20 years on, still dreaming of freedom
Robin D. G. Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” first came out in 2002, and Boston-based Beacon Press is releasing a 20th anniversary edition with a new introduction from Kelley that looks back on the last two decades, moving from the eve of September 11th when he was initially working on the book, through the murder of George Floyd and the protests and public outcries that followed that spring and summer, and what happened after that. For Kelley, “it is not enough to imagine a world without oppression.” We also have to understand what systems and processes not only “reproduce subjugation and exploitation but . . . render them natural or invisible.” The book, he writes, is not a manifesto or a road map, and optimism and pessimism are not his concerns. Instead, it’s an argument for the necessity of a collective imagination that “conjures and sustains visions of freedom even in the darkest times.” In a new epilogue, Kelley also calls attention to individuals — artists, poets, musicians, activists — and organizations driving movements forward, the ones doing the work to turn “dream into action.”
Coming out
“My Government Means to Kill Me” by Rasheed Newson (Flatiron) “Afterlives” by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead)
“Bad Fruit” by Ella King (Astra House)
Pick of the week
Jack Higgins at Still North Books & Bar in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, recommends “Such Color” by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf ): “After reading Smith’s poem ‘Duende,’ I remember looking up from the page and thinking, ‘It almost feels dangerous that something so powerful can just be casually bought at a bookstore.”
Beacon Press is reissuing “Freedom Dreams” by Robin D. G. Kelley (above).