Robin D.G. Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams”

One of the areas that’s always fascinated me has been the Black imagination, and what we have, are and can do to expand it. When I regularly wrote BoldAsLove, my online magazine on Black rock and Afropunk, I subtitled it “music, culture & the new black imagination.” At the time when I started the site–2007–I, along with the Black Rock Coalition and others in the progressive Black arts community, was pushing against the boundaries that seemed to proscribe Black cultural expression, particularly the idea pushed by the music industry up to that point that Black music was only either hip hop or R&B. And that frame constrained Black people willingness to explore music by Black artists who colored outside of those lines. The place to have that fight was in the collective imagination of Black folks.

In 2008, I argued that yes, we have to call it “Black rock” and I cited scholar Richard Iton’s book, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era and this quote in particular:

The black in black fantastic, in this context, signifies both a generic category of underdeveloped possibilities and the particular “always there” interpretations of these. . .visions and practices generated by subaltern populations.

I further wrote:

So, for me, the black in Black rock is about the underdeveloped and, I’d say, unexplored, possibilities of our imagination, our creativity and our identity.

I spent a decade actively expanding the space for Black rock and repositioning that music away from being “white people’s music”. I’m happy to see that mine was among the many efforts that helped expand the landscape of Black folks’ imagination and our understanding that rock is Black music and we are as entitled to explore the full sonic range of our creativity as anyone else. Afropunk–and not just the music–is an example of how the culture has shifted.

Recently, I finally cracked open Robin D.G. Kelley’s 2002 Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. What a book! The short synopsis is that the book is about how Black intellectuals and artists have used the power of imagination to transform society.

This isn’t a review. First, I haven’t finished the book. Rather, I’m using this space to highlight a few ideas that are inspiring me.

The critical role that imagination plays:

Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.

Freedom starts in the mind:

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.

Though written in 2002, this is a question that remains pertinent for all activists, and for Black people, particularly:

The question remains: What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?

He notes elsewhere that “what we are against tends to take precedence over what we are for…” and then makes this point:

Progressive social movements 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.

So there’s a lot here. The real work to be done is, as it always has been, in the hearts and minds. We need more than just to know something is possible, but we need to feel that it is.

Imagination is the bridge between feeling, knowing and making that idea real.

Much more to come here.