1117360

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SOC0010.1177/00380385221117360SociologyDavidson

Article

Sociology

The Sociology of Utopia,

2023, Vol. 57(4) 827­–842
© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00380385221117360
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Joe PL Davidson
University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
This article focuses on the relationship between the sociology of utopia and Black visions of
liberation. Influential figures from Karl Mannheim to Ruth Levitas have effectively demonstrated
the value of a utopian perspective for sociology. However, the African American tradition of
utopianism has been largely overlooked in this literature. I argue that the Black standpoint forces
a rethinking of the sociological understanding of utopia. More specifically, while most sociologists
of utopia straightforwardly associate the desire for a better world with the future, the Black
tradition proposes a more expansive understanding of utopia’s temporality. Building on visions of
new worlds advanced by WEB Du Bois and the movement for reparations for slavery, I suggest
that Black utopia involves a glance backwards to the past, such that the image of a better future
is accompanied by the memory of the catastrophe of slavery.

Keywords
decolonial theory, race, reparations, social theory, temporality, utopia, WEB Du Bois

Introduction
Ruth Levitas (1979: 31), writing in Sociology, noted that: ‘It has not become impossible
to imagine utopias; but it has become difficult to imagine utopia as possible – which para-
doxically makes it possible to be more utopian.’ The notion of possibility is at the heart of
the study of utopia from a sociological perspective. Scholars in other disciplines are con-
cerned with the imagination of new and better worlds, with philosophers explicating the
structure of hopeful desires (Bloch, 1986), intellectual historians drawing out the precon-
ditions for the emergence of utopian consciousness (Davis, 1981) and literary critics trac-
ing the shifting contours of fictional visions of alternative social orders (Jameson, 2005).
However, if there is something distinctive about attempts to think sociology and utopia

Corresponding author:
Joe PL Davidson, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1SB, UK.
Email: jpld2@cam.ac.uk
828 Sociology 57(4)

together, it is the impulse to demonstrate that a better world is possible. That is to say,
there are forces within society that tend towards the realisation of a liberated world.
Utopia, which can be simply defined as ‘the desire for a better way of being’, is not a mere
wish but immanent to the social order as it presently exists (Levitas, 2013: xii).
To substantiate this claim, we can turn to four of the most prominent attempts to
think about utopia from a sociological perspective. Karl Mannheim (1936: 173), in his
famous reflections on ideology and utopia, examined social movements, ranging from
the peasant revolutionaries of the early modern period to the modern labour movement,
that ‘tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time’.
For Mannheim, the task is to study how the desire for a new world acts as a catalyst for
social change. A similar perspective is adopted by Zygmunt Bauman (1976), who sug-
gests that socialism is the active utopia of modernity; the former draws out the libera-
tory potential of the latter, such that a society of substantive equality and freedom is
dormant in the contours of the capitalist present. More recently, Erik Olin Wright(2012:
2), with his notion of real utopias, argues for a ‘sociology of the possible’ that focuses
on the elaboration of alternative social institutions that can be implemented in the con-
temporary moment. Finally, Levitas (2013: xvii, emphases in original) has articulated a
utopian method that is oriented around the ‘archaeological’ task of discerning the hope-
ful desires circulating in society and the ‘architectural’ task of elaborating concrete and
realisable visions of new and better worlds.
Now, at least within the North American and European traditions, it would be wrong
to say that utopia has been central to the sociological endeavour. As a number of scholars
stress, in sociology, analysing and understanding actually existing society tends to take
precedence over the articulation of utopian worlds (Dawson, 2016; Jacobsen and Tester,
2012; Levitas, 2013). HG Wells’s (1906a: 367) claim, voiced at the beginning of the 20th
century, that ‘the creation of Utopias [. . .] is the proper and distinctive method of sociol-
ogy’ has found little support among most sociologists (see Levitas, 2010). Certainly, a
concern with utopia is sometimes implicit in sociology. Calls for a public sociology
focused on building a better society (Burawoy, 2005), conceptualisations of the relation-
ship between social theory and alternative futures (Urry, 2016) and proposals for specu-
lative research attuned to the non-actualised possibilities of society (Savransky et al.,
2017) all touch on utopia. Nevertheless, there are few explicit accounts of the relation-
ship between utopia and sociology beyond those advanced by Mannheim, Bauman,
Wright and Levitas (see Dawson, 2016; Goodwin, 1978; Jacobsen and Tester, 2012). So,
when I refer to the sociology of utopia in this article, I am primarily talking about the
contributions of these four theorists.
While utopia may have been of relatively marginal concern in sociology, it has been
subject to in-depth consideration from literary critics, intellectual historians and political
philosophers working in the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies (for a recent over-
view, see Sargent, 2021). Insights from scholars working in other disciplines have the
potential to enrich the sociology of utopia. In particular, there has been increasing inter-
est in the relationship between utopia and race in recent decades. As a number of studies
demonstrate, in the most famous utopias – such as Thomas More’s Utopia (2002 [1516]),
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (2007 [1888]) and Ursula K Le Guin’s The
Dispossessed (2000 [1974]) – white Europeans are responsible for building the ideal
Davidson 829

