About this Event
Detroit you will love the Detroit history in the book and the way the it fits in our collective search for freedom.
We are excited to celebrate the release of The Black Utopians with native Detroiter Author Aaron Robertson, who helps us see what Utopia looks like in Black. Aaron will be in conversation with Wayne State Professor David Goldberg at our event. We are grateful for this book's attention to Detroit History and for contribution that David offered to the success of this insightful book. We look forward to this rich conversation.
SAVE YOUR SEAT!!!
To join us for the celebration you can purchase a book ticket from this link or obtain a book ticket buy pre-ordering the book through Source Booksellers Online at this link !!!! If you need to join us with a audiobook pre order, here is the link www.bookstorelink.com/9780374604981
A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives.
How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?
These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this effort was the shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where the effort to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. The Black Utopians is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.
Aaron Robertson is a native Detroiter, writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. More on Aaron at https://www.aaroncrobertson.com/
In conversaton with -
David Goldberg, a Professor at Wayne State University, David's research focuses on the intersection between Black working class urban activism and Black social movements. currently writing a political biography of legendary Detroit revolutionary, General Baker, who was a founding member of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW)... This work includes a student sucess program at WSU called Crockett-Lumba Scholars program.
" 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 subborn hopefulness pushes back against the strens of impossiblity. In these pages, utopia is not faniciful and fleeting , but the sweat-soaked soil of freedom dreams and fugitive imagination - nowhere and everywhere at once." - by Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice : How we Grow the World We Want and Imagination : A Manifesto
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Detroit Food Commons, 8324 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, United States
USD 17.69 to USD 34.38
