Abstract

Alex Zamalin's Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism offers the most thorough scholarly survey of African American utopian literature currently available. The scope of the project is ambitious—the book's chapters proceed chronologically from the genre's utopian beginnings in Martin Delany's Blake; Or, the Huts of America, through the anti-utopian turn of the twentieth century found in texts such as George Schuyler's Black Empire, and concluding with the ambiguous utopias and heterotopias of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. Unlike recent scholarship on black speculative fiction (andré m. carrington, Sandra Jackson...