Introduction: Articulating Race and Utopia

While at the beginning of 2018 the success of Ryan Coogler's film Black Panther suggested a widespread desire to witness an Afrofuturistic utopia, that desire—or perhaps even need—has not always been acknowledged. Today, however, the film is one marker of a growing interest in expressions that speak to the combination of the utopian and the racial imaginaries.1 However, if Black Panther has inspired interest in utopia, there has simultaneously been a flood of dystopian visions marked by the attenuation of hope that suggest a bleaker view, especially regarding race and nation. The rise of Brexit, Trumpism, the Le Pens' Front National, Netanyahuism, “Italians First,” Bolsonaroan Brazil, and so on indicate a growing nativism. White supremacists and other fringe movements have found a global audience with the help of Russian bots and the Internet, while Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders of “Parij voor de Vrijheid” (Party for Freedom) appears before crowds in small towns in the American Deep South,2 and Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon addresses Front National members in France, urging, “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”3As scholars, we maintain that part of the response to such a bleak worldview in these times requires bringing together race and utopian consciousness. While there are important things to learn from studying dystopian figurations, we think it important in the current moment to counter racist visions by situating race, when possible, in a more hopeful way, even as the eutopian vision might be beset by internal contradictions and limitations. In short, the seemingly endless thirst for imagining the bad place of racism with its cruelty requires us to present alternatives that seek racial justice.From a historical perspective, George M. Fredrickson argues that the practice of racism and our modern conceptions of the phenomenon called race—with the term carrying all its complexities, variations, contradictions, and constructedness—emerged as early as medieval Europe.4 Ibram X. Kendi tells us that the term race first appeared in a 1481 French poem, while Michael Banton maintains that the term first appeared in English in a 1508 Scottish poem.5 Whatever its origin, most agree that it was with the Enlightenment that scientific classifications of race evolved as a way to categorize all the world's people systematically and comprehensively: François Bernier, Carl Linnaeus, Johann Freidrich Blumenbach, Arthur de Gobineau, Samuel George Morton, and so on. Despite these attempts to pin down race, however, the meanings and practices of race have always been in flux. For example, in the United States, where race has at its heart been thought of in terms of black and white, that classic binary has evolved as forms of cultural and visible difference have led to a multiplicity of racialized identities,6 including the racialization of Muslims and the categorization of mixed race as its own unique racial identity.7This special issue is specifically designed to prioritize eutopia over dystopia as part of an effort to imagine race in new ways. We argue that insufficient attention has been given to race in relation to utopia, but we are well aware that this special issue is by no means the first attempt to address the intersection of the two in Utopian Studies or other scholarly venues. For instance, in 1978, the very first issue of Alternative Futures, the precursor to this journal, featured William Nichols and Charles P. Henry's article “Imagining a Future in America: A Racial Perspective,” as well as John M. Reilly's “The Utopian Impulse in Early Afro-American Fiction” in the following issue.8 Since 1990, when the journal changed its name to its current Utopian Studies, there have been intermittent articles dealing with race. Early discussions included George Mariz on Sydney Olivier's application of a sort of “modern or practical utopianism” to race relations in colonial Jamaica, Curtis C. Smith on Nkrumah's utopian vision for postcolonial Africa, Felicia F. Campbell on the appropriation of the mythical Shangri-La in James Hilton's Lost Paradise from the Tibetan legend of Shambhala, and Samson B. Knoll on Aryanism in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.9 By the 2000s, we saw about one article per year, though in some years there were a few more, and in 2010 there seem to have been none.10 Some special issues have been dedicated to authors and topics where discussions of race are part of the larger critical discourse, such as the 2008 special issue on Octavia Butler edited by Claire Curtis and the 2013 special issue “Utopianism in Other Traditions” edited by Jacqueline Dutton and Lyman Tower Sargent.11 These pronounced examples stand out for their relative infrequency, a trend that has historically not been much improved when we broaden our focus to examine book-length projects.One of the first scholarly monographs dedicated specifically to tackling the intersection of race and utopia was William H. Pease and Jane Pease's Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America, published in 