BLUE SKY FOR BLACK AMERICA: Utopia and African American Development
Although I earned an MA in Political Science and PhD is in Ethnic Studies, my new book is more culture studies and social science. My professor said of Blue Sky for Black America: Utopia and African American Development:
Jesse A. Rhines has written a brilliant analysis of utopian literary, film, and television depictions of Black Americans, finding them sorely lacking in positive idealistic images of the future. His critical discussions are both riveting and devastating, but he does not become cynical or defeatist. Rather, he concludes with hope for the future, with a challenge to African Americans to engage their imaginations and create visions of desirable futures for themselves as well as the means to transform them into social realities.—Wendell Bell, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale University, USA
In the early 2000s, fellow members of The Society for Utopian Studies seemed to me confused by my research. Since then they have included more African American works in their listings. For this reason I find Dr. Bell’s continued comments applicable:
[Jesse, this is an important book, truly outstanding. From my perspective, as a sociologist turned futurist, it opens a door not only for Black Americans but also for the futurist community. Reading it made me realize that there aren’t many Black Americans who are futurists. This is a long story for me, since, ironically, I became a futurist while I was studying the transitions to nationhood in the Caribbean in mostly Black societies. The British were leaving and the local leaders, mostly nonwhite, were taking over the reins of government and making the decisions of nationhood, all focused on the kind of a future they wanted for their new state, government, society, and culture. They taught me about the importance of images of the future.
[Thus, I see your book as a milestone in two ways. One is the direct message of the need for positive, idealistic images of the future as guiding lights for social action and change of self and society. The other is a dual invitation for futurists to look at the Black American trajectory and for Black Americans to enter the world of futurists and their concerns (from nonviolence, peace, altruism, and environmental protection to the empowerment of women, concern for the well-being of future generations, equality and social justice)—to the enrichment of both Black Americans and futurists.]
The general outline
BLUE SKY FOR BLACK AMERICA: Utopia And African American Development is a book for social science students, social and education policy makers, readers of Western literature, particularly utopian literature, Ethnic and African American Studies and science fiction enthusiasts.
The main rationale for this book is that readers will learn that the concept of utopia can be used to give young students hope and reason to participate in their country’s political future. The means to accomplish this is analysis of the representation of Black Americans in Western writer’s imagination of America’s long-term future through such works as:
· Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, Random House, 1917.
· Butler, Octavia E., Parable of the Sower, New York: Warner Books, 1994.
· Callenbach, Ernest, Ecotopia, New York: Bantam, 1982.
· Herzl, Theodor, Old-new Land—Altneuland, New York: Herzl Press, 1987.
· Aldos Huxley’s Brave New World
· Mosley, Walter. Futureland, New York: Warner Books, 2001.
· Piercy, Marge, Woman on the Edge of Time, New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.
· Schuyler, George S. Black Empire, [1936-8] Boston:Northeastern University Press, 1991.
· The Star Trek television series.
In Blue Sky the reader will learn that Blacks have written utopian and future oriented novels at least since the Civil War. They will also learn that whites and Blacks depicted persons of color very differently within each historical period and that white treatment of Black characters reflected the real world social status of Blacks at that time in most but not all instances. As part of my First Hundred Years of Blacks In…series, Blue Sky also provides context enlargement when read in conjunction with my two other books that cover the same post Civil War period. Number 1 was Cinema (BLACK FILM/WHITE MONEY), number two was Elite Universities (BLACK HARVARD/BLACK YALE), and now number three is Blue Sky which analyses Blacks in the Western Utopian Imagination.
Blue Sky is now complete at 42,000 words over about 150 6X9” pages. It may have about 20 photographs. But will have to be put in the Chicago format you desire if accepted.
The contents
Table of Contents
Preamble
INTRODUCTION
Places the concept of utopia as a vessel within the context of a 21st century African America where Black-on-Black violence, poverty and lack of education blocks youths’ interest in the total political economy in which they live.
