for citizenship. Some Black leaders felt that Black Americans should return to Africa.

Kelley describes the different visions of “Africa” held by Black Americans throughout history. In the 19th century, Black American leaders looked to Ethiopia in particular as a source of hope. Not only was the country mentioned in a prophetic passage from the Psalms, but in 1896 it had successfully resisted Italy’s attempt at colonization, making it the only independent nation on the continent. By the end of the nineteenth century, Liberia became a focus of visions of Africa. The Black Americans who hoped to and later did colonize Liberia saw themselves as bringing Christianity, civilization, and technology to the Indigenous people there. This was very much in keeping with the white, Western model of colonialism, although some, like Edward Wilmot Blyden, argued that these Black colonizers should instead seek to adopt traditional, communal African modes of living rather than impose Western ones.

In a section entitled “Redemption,” Kelley turns to a discussion of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey had an idiosyncratic world view that incorporated elements of Christianity, Western technology, Black Nationalism, and a focus on Africa (especially Ethiopia) as a mythopoetic cradle of culture. Kelley traces the history of UNIA from its founding by Garvey in Jamaica in 1914 through its move to Harlem in 1916 and its subsequent activism in the US through the 1920s. He describes in particular how the UNIA promoted an essentialist view of gender, noting that within the group, a Black man’s role was to protect women, and Africa as the “motherland,” from rape. Despite this patriarchal ideology, women such as Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey’s second wife, played an important role in the structure and running of the organization. Kelley argues that the UNIA ultimately failed because it focused too much on capitalist, free enterprise solutions rather than collective economies like the kibbutzim in Israel.

In the final section, “Space is the Place,” Kelley considers Afrofuturist visions of a “New Land”—a phrase echoed in the book’s title—modeled on these utopian, imaginary African pasts. Though the precolonial Africa envisioned by Garvey and others was not always accurate, that idealized past inspired new ways of imagining an emancipated future. Kelley lists many artists, writers, and thinkers who have engaged with this idea, including singer Abbey Lincoln. Kelley describes how this New Land is sometimes envisioned as outer space, as seen in the aesthetics and language of musicians Sun Ra and his Arkestra, who wore Egyptian-style space suits onstage. This set of ideas can be found in the Afrofuturist movement, which incorporates elements of science fiction, avant-garde art, and Black culture to create new images of utopia. Kelley details a number of rap and hip-hop artists and groups who mobilize this Afrofuturist, outer space imagery in their work, including X-Clan, Digable Planets, and the song “Sunny Meadowz” by Del tha Funkee Homosapien. Using the spoken word poetry of Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie as an example, Kelley notes that in contemporary times, the idea of Exodus has shifted, signifying not a return to Africa but a movement forward to a better world that might be found, or built, anywhere.