society, while non-European peoples are either excluded from the liberatory schema
entirely, understood to passively follow the utopian example described or subject to
forms of domination and violence (Ahmad, 2009; Balasopoulos, 2004; Bell, 2020;
Marouby, 1988). Moreover, there are significant, though often overlooked, currents of
non-European utopianism that challenge the exclusions of white utopianism, advancing
images of new worlds that are explicitly concerned with racial justice (Ashcroft, 2016;
Dutton, 2010; Pordzik, 2001). The freedom dreams articulated by Black Americans –
whether directed against slavery in the 19th century, segregation in the 20th century or
police killings in the 21st century – are especially instructive in this regard, providing
hopeful accounts of alternative societies where racial violence has been overcome
(Brown, 2021; Kelley, 2002; Sargent, 2020; Womack, 2013; Zamalin, 2019). Building
on this literature, in this article, I look to Black utopias to critique and reconstitute the
sociology of utopia.
From the perspective of this work on the relationship between race and utopia, some
of the limitations of sociological accounts of utopia become apparent. In particular,
among sociologists of utopia, there is a tendency to associate the desire for liberation
with radical socio-economic change. Mannheim (1936) examines a range of class-based
movements, Bauman (1976) focuses on the dreams of the proletariat and Wright (2010)
and Levitas (2013) propose a range of reforms designed to reboot socialism for the 21st
century. However, utopian visions that specifically address questions of racial equality
are largely missing from the sociological literature. Symptomatic in this regard is
Wright’s (2012: 9) comment that affirmative action is ‘one of the critical policies for
combating the pernicious effects of ongoing racism’ but is not ‘a building block of a
world of racial justice and emancipation’. However, among Wright’s (2012: 9) utopian
proposals there are no institutional forms that would offer an ‘emancipatory alternative’
to white supremacy; the question of race is briefly raised, then quickly dropped.
This lack of dialogue between utopian sociology and race is a problem. Generally
speaking, the decolonial turn in sociology in the last decade poses a challenge to the
sociology of utopia as it is presently constituted (for an overview, see Meghji, 2021). On
this perspective, social theoretical concepts need to be rethought to draw out their latent
connection to histories of colonial power and racial domination (Bhambra, 2014; Go,
2016). If other key concepts of modernity, from citizenship (Bhambra, 2015) to nostalgia
(Tinsley, 2020), have been marked by these histories, why not utopia? More specifically,
I am not the first to notice the lacuna regarding race in the literature on the sociology of
utopia. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2012: 3) emphasises that a major failing of Wright’s soci-
ology of utopia is its ‘lack of serious engagement with race and race matters’; it operates
on the tacit belief that socio-economic transformation would result in a world of racial
equality. In a similar fashion, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2020: 576) notes that many
of the utopian schemes imagined by Wright are only viable ‘in the metropolitan domain
of sociality’ but not the ‘colonial zone’.
At first glance, these criticisms might be relatively easily addressed. The insights of
the sociology of utopia do not only pertain to the contents of the new world but also the
processes and methods by which images of liberated societies can be identified and pro-
duced. The latter can be expanded beyond the standard socio-economic concerns of uto-
pian sociologists to encompass visions of racial justice. For instance, what happens if we
830 Sociology 57(4)