Section 1: Pre-World War II Utopias
Even before the Civil War, Martin Delany wrote of Blake, a black, welthy Cuban born explorer sold into slavery on a visit to the Southern United States, who, once escaped, spread the word of slave rebellion through all the slave plantations and even back into his native Cuba. Before World War II Blacks penned heroic characters, male and female, who sacrificed much to build independent skilled communities that both fought and communed with white neighbors while white authors showed blacks only as low level laborers, servants or rapists.
Section 2: Post World War II Utopias
The struggle for African American Civil Right grew after World War II; but despite efforts of A. Philip Randolph and President Truman’s integration of the Armed Forces and Jackie Robinson’s entrée into baseball the most significant attempt at literary racial utopia did not occur until the television series Star Trek in the mid-late 1960s.
Section 3: Star Trek as Utopia
Although Star Trek was early to feature a multiracial group of main characters, well into its syndicated off spring into the 1990s the series featured blacks in often stereotypical roles set within a Eurocentric context.
Section 4:The Critical Utopia
While Star Trek augured for integration of the races, some utopian writers saw Black reactions to the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as negative and fodder for backlash against racial change. “Utopia” became more dream than social blueprint as the1970s morphed and feminism and ecology consciousness developed among young whites who almost grudgingly begun to imagine multiracial societies with fully formed non white characters within their own fully articulated communities that could even dissolve into dreamy non race-conscious, multiethnic environments “at one” with nature in distant time.
1990s Black Dystopias
Utopia produced by African American saw the United States as a hostile place where Blacks were banished from the Earth, were officially segregated from non Blacks, or roamed a devastated, post apocalyptic countryside at the head of multicultural groups of dispossessed persons. Political activism became a major theme in these dytopic environments.
Post 2000 Critical Dystopia Applied
After 2000 African American utopia was not only multiracial but also international and politically aimed at attack on the super rich and multinational corporations. Political actions in these imagined worlds actually mimicked political actions of Black, non-white and white progressive political activists in the real world who began to take on a greater part in America’s real political economy, ultimately electing the first African American president of the United States.
CONCLUSION
“Blue sky,” the physics and business concept for seeing to the farthest away, most distant possibilities of an endeavor can be used to encourage students to create their own utopias that they can compare with real work occurrences the rest of their lives.
REFERENCES
Author Bio
It is my hope that the book will contain one non-white produced visual images of humans in a utopia at the start of each chapter. But I have yet to find such works.
The book will also contain six pages of STAR TREK DEEP SPACE NINE behind the camera personnel photos.
The markets
Blue Sky is primarily for teachers of university and high school students. Secondary markets include education professionals interested in Western literature, American history, politics, social science, and civics, science fiction and futures studies, Ethnic and African American Studies. The audience can be reached at annual Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions and conventions for Ethnic and African American Studies where combined attendees number perhaps one million annually.
High school English literature courses may use Blue Sky to survey utopian literature. Civics courses may use it to juxtapose various types of potential social systems against those that are extant and to encourage student creative thinking about political systems. College Political Science and Government courses may use Blue Sky as a source for models of student created government structures that student may use to compare their desired structures with those of the real world. Ethnic Studies courses may use Blue Sky to trace the history and imagination of inclusiveness within societies. Scholarly meetings and libraries are the best place to reach these markets.
Competition for the book:
There is no contemporary competitor with Blue Sky because no other book traces the imagination of race relations over so long either an actual historical period or into so distant a future. Lyman Sargent’s British And American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975, (Boston: G. K. Hall, c1979) is a bibliography that covers a longer historical period but essentially ignores race.
Pedro Noguera’s The trouble with Black boys : and other reflections on race, equity, and the future of public education, (San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, c2008), addresses near term future social science implications of the American public school system and the contest between parents, students and school administrators’ attempts to stem in-school violence and improve student performance. A micro focus on specific cases is it’s primary strength. Its primary weakness compared with Blue Sky is a concatenated time frame limited to the present and very near future. Blue Sky endeavors to provide individual students with “utopia as a tool” to understand and connect with the socio-political system for life.
Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia : the search for the ideal society in the western world, (New York : The New York Public Library : Oxford University Press, 2000).
