As my inaugural post, it seems fitting to meditate upon the title of this blog. Taken from Octavia Paz’s “Towards A Poem,” Robin Kelley uses it to bookend his writing on the history on the Black radical tradition. In doing so, he teases out what he refers to as the Black Radical Imagination. For Kelley it “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” (Kelley: 150). Within this imagination one finds an alternative epistemology that challenges the universalist conceits of dominant western paradigms. In priviledging the black experience, it is not to essentialize their identity but instead to adknowledge the specific epistemo-politico conditions that “Blackness” is indissolubly linked to within modernity’s rise. And yet, this Black Radical Tradition is not simply the Other of the West since in challenging Western epistimological dominance, it offers an alternative vision of futurity. To say it differently, the Black Radical Imagination does not negate but instead obliquily eschews the binary of West and Non-West by being radically immanent to its terms (i.e. blackness renders visible the failed assumptions of western universality) while simultaneously exceeding them (i.e. blackness posits different modes of community without falling into world historicism).

Kelley does a spectacular job of elaborating this point by working out the multiple, and highly imbricated, meanings of dreams through the history of radical social movements like the Pan-Africanist movement, Black Nationalism, Reparations Movement; all, of which, culminates, for him, into surrealism. For Kelley dreams are not just fabrications of the mind (i.e. dreams in the pejorative sense like pipe dream) nor simply a manifestation of desire but both in that it is an immanent vision. It is fitting then that he takes up surrealism since “[i]ts basic aim is to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams” (Kelley: 160). This “contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams” is the analytic purchase that Kelley finds in the Black Radical Imagination. In using contradiction I do not mean this in the Hegelian sense as the contradiction between essense and appearance that is the movement of Spirit but instead I want think contradiction as a historical analytic of the present. For the dream is only impossible in that the conditions from which it arises from cannot (yet) facilitate its actualization within the present. In that way, dream functions as a critique of the present by showing its political limits. However, by the shear fact that it arose from those conditions also signals its potentiality. Understood in this way, the call to “be realistic, demand the impossible” can have no trace of irony.

 So where do we go from here? I think Kelley might provide a possibility. I cannot help but adore the closing chapter of his book where he offers up his own dream–a gesture that can only be read participating within the Black Radical Imagination. In it, he works out an elaborate vision of an international park to take the place of the twin towers. What I find amazing is its details from the way that it will be funded to a set of artwork. Its intricacies makes it substantial. How then, can we use that actual dream as the analytic that I have been trying to work out? What are the epistimo-politico conditions from which that dream comes from but also disenable its actualization? In short, why is that vision impossible at this moment and how can it be enabled?