turn Levitas’s (2013: 153) method, which begins with the archaeological act of ‘piecing
together the images of the good society that are embedded in political programmes and
social and economic policies’, to the Black Lives Matter movement? In the aftermath of
the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition
of African American organisations, produced a comprehensive policy platform, includ-
ing plans for reparations for the harms of slavery and its aftermath, divestment from the
police and investment in Black communities, an economy that serves the people and not
corporations, and greater community control and self-determination (Newkirk, 2016).
Although the policy programme does not offer a totalising image of a new society, the
flashes of an alternative are evident; there are moments of hope waiting to be excavated
via Levitas’s archaeological method.
However, while it is certainly necessary to bring demands for racial justice into dia-
logue with the sociology of utopia, it is also insufficient. An adequate response to the
exclusion of race requires a more fundamental rethinking of the implicit assumptions
about utopia found in the existing sociological literature on the topic. In particular, as I
argue in this article, there is a discrepancy between the temporal shape characteristically
attributed to utopia and that which is found in Black visions of new worlds. The sociol-
ogy of utopia associates liberation, in a relatively straightforward fashion, with the
future, positing that the realisation of a fulfilled world is to be achieved via a progressive
movement through time. By contrast, Black visions of liberation critique this association
between utopia and the future and articulate a more expansive understanding of utopian
temporality. In the African American tradition, a place for the memory of slavery and its
aftermath must be found within the alternative society imagined; past and future need to
be held together. Black utopias, then, ‘exist “after the future”, blossoming in spite of
what presently seems destined to be the future’; they question and contest the dominant
conception of the time-to-come in European modernity (Keeling, 2019: 36).
To make this argument, I begin by considering the relationship between utopia and
temporality, first analysing the tendency to imagine visions of new worlds in the future
and then counterposing this to the more complex articulation of utopian temporality
offered by Mannheim. In the next section, I turn to the Black tradition of utopian imagi-
nation, beginning with a neglected utopian sociologist: WEB Du Bois (1920), and in
particular his short story ‘The Comet’. In this story, Du Bois criticises the progressive arc
of history, suggesting that a futural world of racial equality will not be truly utopian if it
fails to account for the lingering presence of slavery and segregation. Then, building on
Wright’s work, I examine how this distinctive temporality can be translated into real
utopian terms. Reparations for slavery are posited as a realisable liberatory demand that
mediates between the past and the future.
Before turning to this argument, it is first worth reflecting on why the focus in this
article is on expressions of utopia in the African American tradition of social thought. It
should be stressed that utopianism is a global phenomenon. For example, postcolonial
visions of new worlds, many of which criticise the racism of the European colonial pro-
ject, have been articulated in recent decades (Ashcroft, 2016). This article only focuses
on one tendency in the broader movement of anti-racist utopianism. However, the tradi-
tion of Black utopianism is a generative case study for two reasons. First, the pivotal
place of Du Bois in Black utopianism (Zamalin, 2019), early American sociology
Davidson 831

(Morris, 2015) and decolonial sociology (Burawoy, 2021; Weiner, 2018) means that ‘The
Comet’ is a useful bridging point between utopia, sociology and race. Second,
Afrofuturism, a movement focused on bringing together science fiction and the culture
of the African diaspora (Womack, 2013), has become increasingly prominent in popular
culture, something demonstrated by the success of the film Black Panther (2018) and
Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King (2020). The utopias of the African American tradi-
tion, at least within North America, have been at the forefront of elaborating a nascent
unease with the implicit whiteness of utopian imaginaries.

The Temporalisation of Utopia

It is first worth outlining the contours of the relationship between sociology, utopia and
the future. The sociologists of utopia discussed above, for the most part, associate
images of better worlds with the temporal category of the future. Levitas (2013: 83, 19)
puts this especially clearly, stating that the utopian perspective offers a ‘speculative
sociology of the future’; the act of unearthing the latent lines of development in contem-
porary society involving the projection of a range of ‘alternative possible scenarios for
the future’. Visions of new worlds, in this sense, are ‘anticipated end-products’ of a
temporal movement; the future can be made radically different from the past (Bauman,
2003: 16). Emblematic of this association between utopia and the future is Bauman’s
Retrotopia (2017), one of his final books. In this text, Bauman considers the resurgence
of nostalgia in recent decades, considering the meaning and function of idealised visions
of the past that circulate in contemporary culture. Importantly, the relationship between
nostalgia and utopia is understood in zero-sum terms: the more of the former, the less of
the latter, and vice versa.1 This becomes clear when Bauman (2017: 123) contrasts ‘the
early-modern, positive, boisterous, assertive and self-confident utopia’ and ‘the present-
day diffident, dejected and defeatist retrotopia’. The turn to the past is identified with a
movement away from utopia; it acts as a drag on efforts to build an alternative world in
the future.
It should be stressed here that there is nothing specific about the association between
utopia and the future in these sociological accounts. The sociology of utopia reflects a
broader cultural understanding of the temporality of utopia. The dominant time con-
sciousness of European modernity pairs the future with novelty and alterity, something
demonstrated by the rise of ideas of progress and revolution in the 18th century (Assmann,
2020; Hartog, 2015). Prior to this point, the future (at least within secular history) was
understood to involve repetition. For instance, on the circular conception of history, past
events would eventually recur in the future, while on the exemplary conception of his-
tory, the best had already happened and the past provided standards for the future. By
contrast, for modern time consciousness, the future is understood in terms of ‘the nonre-
peatable’; it contains novel phenomena that have no precedent in the past (Hartog, 2015:
105). It is no accident that the ‘temporalization of utopia’ coincided with the rise of
modern time consciousness (Koselleck, 2002: 85; see also Baczko, 1989). While the
utopias of the early modern period were primarily spatial in form, their accounts of new
social orders located elsewhere in the world, as in the vision of an isolated island in
Thomas More’s Utopia (2002 [1516]), in the 18th and 19th centuries, the future became
832 Sociology 57(4)

