Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Trying to envision ‘somewhere in advance of nowhere,’ as poet Joyne Cortez puts it, is an extremely difficult task, yet it is a matter of great urgency. Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.”

Throughout Freedom Dreams, Kelley emphasizes the value of what he terms poetic knowledge to generate ideas about the kind of world Black radical activists hope to create. In this call to action, he describes the need to envision a new world as “a matter of great urgency.” In his view, this is not secondary to political organizing but in fact a critical component of it.

“The surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they have also given us some of the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known. Contrary to popular belief, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine but an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought.”

Kelley views the surrealist movement as a key source of inspiration for envisioning the world activists hope to create. This quote demonstrates how surrealism has been an important part of Kelley’s own activism. It also justifies Kelley’s analysis of poetry and music throughout the essays as examples of surrealism’s connection with Black radicalism.

“Although Freedom Dreams is no memoir, it is a very personal book. It is loosely organized around my own political journey, around the dreams I once shared or still share—from the dreams of an African utopia to the surreal world of our imagination, from the communist and feminist dreams of abolishing all forms of exploitation to the four-hundred-year-old dream of payback for slavery and Jim Crow.”

In this quote, Kelley describes Freedom Dreams as an activist history wherein he explicates political theories and goals in a way that incorporates his personal experiences in organizing. For Kelley, the struggles he describes are not simply theoretical or academic; he is implicated in them.

“Progressive social movement do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic knowledge.’”

A key element of Kelley’s analysis is the importance of poetry in imagining and visualizing new worlds and new possibilities. Here, he explains how he sees poetry as operating within political movements. This quote also highlights Kelley’s belief that political organizing itself expands the horizon of possibility.

“We looked back in search of a better future. We wanted to find a refuge where ‘black people’ exercised power, possessed essential knowledge, educated the West, built monuments, slept under the stars on the banks of the Nile, and never had to worry about the police or poverty or arrogant white people questioning our intelligence.”

The “we” Kelley refers to here are Afrocentric scholars and activists like those who informed his political development as a young man. In this quote, Kelley describes how the mythopoetic notion of an Edenic Africa operated within the movements he was part of. In this conception, “Africa” is a utopia free of oppression.

“Defending Africa from imperialism was tantamount to defending black womanhood from rape; black men were called upon to redeem this oppressed and degraded black woman, our mother of civilization, in a bold, chivalrous act.”

In this quote, Kelley is describing the Garveyite conception of gender roles and its relationship to anticolonial movements in Africa. Kelley critiques this view as reinforcing patriarchal gender stereotypes of strong men and weak women in need a protection, even as he acknowledges that Black women are valorized for being the “mother of civilization.”

“If there is one thing all the factions of the twentieth-century American Left share, it is the political idea that black people reside in the eye of the hurricane of class struggle. The American Left, after all, was born in a society where slavery and free labor coexisted, and only skin color and heritage determined who lived in bondage and who did not.”

Kelley explains why “The Negro Question” is of critical importance to the American labor movement and constitutes a unique case in the international context. Slavery and its aftermath is a form of labor that has to be taken account of when organizing workers in the United States. Although Kelley goes on to criticize the American Left for its handling of the “Negro Question,” here he acknowledges that they did at least take it seriously.

“When McKay addressed the Congress, he put the question of race front and center, criticizing the American Communist party and the labor movement for their racism and warning that unless the Left challenged white supremacy, the ruling classes would continue to use disaffected black workers as a foil against the revolutionary movement. In the end, McKay’s point was clear: The Negro stood at the fulcrum of class struggle; there would be no successful working-class movement without black workers at the center.”

In this quote, Kelley describes the address of Claude McKay, a Jamaican writer who was part of the Harlem Renaissance, to the Fourth International in 1922. In his summary of McKay’s speech, Kelley is also articulating what he sees as a perennial issue of how the American Left addresses the perspectives of Black Americans.

“As Cedric Robinson argued, a group of radical black intellectuals including W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox, and others, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western civilization itself. They viewed fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but in racist ideologies that were already in place at the down of modernity.”

This quote exemplifies a mode Kelley often uses, which is to list examples at length. This goes to the pedagogical nature of the text wherein Kelley intends for those who are interested in learning more about the arguments he summarizes to research these names and sources independently. It also explains the international, interconnected worldview that Black radicals articulate historically and in contemporary times.

“In short, China offered black radicals a ‘colored’ or Third World Marxist model that enabled them to challenge a white and Western vision of class struggle—a model they shaped and reshaped to suit their own cultural and political realities.”

In this quote, Kelley summarizes how Maoist China and Maoism more generally acted as a source of inspiration for the Black radical imagination in the 1960s and 1970s. He acknowledges that this is an idealistic and, in some ways, unrealistic conception of China, but it functioned similarly to the notion of Africa as utopian land to animate Black nationalist movements.

“[Harold Cruse] reversed the traditional argument that the success of socialism in the developed West was key to the emancipation of colonial subjects and the development of socialism in the Third World. Instead, he saw the former colonies as the vanguard of the revolution; at the forefront of this new socialist revolution were Cuba and China. ‘The revolutionary initiative has passed to the colonial world, and in the United States is passing to the Negro, while Western Marxists theorize, temporize and debate.’”

