54 pages • 1 hour read
Robin KelleyFreedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Imagination in Activism
As indicated by the subtitle, The Black Radical Imagination, Kelley is primarily concerned with how creativity, dreams, and utopian ideas have animated the Black civil rights movement in the United States and abroad. At the core of his thesis is the argument that a vision of the future is critical to continually enrich and motivate activism. Kelley argues that without an idea of what the world should look like, activists will not know what it is they are working toward and therefore will not be able to maintain resistance movements.
Kelley interprets imagination broadly throughout the text. One of the major sources of vision that he identifies are in the creative arts: poetry, hip-hop music, blues, jazz, and painting, to name just a few. He frequently breaks from traditional narrative history to identify and interpret these creative sources, highlighting their integrally relation to the political activism he is describing. Every essay in the collection begins with an epigraph of poetry, musical lyrics, or, in the case of the final essay, a quotation from jazz musician Thelonious Monk that directly relates to the historical argument that follows. While Kelley covers many different kinds of creative efforts, his greatest interest is in surrealist art and poetry and its intersection with political activism. Surrealism, as an artistic movement that counters and subverts traditional logics of both creative production and engagement with the world, provides an avenue for activists to step outside reality as given and imagine new possibilities. Surrealism offers liberation of the mind, which Kelley argues is necessary before one pursues material and political liberation.
Kelley argues that political activism itself is a form of collective imagination, generating new horizons of possibility, especially when it incorporates the insights of marginalized groups such as Black women. This is most clearly exemplified in his discussion of reparations, a seemingly failed movement that nonetheless provides a space for Black radicals to imagine what the world could be like if they had the resources to build it.
By highlighting the importance of Imagination in Activism, Kelley demonstrates how he differs from doctrinaire Marxism. In doctrinaire or strict Marxism, material needs such as food and housing are of primary concern. Kelley instead argues that nonmaterial imagination is also critical to Marxist or radical socialist movements. By drawing on examples dating back to Marxism’s origins in the 19th century, he demonstrates that, in fact, imagination has always been an element of radical politics. Kelley believes that in order to create a radically new world, one has to be able to imagine it.
International Aspects of Black American Radicalism
In Freedom Dreams, Kelley demonstrates that rather than being a strictly domestic movement defined by American political and material realities, Black American radicalism has historically been connected to global liberation movements. Kelley shows how Black American radicalism is defined in part by the experience of slavery, an international system that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Black American radical movements draw inspiration from their literal and figurative affiliations with Africa, their ties to international Marxism, and their relationships with global anticolonial movements. Further, Kelley describes the International Aspects of Black Radicalism as being a two-way street. Not only are Black Americans influenced by international movements, but they influence these movements in turn.
The first essay in the collection establishes how Black American radicalism has long been interested in the continent of Africa as both a literal place and a mythopoetic land. The Black American community’s conception of itself as part of an international African diaspora both created solidarity and informed a common aesthetic. In some early instances, the movement dreamed of a literal return to Africa. Later, Africa was figured as a kind of Edenic land without oppression, hierarchy, or want. In both cases, the international geographic imaginary was an animating force of Black American radicalism.
As a Marxist, Kelley is interested in tracing the connections between Black American radicals and the Communist movements of the 20th century. Black American radical leaders like W. E. B. du Bois and Paul Robeson were connected with international Marxism at a moment when it was an ascendant political ideology. As detailed most extensively in the essays “The Negro Question” and “Roaring from the East,” Kelley also shows how Black American radicals pushed white Leftists to engage with their specific experience as an oppressed people who had been enslaved. While doctrinaire Marxism holds that racial oppression will resolve itself when capitalism has been dismantled, many Black American radicals were skeptical of this view and pushed for antiracist positions that were taken up by leaders such as Lenin and Mao.
Kelley also demonstrates how Black American radicals influenced (and were influenced by) global anticolonial movements that reached their height in the 1960s and 1970s. As an oppressed people in the United States, they were in solidarity with oppressed people globally. Black American radicals theorized Third World struggles, traveled to nations fighting against colonialism, and met with anticolonial leaders. Beyond these concrete relationships, Black American music and literature influenced European surrealists, and the work of anticolonialist surrealist Aimé Césaire in turn reenergized movements of Black liberation in the United States, as described in the essay “Keeping it (Sur)real.”
Kelley highlights international solidarity as a source of strength and inspiration for Black American radical movements throughout history. He critiques narratives of the Black civil rights movement in the United States that do not take into account its Marxist and anticolonial aspects.
Intersectionality in Resistance Movements
While he never uses this specific term, Kelley explores Intersectionality in Resistance Movements throughout the book, especially in the essay on Black feminism “This Battlefield Called Life.” Intersectionality is a mode of analysis closely associated with Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. It was first articulated publicly by Crenshaw in her article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989. In this essay, Crenshaw notes that “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorial axis […] [T]his single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination” (Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, article 8, p. 140). While Crenshaw’s research initially focused on legal frameworks, she and other scholars later expanded her mode of analysis to encompass political and societal critiques. Intersectionality considers how different forms of oppression and marginalization overlap. It is a way of identifying the unique experiences of, for instance, Black women who are oppressed both as Black people and as women. Kelley applies this framework to note that Black workers occupy a unique position within the larger community of workers and to highlight the experiences of Black women within Black radical politics. He critiques the internal dynamics and histories of Black radical organizations, which often focus on male leadership.
The terms Kelley uses to describe these dynamics are the “Negro Question” and the “Woman Question.” In the essay “The Negro Question,” Kelley discusses how, as formerly enslaved people who continue to experience discrimination, Black Americans constituted a unique case within the larger labor movement. He critiques white Leftists who failed to take this into account with their insistence that racist oppression would resolve itself with the fall of capitalism. He further shows how, due to their engagement with Marxism, Black radical leaders pushed white leadership to modify and expand its understanding of race and how it interacts with class.
In the essay “This Battlefield Called Life,” Kelley critiques Black radical politics, and Leftist politics more generally, for failing to address the unique challenges faced by Black women. He shows how many Black radical organizations enforced patriarchal views of women and did not acknowledge their contributions to the movement. In his discussion of the Combahee River Collective, Kelley takes this critique one step further to show how Black lesbians in turn had a unique positionality informed by their experiences as a community marginalized along race, gender, and sexual axes.
Kelley sees Intersectionality in Resistance Movements as a key source of strength for organizing, as the contributions of these marginalized groups gives rise to new understandings and modes of engagement while enlarging the horizon of possible futures. For instance, as the experiences of Black lesbians are incorporated into the Black radical movement, traditional heteronormative gender roles are challenged and may be dismantled.