the key location for utopian fiction, something represented by Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s
image of Paris in the 25th century in L’An 2440 [The Year 2440] (1971 [1771]) and
William Morris’s London of the 22nd century in News from Nowhere (1995 [1890]).
Once the future was identified with novelty and alterity, it became the ideal site to place
an alternative, utopian world.
The shift from space to time suggests that, though there is a strong historical associa-
tion between utopia and the future, there is nothing necessary about this relationship.
There are forms of utopianism that do not rely on the temporal movement from the
degraded present to the liberated future. Importantly, the ‘time maps’ of utopia – the
particular way in which past, present and future are concatenated in visions of new
worlds – do not only vary historically but also between different groups within society
(Zerubavel, 2003: 109). This variable relationship between temporality and utopia is
made clear by Mannheim (1936) in Ideologie und Utopie [Ideology and Utopia], which
was first published in 1929. While Mannheim’s book is a classic text of 20th-century
sociology, his account of utopia is the least discussed section of the study.2 This is a
shame, not least because it contains a series of instructive comments on the relationship
between social hope and temporal consciousness.
Each of the four modes of utopia identified by Mannheim (1936) – millenarian, lib-
eral-humanitarian, conservative and socialist-communist – articulates a distinct ‘histori-
cal time-sense’ (1936: 189). The millenarian desire to bring heaven down to earth is
focused on ‘the immediate present’, with the German peasant revolutionaries of the 16th
century enlivened by the expectation of a sudden and abrupt ‘swing into another kind of
existence’ (1936: 195). The liberal-humanitarianism of the 18th and 19th centuries pos-
ited a progressive movement towards the utopian world of the future, such that the latter
is understood as ‘the culminating point of historical evolution’ (1936: 202). If the mille-
narians are focused on the present and the liberals the future, then conservative visions
of utopia are oriented around the past; they aim to safeguard and augment that which has
come into existence ‘slowly and gradually’ (1936: 211–212). Finally, the socialist-com-
munist mode of utopia builds on the liberal ideal of progressive development, with the
future world of equality understood as the product of class struggle and capitalist crisis.
For Mannheim (1936), there is a close relationship between the mode of utopia, its his-
torical time-sense and the class position of the group that produces it: the zeal of the mil-
lenarians, their desire for utopia in the here and now, was born of the ‘mental structure
peculiar to oppressed peasants, journeyman, an incipient Lumpenproletariat’, whose abso-
lute exclusion from medieval society led them to demand its immediate overturning (1936:
204); the liberal-humanitarian impulse to recuperate something from contemporary society
stemmed from the middling, bourgeois status of its proponents; the declining classes in
capitalist society, particularly the aristocracy, turned back to the past to reimagine a world
where they were again dominant; and the socialist focus on the future is an expression of
the status of the proletariat, which, as one of the rising classes of capitalist society, is able
to harness the ‘progressive social force’ of historical development (1936: 218).
The point here is not to affirm the particulars of Mannheim’s account of these modes
of utopianism. Certainly, the attempt to map the relationship between social class, time-
sense and utopian mode could easily become reductionist, limiting the various ways in
which utopia can be expressed by peasants, capitalists, aristocrats and proletarians.
Davidson 833

Nevertheless, Ideologie und Utopie offers some useful hints for thinking about the rela-
tionship between race, temporality and utopia. Two points should be stressed. First, the
correspondence between utopia and the future should be augmented by a range of other
temporal maps, with liberatory visions taking their cue from past, present and future.
Simply put, utopia, like society more generally, is pluri-temporal (Adam, 1995). Second,
utopian time maps are shaped by the experience of the social groups that produce them.
Just as different standpoints generate distinctive knowledge of actually existing society,
they also produce different ways of understanding its utopian other (Connell, 2007).
With these two insights in hand, it is possible to turn to the distinctive coming together
of past and future in Black visions of liberation.