This book was designed to accompany the joint New York Public Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France utopia exhibit to ”speculate on the role of the imaginations, and even of fiction, in the construction of the future…” While an update and expansion of Sargent’s British And American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975, it lists some African American works and includes real world attempts to create physical utopian communities. However, while it acknowledges Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. it does not analyze the few African American literary utopias it does mention.
This book comprises interviews with poor, inner city black men as to their life motivations as a foundation for sociological understanding of how their hopes for the future are arrived at. It is micro focused but not at all speculative except with regard to the expressed hopes and their imagining of the world outside their communities. Blue Sky, by contrast, is a step removed from such detail. It takes newspaper summaries of such men’s, and their children’s, actions and asks how can we concretize those imaginings and attached them to continuing concern about the socio-political reality that surrounds and pervades their community.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and West, Cornel. The Future of the Race, New York: Random House, 1996.
Professors Gates and West critique WEB DuBois’ turn–of-the-20th-Century concept of the Talented Tenth at the turn–of-the-21st century and predict that the “Tenth” even with other, multiracial progressives, are unlikely to improve the condition of the African American poor. But where Blue Sky hopes to connect the poor with the lived political economy of the future, this is the extent of Professors Gates and West’s theorizing the future.
Curriculum vitae
CV attached.
For 10 years, until I became disabled, I was an Assistant Professor teaching Political Economy in the African American Studies Department at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. After its publication in 1996, I was often commissioned both independently and through the Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau to read from and speak about my book, BLACK FILM/WHITE MONEY.
I have published two books and a number of articles on the subjects of race and media:
· BLACK HARVARD/BLACK YALE: 100 years of African American Student life at Harvard and Yale Universities, Self published with Createspace.com/Amazon.com, 2011.
· Agency, Race and Utopia," SOCIALISM & DEMOCRACY , 17 2bis Summer/Fall 2003, pp. 91-102.
· “Blacks in Dystopia: 1969-71,” FUTURES 35 8, pp. 869-881.
· “Black Film/Black Future,” THE BLACK SCHOLAR, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2003.
· “Blue Sky for Black America: Utopia and African America's Future,”
o VIABLE UTOPIAN IDEAS, Art Shostack, ed., 2nd edition, M.E.Sharpe, 2003.
· “African-Americans in Africa: Grass Roots Farming, An Interview with David (son of Jackie) Robinson,” HORN OF AFRICA, 19 2001.
· BLACK FILM/WHITE MONEY, Rutgers University Press, 1996, 2000
o Winner, 1997 Gustavus Mayer Human Rights Award
· CINEASTE MAGAZINE:
o "Film guide: GRIDLOCKE'D by Vondie Curtis-Hall," 22 4 1997, p. 72.
o "The Political Economy of Black Film," 21 2 Sp. 1995, p. 38.
o "Integrating the Hollywood Craft Unions," An Interview with Grace Blake," 20 4, 1994, pp .
o "Stimulating a Dialogue Among African-American Viewers: An Interview with Daresha Kyi," 20 3 1994, pp. 43-44.
o "Film guide: One False Move directed by Carl Franklin," 19 4 1993, p. 104.
o "Spike Lee, Malcolm X, and the money game : The compromises of crossover marketing," 19 4 1993, p. 17-18.
· "Sammy Davis, Jr.," ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND HISTORY, McMillian, 1994.
· "Noneconomic liberalism : An ineffective course towards African American development," WESTERN JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES Summer 1993, v17 n2, p. 87-95.
· "Distributing difference," AFTERIMAGE Summer 1993, 21 1, p. 2.
Promotional resources:
I would urge your company to republish my other two books as a package along with Blue Sky because all three cover the same 100 year, post slavery period of African American development in three different areas central to socio-economic and political progress: business of cinema, higher education and conceptual inclusion within the American intellectual project.
I am a member of organizations such as the Rotary Club, Modern Language Association, Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, Yale Alumni Association, Yale Black Alumni Association, National Council of Black Political Scientists, American Political Science Association, and am in the Jodi Solomon Speaker’s Bureau, both UCLA and UC Berkeley Alumni Associations, Greater Los Angeles Writers Association. I would expect at least 500 copies to be purchased based on these professional contacts and100 based on personal contacts.