Publishers Weekly
★ 09/02/2024
Translator Robertson (Beyond Babylon) debuts with an ambitious and captivating group portrait of African American visionaries who sought to escape the “persistence of abysmal realities for black people” by setting up self-sustaining communities. Opening the narrative with a visit to his ancestral home in Promise Land, Tenn.—“one of the oldest-known settlements founded by formerly enslaved people”—Robertson then delves into the history of the migration of freedmen and their descendants (including Robertson’s grandparents) from Tennessee to Detroit, and the founding of Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna church, a “countercultural mecca” that gained momentum in the 1960s when Black Detroiters displaced by gentrification were pushed into the surrounding neighborhood. Headed in the 1960s by “firebrand” pastor and Black Nationalist leader Albert Cleage Jr. (later known as Jaramogi Abebe), the church became a hub for utopian experimentation, such as Mtoto House, a “communal child-rearing” experiment based on socialist kindergartens in the Soviet Union and kibbutzim in Israel. Speaking to and researching former Mtoto House residents and other participants in Black utopian projects, as well as reflecting on his family’s “sacred” relationship with Promise Land, Robertson paints a vivid and beguiling picture of the indomitable human yearning for a safe and nurturing home. It’s a must-read. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"Ambitious and captivating . . . Robertson paints a vivid and beguiling picture of the indomitable human yearning for a safe and nurturing home. It’s a must-read." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This enticing mix of personal and general history of Black utopian safe spaces promises to engage readers interested in reckoning with the past and present of Black American experiences and milestones." —Library Journal
"At a time when signs of dystopia and despair abound, The Black Utopians takes us on a journey to a place—as much inside as around us—where stubborn hopefulness pushes back against the sirens of impossibility. In these pages, utopia is not fanciful and fleeting escapism, but the sweat-soaked soil of freedom dreams and fugitive imagination—nowhere and everywhere at once." —Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want and Imagination: A Manifesto
“An entrancingly rich odyssey of observation and storytelling, The Black Utopians returns us to forgotten and unknown histories of the ongoing search for a fairer, more equitable America. Aaron Robertson reminds us that integral to Black struggle has been an unbreakable sense of hope, resistance, and joy.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New & Selected Poems and Counternarratives
"A richly braided and beautifully written account that combines history, personal memoir, and journalism to explore the search for a black utopia. Robertson’s tone is elegiac and lyrical, his method grounded in colorfully detailed characters and painstakingly reconstructed examples. This wise and often moving book offers both a slice of a particular utopia as well as a more general portal onto the quest for a better world that has propelled so much human history. A deeply original and major contribution to the literature of utopia." —Akash Kapur, author of Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia
"In this stunning narrative, Aaron Robertson beautifully unveils the hidden spirit of Black utopian yearnings. By telling the forgotten story of the important Detroit pastor, Albert B. Cleage, Jr. and the Shrine of the Black Madonna, which he led, and the 1960s Black freedom struggles, with which he was affiliated—The Black Utopians deftly shifts from intellectual history to cultural critique to personal memoir. In doing this, Robertson answers a profound question: what does it mean to be free? The Black Utopians is thus more than just a gripping story; it is an indispensable resource for all those who dream of horizons, and who imagine unimaginable worlds." —Alex Zamalin, author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism
"In The Black Utopians, Aaron Robertson invites readers into a lyrical, rigorous, and deeply personal chronicle of the 'better worlds' that Black Americans have, against all odds, dreamed into being. Robertson's exploration is not merely a historical recounting of collective innovation, but an urgent philosophical quest for what is sacred about the Black utopian imagination in the face of brutal constraints. Robertson's voice is exquisitely clear-eyed, searching, and expansive, offering a perspective as wise as it is intimate. From the postbellum settlement of Promise Land, Tennessee, to the radical social movements of Detroit, The Black Utopians unearths again and again crucial legacies of Black resistance." —Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
Library Journal
08/01/2024
NEA grantee Robertson's book shows that formerly enslaved people established 200 to 1,200 settlements in the U.S. and Canada between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, and their frameworks for self-ruled and safe spaces for Black people bear emotional and tangible links to the Black nationalism of the 1960s and '70s and the 21st-century Black Lives Matter movement. Unfolding a broad, nuanced narrative of personal reflection and familial connection, Robertson explores individual and collective ideas and efforts among Black people striving to realize the security of independence. The narrative moves between the author's hometown of Detroit and his ancestral home in Promise Land, a middle Tennessee village founded by Black people during the Reconstruction era. He focuses on Detroit minister Albert Cleage Jr. (1911–2000), his Shrine of the Black Madonna church, the Black Christian Nationalism it symbolized, and Beulah Land, the 4,000 church-owned acres in South Carolina that were envisioned as a haven to physically and psychologically liberate Black people. VERDICT This enticing mix of personal and general history of Black utopian safe spaces promises to engage readers interested in reckoning with the past and present of Black American experiences and milestones.—Thomas J. Davis
Kirkus Reviews
2024-08-02
Inventing an ideal.
Translator, editor, and essayist Robertson makes his book debut with an informative history of Black Christian Nationalism, an ambitious utopian experiment begun in 1967 by radical activist pastor Albert Cleage Jr. Predicated on “the historic truth that Jesus was the Black Messiah,” Cleage called his church The Shrine of the Black Madonna; its central image was a startling mural of a Black Madonna, painted by iconoclastic artist Glanton Dowdell. Under Cleage’s leadership, the shrine served as a cultural center and the launching place for a larger mission for Blacks to take control of institutions that had been oppressing them. By 1971, Robertson reports, “the Shrine’s agricultural, technical, and manufacturing (ATM) program was conceived so that the Black Christian Nationalists could one day grow and can their own food, train their own corps of construction, electrical, and plumbing specialists, and provide resources to meet whatever unforeseen needs would one day arise.” Interwoven with the eventful life stories of Cleage and Dowdell are nine letters written by Robertson’s father, Dorian, who had been in prison for robbery for ten years as his son grew up. As he reflects on the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, and on God, freedom, and family, Dorian exemplifies a man “born into a land of evil and violence,” depressed and alienated. He was precisely the kind of man to benefit from Cleage’s vision of a New Black World, “where evictions did not happen, where there were few worries, no social disorganization, no isolation, no abuse of women, no abandonment of children, no bad schools, no diseased spirits.” Those ideals, Robertson finds, continue to inform many recently established intentional communities that prioritize the care and dignity of people of color.
A fresh perspective on Black history.