Black Utopia: From Du Bois to Reparations

In this section, I analyse Black visions of liberation in the light of this account of utopian
sociology and its temporality. The focus is on two African American utopias: Du Bois’s
‘The Comet’ (1920) and the movement for reparations for slavery. It is not possible to
trace the entire history of Black utopianism in this article, something which is done very
ably elsewhere (Brown, 2021; Kelley, 2002; Sargent, 2020; Womack, 2013; Zamalin,
2019). While these histories often highlight the contributions of Du Bois and the repara-
tions movement, they also include a wide range of other examples, such as: attempts to
found African American towns, including the Exodusters of the 1870s and Civil Rights-
leader Floyd McKissick’s Soul City in the 1970s; literary utopias from Sutton E Griggs’s
Imperium in Imperio (1899) to Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019). and, Afrofuturism,
the cultural movement mentioned above that emerged in the mid-20th century around
figures like Sun Ra and George Clinton. Given this wide-ranging history, why focus on
Du Bois and reparations? It should first be stressed that no claim is made regarding the
representativeness of these two examples vis-a-vis the broader tradition of African
American utopianism. That is, I do not argue that all Black utopianism converges with
the visions discussed here. Instead, a more modest argument is made. I suggest that Du
Bois and the reparations movement exemplify a particular tendency within this tradition.
Following Joseph Winters’s (2016) survey of the Black literary and aesthetic tradition, it
is argued that the two examples highlighted elaborate a form of melancholic hope, in
which the desire for a better world is indexed to the memory of racial violence. This
tendency will be elaborated in greater detail as the section progresses.

Du Bois’s Dialectic of Hope and Disappointment

The recent resurgence of sociological interest in Du Bois has focused on restating the
importance of his work in the discipline (Back and Tate, 2015; Itzigsohn and Brown,
2020; Morris, 2015). Of particular importance here is Aldon Morris’s The Scholar
Denied (2015), a careful recuperation of Du Bois’s pioneering empirical work at the
Atlanta Sociological Laboratory. Morris stresses that Du Bois’s contribution to the devel-
opment of American sociology has been repressed in dominant accounts of its history.
The Scholar Denied poses a question for us: is Du Bois also the utopian denied? There
are reasons to think that Du Bois’s work has much to contribute to utopian sociology.3 As
834 Sociology 57(4)

Du Bois scholars have stressed, a concern with visions of new and better worlds punctu-
ates his corpus, something particularly evident in his works of fiction (Ahmad, 2009;
Byerman, 1992; Zamalin, 2019). For instance, The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911)
contains a detailed description of a utopian community led by a Black woman from the
South, while Dark Princess (1928) imagines a future world where all the racially
oppressed peoples of the world form an anti-racist, anti-colonial alliance.
However, if there is one text where Du Bois’s utopianism comes to the fore it is his
short story ‘The Comet’. The story, now regarded as a pioneering text in the Afrofuturist
tradition (Womack, 2013), is centred on the arrival of a comet in New York. It follows
a Black man named Jim, who has survived the arrival of the comet by a combination of
chance and prejudice. After being sent deep into the vaults of a Wall Street bank to
retrieve some records by his white boss, Jim is accidentally protected from the effects
of the comet’s deadly gas. After emerging from the vault, Jim confronts the destruction
of New York, almost all of its inhabitants killed by the gasses of the comet. However,
he eventually encounters another survivor: a rich, white woman called Julia. The two,
after some initial suspicion, share a moment of recognition. Julia comes to see Jim as an
equal: ‘He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another
clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate’ (Du Bois, 1920: 269). Jim also
gains new understanding, his power and prowess growing as the structures of racism
and prejudice fall away: ‘The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from
the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long
dead’ (Du Bois, 1920: 270).
Up to this point in the story, Du Bois’s conception of utopia does not seem radically
different from the futural emphasis often found in the sociological literature. ‘The
Comet’ traces the movement from the degraded present, defined by the prejudice of
New York in the early 20th century, to a world of freedom, the arrival of the deadly gas-
ses clearing away the forces of racism and inaugurating a new state of equality. Indeed,
Du Bois appears to base his tale on Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (1906b), which
also features the arrival of an extra-terrestrial object that fundamentally upturns social
relations to produce a worldwide state of peace and unity. However, the temporality of
Du Bois’s tale is distinct; ‘The Comet’ is a subtle critique of the straightforward futur-
ism of In the Days of the Comet. Significantly, in Du Bois’s tale, the forces of the past
are not left behind but come to disrupt and destroy the utopian future. At the end of the
tale, it transpires that it is only New York that has been devastated; the rest of the USA
remains intact. Julia’s racist father suddenly emerges and proceeds to accuse Jim of
rape, abuse him verbally and separate him from his daughter. With his intervention, the
gaze between Jim and Julia ‘faltered and fell’, and everything returns to how it was
before: the comet threatens but does not break the racist coordinates of American soci-
ety (Du Bois, 1920: 270).
‘The Comet’ combines ‘pessimism and hope’, the initial moment of liberation quickly
ruptured by the return of forces of racial violence (Zamalin, 2019: 61). Whereas Wells
(like many utopian sociologists) understands the future in terms of decisive breaks and
radical caesuras, a looping movement of time is presented in ‘The Comet’. The temper-
ing of the hopeful vision of the future by Du Bois should be understood as an attempt to
reconcile the desire for liberation with the reversals and failures experienced by African
Davidson 835

