Overview
This exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora throughout the twentieth century begins with the premise that the catalyst for political engagement has rarely been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movement because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited.Our imagination may be the most revolutionary tool available to us, and yet we have failed to understand its political importance and recognize it as a powerful social force.
From Paul Robeson to Aime Cesaire to Jayne Cortez, Kelley unearths freedom dreams in African and Third World liberation movements, in the hope that Communism offered, in the imaginative mindscapes of Surrealism, in the transformative potential of radical feminism, and in the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.
With Freedom Dreams, Kelley affirms his place as "a major new voice on the intellectual left" (Frances Fox Piven) and shows us that any serious movement toward freedom must begin in the mind.
Editorials
Washington Post
an intriguing premise that Kelley investigates with estimable aplomb...Kelley's comparative obscurity is to our detriment, because he favors thorough research and historical detail over the glib sloganeering that often passes for critical thinking...consistently smart, consistently readable book.Village Voice
At the heart of Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination is a call. It is not a call to arms (even metaphorically), nor is this onetime Communist Party worker calling for a return to the elevation of class above all the other complexities that ail us. The author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America-a work that took to task lefties who have shown a reckless disregard for "identity movements"-would hardly take that great leap backward. No, it is a call to the Marvelous.The Marvelous is a way of seeing Kelley learned early. "My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free," he writes of his childhood spent on the border of Washington Heights and Harlem, "in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from our fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin's 'Summertime,' in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant."
This parental gift, this poetic ethics, has since provided Kelley with a key to understanding the wild current of freedom running through the myriad efforts of black cultural prophets and community visionaries, poetic renegades and musical rebels. Whether it was W.E.B. DuBois or Thelonious Monk, Audre Lorde or Wifredo Lam, the African Blood Brotherhood or the Maoist-influenced Revolutionary Action Movement-blacks, Kelley argues, have kept their eyes on the prize of the possible: an African homeland; a black nation staked out in the belly of this beast; or an anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, anti-racist elsewhere.
Africana.com
Prior to the publication of his new book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley had never been reviewed in the New York Times and therein lies the subtle distinction between being a Black Celebrity Intellectual and merely a well-known and respected scholar. Kelley has rarely sought the attention that of some of his more well-known colleagues have garnered, but as the author of ground-breaking books like Hammer and Hoe (1990), Race Rebels (1994) and Yo' Mama's Disfunktional (1998), the not quite 40-year-old Kelley may be the most respected and influential of his generation of black scholars. While the reading public eagerly awaits his critical meditation on the music and influence of Thelonious Monk, in his latest book Kelley "dreams out loud" about the black radical tradition.According to Kelley, currently a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University, Freedom Dreams represents an opportunity to "recover ideas - visions fashioned mainly by those marginalized black activists who proposed a different way out of our constrictions." Black folk, he adds, "must tap the well of our own collective imaginations, that we do what earlier generations have done: dream." Indeed, Kelley locates dreams and dreamers in "Back to Africa" movements, black feminist thought, third world insurgents, the desire for reparations, Marxism and Afro-diasporic Surrealism.
Throughout the book, Kelley's focus reflects his own left-radical politics and as such the chapters on Marxism (subtitled "Red Dreams of Black Liberation") and third world politics draw on Kelley's previous scholarship. As in his earlier works, Kelley exhibits a nuanced wit.