In this quote, Kelley describes the perspective and arguments of Black Marxist Harold Cruse, which are emblematic of Black Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology in the 1960s. It clearly describes how Black radical leaders saw their struggle as analogous to the struggles of the people in the colonial world seeking independence. Within this analogy, Black Americans are colonized subjects with a right to self-determination and possibly their own nation-state.

“Moreover, despite [Amiri Baraka’s] immersion in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist literature, his own cultural work suggests he knew, as did most black radicals, that the question of whether black people constituted a nation was not going to be settled through reading Lenin or Stalin. If it ever could be settled, the battles would take place, for better or for worse, on the terrain of culture.”

Throughout, Kelley refers to art as a source of inspiration for Black radical movements. Here, he provides a historical justification for this belief by drawing on the insights of Black Marxist and poet Amiri Baraka.

“While I do make a case for reparations, I’m more interested in the historical vision and imagination that has animated the movement since the days of slavery.”

This quote is the thesis statement of the essay. Here, Kelley makes it clear that he is interested in reparations not only as a material form of restorative justice, but also as a source of inspiration to those dreaming of a better future.

“The new nation would not follow the path of American capitalism. Rather, its economy would be based on Tanazia’s model of African socialism, Ujamaa—roughly translated, ‘cooperative economics.’”

Kelley here is describing the model of reparations advocated by Imari Obadele in his 1972 text “Anti-Depression Program of the Republic of New Africa.” This example illustrates what Kelley means when describing reparations advocacy as a terrain where Black radicals articulate their visions for the future. In this case, the vision is connected to Black nationalism and radical socialism, inspired by an international model found in Africa.

“The reparations movement exposes the history of white privilege and helps us all understand how wealth and poverty are made under capitalism—particularly a capitalism shaped immeasurably by slavery racism. It stresses the fact that labor—not CEOs, not scientists and technicians, not the magic of the so-called free market—creates wealth.”

As a Marxist, Kelley is critical of capitalism, particularly its view of political economy. In this quote, Kelley details his views while highlighting how the debate around reparations clarifies this argument to a wider audience that may not be familiar with Marxism.

“The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question.”

In this quote, Kelley describes in basic terms the concept of intersectionality as it relates to Black feminists. He critiques the American Left for its historic inability to consider the specific experience of discrimination experienced by Black women.

“Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board.”

Intersectionality recognizes that struggles for liberation are linked across race, class, gender, and sexuality. Kelley advocates for more Leftists to adopt the vision of Black feminists as described here, seeing them as an example of truly radical politics that incorporates many identities and modes of being.

“The black radical imagination, as I have tried to suggest throughout this book, is a collective imagination engaged in an actual movement for liberation. It is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and losses, crises and openings, and endless conversations circulating in a shared environment.”

This quote provides one of the clearest definitions of what Kelley means by “black radical imagination” and how it operates within activist movements. While he is specifically commenting on the ideology and work of the Black lesbian Combahee River Collective, this statement is applicable to the ensemble of leaders and groups he details throughout the text.

“Finally, radical black feminism offers one of the most comprehensive visions of freedom I can think of, one that recognizes the deep interconnectedness of struggles around race, gender, sexuality, culture, class, and spirituality.”

The essay “This Battlefield Called Life” ends with a call for radical activists to embrace the leadership shown by Black women. In this quote, Kelley argues for why specifically the Black feminist imaginary is so important to liberation movements, as it incorporates intersectionality at its core.

“By plunging into the depths of the unconscious and lessening ‘the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams,’ we can enter or realize the domain of the Marvelous. Surrealism is no mere artistic movement like cubism or impressionism, and it is not primarily concerned with art. Surrealism is about making new life.”

In this quote, Kelley provides a definition of surrealism and how it brings together art and politics. He cites the Chicago Surrealist Group’s 1976 definition of surrealism to justify his position. Kelley seeks to change the mainstream view of surrealism as primarily an art movement by bringing its impact on political imagination to the fore.

“Surrealism, I contend, offers a vision of freedom far deeper and more expansive than any of the movements discussed thus far. It is a movement that invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon.”

Kelley is direct in his valorization of surrealism. Here, he makes the bold claim that it “offers a vision of freedom […] more expansive than any of the movements discussed thus far.” He seeks to shift the center of Black radical imaginary away from purely political and social questions toward the creative potential offered by surrealism.

“In other words, the revolts of the colonial world and its struggles for cultural autonomy animated surrealists as much as reading Freud or Marx. And they discovered in the cultures of Africa, Oceania, and Native America a road into the Marvelous and confirmation of their most fundamental ideas.”

This quote describes how anticolonialism and an interest in the intersectional aspects of folk art are key to the surrealist movement. Kelley argues that surrealism is not a European artistic movement adopted by non-European cultures, including Black American radicalism, but rather that it is a political movement shaped by its interaction with non-European groups.

“Surrealism was less a revelation than a recognition of what already existed in the black tradition. For [Jayne] Cortez surrealism is merely a tool to help create a strong revolutionary movement and a powerful, independent poetry. Jayne Cortez dreams anti-imperialist dreams. It is not enough to imagine what kind of world we would like; we have to do the work to make it happen.”

This quote is a call to action to contemporary Black radical activists to use the tools provided by surrealism to inform their political struggle. It demonstrates how surrealism brings together the power of the imaginary, the importance of poetry, and Black radical politics. Kelley cites specifically the work of Jayne Cortez, a Black radial poet whose work he cites at length in the essay.