Americans, particularly in relation to the Civil War and Reconstruction in the 19th cen-
tury. In Mannheim’s terms, the time-sense of Black utopia is dependent on the social
experience of those who articulate it. Du Bois (1903: 6), in The Souls of Black Folk,
makes it clear that the great hopes aroused by emancipation were decisively crushed by
the racial violence of the years that followed (including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and
the development of the Jim Crow system of segregation): ‘Whatever of good may have
come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the
Negro people.’ The African American experience is defined by a dialectic of hope and
disappointment, whereby ‘divine’ events (from civil wars to comets) that promise ‘the
end of all doubt’ are accompanied by a feeling that the catastrophes of the past will never
be eclipsed (Du Bois, 1903: 5). Racial violence has a hauntological presence; it cannot
be completely forgotten (Baucom, 2005; Gordon, 2008).
This mediation between past and future in utopian visions is not unique to Du Bois.
As noted above, Winters (2016) suggests that hopeful accounts of the future defined by
racial equality in the African American tradition, including those advanced by Du Bois,
Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, are very often accompanied by a pessimistic concern
with the history of slavery and violence in the United States. This looping movement
between future and past produces a distinctive form of ‘melancholic hope’, a hope that
‘suggests that a better, less pernicious world depends partly on our heightened capacity
to remember, contemplate, and be unsettled by race-inflected violence and suffering’
(Winters, 2016: 16). In Tina Campt’s (2017: 16–17) words, Black utopianism is ‘not
always loud and demanding’ but ‘frequently quiet and opportunistic, dogged and disrup-
tive’, looking for the fragile ‘chinks and crevices’ of liberation amid tragedy, defeat and
suffering. One of the tasks of anti-racist utopianism is to bring together consciousness of
the disastrous contours of the Black experience and visions of liberated worlds, with the
movement from hope to disappointment and back again undercutting the embrace of
ruptures and discontinuities characteristic of the modern temporal regime.

The Real Utopia of Reparations

In Raymond Ruyer’s (1950: 9, emphasis in original, my translation) words, the literary
utopia is a ‘mental exercise in lateral possibilities’, working to discern ‘the possibilities
that it sees overflowing from the real’. Speculative visions of the type offered by Du Bois
demonstrate the full potentiality of society, testing out different configurations of institu-
tions, practices and mores. While the arrival of comets may not be likely, such imaginar-
ies fulfil an important function: they guard against the reification of horizons of
expectation and expand consciousness of the possible (Bauman, 1976; Levitas, 2013).
Nevertheless, the exuberance of speculative accounts of other worlds might prompt a
concern. If, following Wright’s (2010: 6) real utopias method, what is needed are ‘acces-
sible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of
navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’, then the propositions of
Du Bois fall short. While ‘The Comet’ may offer a productive counterpoint to the easy
association of utopianism and futurity, it is not yet clear how its dialectic of hope and
disappointment relates to ‘plausible visions of radical alternatives’ that can be achieved
in the here and now (Wright, 2010: 8).
836 Sociology 57(4)

