The Black Utopians
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
This program is read by by four-time Audie Award winner, Odyssey Award winner, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award–winning audiobook narrator, Dion Graham.
One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024
"Narrator Dion Graham's smooth baritone carries gravitas and emotion."—AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)
A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives.
How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?
These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start.
Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today.
Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism.
The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This audiobook is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This quietly compelling blend of memoir and cultural history reimagines what freedom, community, and spiritual self-determination can look like for Black Americans. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, author Aaron Robertson turned inward. He began to explore the intersections between the history of Promise Land, Tennessee—the tiny Black hamlet where he’d spent his childhood summers—and the rise of Black Christian Nationalism as embodied by Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna. The narrative revolves around two poles: visionary preacher Albert Cleage Jr., who viewed the Bible as a radical blueprint for dismantling oppressive systems; and Robertson’s own father, whose letters and memories from a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery shape a moving story of legacy and loss. Dion Graham’s resonant narration adds even more gravitas to Robertson’s introspective historical journey. The Black Utopians invites us to reconsider paradise not as a vision to strive for but a reality to live.