1963, which looked at many of the antebellum attempts to establish free African American communities throughout the United States and Canada.12 Other books have continued to explore utopian racial equality in actual communities, including Dorothy Schwieder, Joseph Hraba, and Elmer Schwieder's Buxton: A Back Utopia in the Heartland (2003) and Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser's Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio (2018).13 Further exploring the connection between race and utopia specifically in literature are such works as Ralph Pordzik's The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (2001), Fernando Arenas's Utopias of Otherness: Nationhood and Subjectivity in Portugal and Brazil (2003), Dohra Ahmad's Landscapes of Hope: Anti-colonial Utopianism in America (2009), Eric D. Smith's Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction (2012), Teresa Botelho and Iolanda Ramos's edited collection Performing Identities and Utopian Belonging (2013), and Sean T. Mitchell's Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil (2017).14 While these contributions are without doubt valuable, again these works stand out all the more because of the relative dearth of texts, considering that race and utopia taken separately are relatively frequent topics for analysis.The shortage of examinations of race and utopia is the product of a great many factors, from uncertainty among scholars as to what constitutes utopian thinking in contexts outside of the West; to the influence of postrace discourse, with its implication that racism is largely a problem of the past; to a sense that utopianism is an insufficient heuristic for addressing the realities of racism's victims; and to the larger, vague notion that utopian imagining is just wrongheaded. Whatever the reasons, at the most basic level, the centrality of race in cultural life shows in a rather obvious way that there is a great need for sustained examinations of ways a racist world could be made more fair and just. This special issue attempts to do that, especially by covering areas that critics have left underexplored. Our strategy for accomplishing this goal was to bring together a variety of utopian expressions from around the world mostly in the present but beginning with a key moment in modernity, the French Revolution.15Blake Smith presents the French Revolution as a “global utopian moment,” especially in conjunction with the Haitian revolution, by looking at Pierre Prevost-Monfort's 1798 play Tenais and Zeliska. By imagining racial mixing in an idealized Bisnapore (today's Bishnupur, West Bengal, India), where racism is not supposed to exist, Smith argues, the play performs a paradoxical urge to both abolish and preserve racial difference that carries forward to other times and other places. The next two articles reposition us in two very different historical and cultural contexts. They also shift our attention from the literary utopia to utopian social movements. Morgan Shipley and Jack Taylor reexamine John Africa's religious vision and the concrete utopian potential of MOVE in negating the dystopian present in the United States and reaching toward a future of “peace, health, happiness, and satisfaction” rooted in Life as the unification of nature and humanity. Jason Paolo R. Telles explores how indigenous groups in the northern part of the Philippines create music videos to express race- and ethnicity-based “screen memories” of their ecotopian “cosmovision,” which necessitates a symbiotic equality between humans and the environment. Both of these social movements emphasize a de-anthropocentric worldview rooted in nondominant racial/ethnic minorities fighting against the dominant system.Taking us back to the realm of fiction, the last two articles treat texts that engage in speculative fantasy. Hugh Charles O'Connell reads Abderrahmane Sissako's film Bamako (2006) as a piece of African-utopianism that is related but not reducible to either Afrofuturism or postcolonial utopianism. As O'Connell argues, the film stages a trial of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for crimes of global capitalism, within which a judgment of guilt can only occur in the “space of the imaginary.” Nihad M. Farooq tracks the myths of freedom and movement in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), which received the 2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize, among several other awards. She identifies Valentine Farm in the book as a “useful delusion” that enables “us to imagine a collective future that is not bound by the manufactured borders of the state but, rather, by the affective borders of shared struggle, experience, and desire,” which leads her to conclude that utopia is really about movement rather than place.Taken together, these contributions operate transnationally and transhistorically to bring race to the center of the utopian imagination. Our hope is that this special issue will be one more step to counter the racism that has historically (de)formed the past, continues to plague societies in the present, and threatens our futures.

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