A question is thus raised: how can the distinctive temporality of the Black utopian
tradition be translated into radical yet realisable demands? Turning to the movement for
reparations for slavery and its aftermath is one way of responding to this question.
Beginning with the demand for ‘40 acres and a mule’ in the aftermath of the Civil War,
there is a long history of African Americans struggling for compensation for slavery,
with everyone from the revolutionaries of the post-Civil Rights moment, like the Black
Panther Party, to more recent movements, like Black Lives Matter, calling for reparations
(Kelley, 2002; Táíwò, 2021). While proposals for reparations for slavery vary greatly in
their specifics, the core components are as follows: the United States should formally
recognise the harm caused by chattel slavery; the inequality faced by Black people since
emancipation, from segregation to mass incarceration, is a legacy of slavery; and con-
temporary forms of racial inequality can only be overcome by programmes that specifi-
cally benefit the descendants of enslaved people (Brooks, 2004; Darity and Mullen,
2020; Henry, 2007).
There are good reasons to think of the demand for reparations as a real utopia. In con-
trast to ‘The Comet’, questions of viability and achievability are at the core of the repara-
tions movement. As Wright (2010: 1) emphasises, a key component of real utopias is the
examination of actually existing ‘cases of institutional innovations’ – such as participatory
city budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the Mondragon conglomerate of worker-
owned cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain – ‘that embody in one way or another
emancipatory alternatives to the dominant forms of social organization’. In a similar fash-
ion, proponents of reparations have drawn attention to the small-scale experiments in
reparatory justice that emerged in the aftermath of the American Civil War (Franke, 2019;
Kelley, 2002). Emancipation left most African Americans with ‘nothing but freedom’;
they were deprived of the resources needed to play a full role in American society (Brophy,
2006: 25). However, a few formerly enslaved people were, for a short time in the 1860s,
provided with the land, materials and equipment required to found autonomous communi-
ties. They were compensated for their enslavement, however inadequately, via the redis-
tribution of the property of former slaveholders. As Katherine Franke (2019: 11)
emphasises in the case of the Port Royal and Davis Bend communities in Georgia, these
reparations provided the basis for ‘utopian experiments in Black emancipation’, with
African Americans developing communal modes of labouring and egalitarian forms of
governance. Concerns about the workability of reparations are at least partially answered
by the concrete experience of these communities. Like Wright’s examples, past repara-
tions programmes suggest that redress for historical injustice and violence is a plausible
proposition; it is something that has happened before, and there is no reason why it should
not happen again.
Of course, reparations for the descendants of enslaved people cannot be simplistically
based on these past examples. Since the vast majority of enslaved Black people and their
descendants were not compensated in the 1860s, reparations is a partly speculative propo-
sition. However, the lack of precedent is not an insurmountable barrier. As Wright (2010:
1) argues, there are purely ‘theoretical proposals’ that are still ‘attentive to realistic prob-
lems of institutional design and social feasibility’. Even if a particular experiment has not
yet been tried, this does not mean that it is not a real utopia; a case can still be made for its
viability and achievability. Proponents of reparations for slavery have developed detailed
Davidson 837

proposals for how the descendants of enslaved people can be compensated (Brooks, 2004;
Darity and Mullen, 2020; Henry, 2007). It is not for nothing that Boris Bittker, the author
of the influential study The Case for Black Reparations (1973), was described as a ‘utopian
technician’, his book demonstrating that ‘creative thought can devise a structure for repara-
tions payments that takes into account the kinds of practical difficulties often described as
unavoidable flaws’ (Tushnet, 1983: 210). Something similar could be said of James
Forman, the author of the iconic ‘The Black Manifesto’ (1969). The manifesto demands
that religious institutions in the United States invest five hundred million dollars in a range
of African American economic, political and cultural endeavours. The churches that once
helped to indoctrinate enslaved Black people into American society were now asked to
help fund new organs of Black self-determination, including a publishing house, a televi-
sion station, a university and a strike fund. Forman’s document puts forward a clear plan
for reparations: it specifies an amount of money to be paid; identifies institutions complicit
in slavery that should provide these funds; outlines how the money would be spent within
the Black community; and highlights how this investment will ameliorate (though not
extinguish) the material and psychological harm caused by slavery to African Americans.
However, while reparations qualifies as a realisable demand, there is a difference
between Wright’s account of real utopias and the plans for reparations advanced by Bittker,
Forman and others: temporality. Wright’s examples of real utopias – such as participatory
budgeting and worker-owned cooperatives – lack a historical dimension; no attempt is
made to respond to the catastrophes and tragedies of the past. By contrast, the demand for
reparations takes up and concretises the distinctive temporality found in the Black utopian
tradition, where hopes for the future are accompanied by the traumatic presence of the
enslaved past. Reparations are caught between ‘a backward-looking assessment of harm’
and ‘a forward-looking conception of democratic reconstruction’ (Balfour, 2014: 53). The
backward-looking moment of reparations involves a confrontation with the horrors of slav-
ery. They would be an acknowledgement of the foundational role of enslaved labour and
white supremacy in Western societies, both past and present, becoming ‘a way for black
people to challenge and subvert the master narrative of white capitalist America and testify
the truth of their own history’ (Marable, 2002: 251). The forward-looking moment of
redress underscores its transformative power; the proper compensation of African
Americans would involve the complete transformation of American society. As Ta-Nehisi
Coates (2017: 202) comments, if it is true that ‘white supremacy is [. . .] a force so funda-
mental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it’, then undercutting
structural racism through reparations involves the need to ‘imagine a new country’. The
shuffling from past to future and back again necessitates the formulation of a utopia as radi-
cal as the catastrophes of history, the latter constantly piquing and provoking a movement
to liberation. In Walter Benjamin’s (2003: 394) words, the desire for utopia is ‘nourished
by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren’, the
positivity of the new world indexed to the negativity of the old.

Conclusion
Care should be taken not to overemphasise the distinctiveness of the temporal maps found
in Black visions of other worlds. Many recent utopias contain moments of imperfection
838 Sociology 57(4)

and suffering (Moylan, 2014) and there are visions of racial progress that straightforwardly
associate utopia and futurity (Seamster and Ray, 2018). That said, Black utopianism offers
an important counterpoint to conceptualisations of utopia found in the sociological tradi-
tion. More specifically, following Julian Go’s decolonial account of standpoint theory, by
attending to the African American utopian perspective, it is possible to, on the one hand,
‘provincialize categories’ and, on the other, ‘cultivate new theories or concepts of conven-
tional objects’ (Go, 2016: 173–174). Negatively speaking, Black utopianism encourages
critical reflection on the assumptions that have traditionally governed attempts to imagine
new worlds in the sociological literature. In particular, by attending to the Black tradition,
the idea that utopias must be futural, and that consciousness of the past can only act as a
drag on utopian consciousness, is revealed as a ‘false universal’ (Butler, 2000: 22). The
association between utopia and futurity, common to liberatory projects from the emergence
of modern time consciousness in the 18th century onwards, is questioned by the emphasis
in the utopianism of Du Bois and the reparations movement on the past. Positively speak-
ing, this critical analysis does not result in the abandonment of liberatory horizons. One
message of the Black tradition is that any vision of the future that fails to attend to the suf-
ferings of the past is not really a utopia, but a mirage that masks ‘missed opportunities and
[. . .] tragic disappointments’ (Hartman, 2007: 46). An alternative conception of the tempo-
rality of utopia is thus advanced: the looping movement between past and future, which
represents a means with which to do justice to the dialectic of hope and disappointment in
the African American experience.
To bring this article to a close, we can return to Levitas’s (1979: 31) statement that the
task is ‘to imagine utopia as possible’. The sociology of utopia, as I stressed in the intro-
duction, is concerned with the question of possibility; it is about looking for the lines of
alterity hidden within actually existing society and demonstrating that a new world can
be realised. If, for utopian sociologists, the task is to analyse the present order for signs
of novelty, then Black utopianism pushes sociologists to examine freedom dreams of the
future for marks of the non-utopian past. From the perspective of the visions elaborated
by Du Bois and the reparations movement, images of utopian societies that do not reflect
on racial violence are unconvincing. In failing to speak to the circling movement between
hope and disappointment in the African American historical experience, they are unable
to motivate action in the present or act as a catalyst for social change. In other words, for
another world to be possible, the straightforward futurism of the sociology of utopia
needs to be revised. Or, as Rivers Solomon (2019: 100) notes in The Deep, which imagi-
nes a utopia formed by Black women thrown overboard during the times of the slave
trade: ‘A people needed a history. To be without one was death.’ Whether it be ‘The
Comet’s’ warning about the recursive nature of racist violence or the emphasis in the
reparations movement on the need to redress the catastrophes of slavery and its after-
math, visions of racial justice bring together the impulse to move forwards and the desire
to glance backwards. Between past and future, new worlds become possible.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their instructive and insight-
ful comments on an earlier draft of this article, as well as the participants in a book club on Erik
Davidson 839

Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias that took place in February 2021. The session was con-
vened by Fabian T Pfeffer and hosted by the University of Michigan’s Stone Center for Inequality
Dynamics. The discussion was key in helping me to develop some of the ideas elaborated here.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article: this work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council
(grant number ES/J500033/1).

ORCID iD
Joe PL Davidson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1800-3771

Notes
1. It is worth noting here that nostalgia, like utopia, is also entwined with relations of racial and
colonial power, an issue not considered by Bauman (see Ravela, 2020; Tinsley, 2020).
2. On the lack of attention given to Mannheim’s understanding of utopia, see Kumar (2006) and
Turner (2003).
3. Matt Dawson (2016) discusses Du Bois in Social Theory for Alternative Societies. However,
Dawson does not address Du Bois’s fictional work, such as ‘The Comet’, which is key to his
utopianism.

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Joe PL Davidson is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.
His thesis is focused on the relationship between temporality and utopia. It utilises a range of uto-
pian texts – from William Morris’s News from Nowhere to contemporary popular music – to
develop a critical social theoretical account of the impasse of the future. His work has been pub-
lished in Current Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Feminist Theory, The Sociological
Review and Theory, Culture & Society.

Date submitted May 2021

Date accepted July 2022