Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Communism is a political ideology that extensively critiques the bourgeoisie, a term from French that describes the upper classes who own the means of production. The means of production are things like the machines in factories, land, and the work of laborers. Communist ideology holds that workers (the proletariat), rather than the bourgeoisie, should own the means of production. The adjectival form of bourgeoisie is bourgeois. As a Marxist historian, Kelley writes about how Black radicals throughout history have critiqued the bourgeoisie, including the Black bourgeoisie, for their perceived inability to create meaningful change in politics and society.

Vanguardism is an element of Leninist Communist politics. It is a strategy where the vanguard, or class-conscious members of the working class or proletariat, form organizations to spread knowledge of communism and build support for the movement. The term comes from military strategy where an advance force, or vanguard, would go in before the rest of the army to prepare the terrain for an action. Kelley writes about Black radicals such as Claudia Jones and RAM, who saw themselves as part of the vanguard to advance communism in the United States and internationally.

Reparations are actions taken to make amends for an injury or slight. In Freedom Dreams, the term reparations specifically refers to monetary or other payments to the Black American community to compensate for the wrongs of slavery, segregation, and ongoing discrimination. In the fourth essay in the collection, Kelley examines demands for reparations throughout American history and details how they form part of the Black radical imaginary for justice. Kelley notes that while reparations are generally conceived of as cash payments to individuals, many of the calls for reparations historically were proposed as collective payments to the Black community to be used to build institutions like schools or to include in-kind payment like land or farm animals (“40 acres and a mule”).

The Third World is a somewhat antiquated term for what is more frequently referred to today as the developing world—though this term is also controversial, as it implies a GDP-based hierarchy among nations—or the Global South. However, Kelley uses the term Third World in its formal sense. During the Cold War, there were nations that were allied with the United States (“the First World”) and others that were allied with the Soviet Union (“the Second World”). Nations that were nonaligned with either superpower were termed the Third World. Many nations in the Third World were former colonies of European powers, such as Somalia, Indonesia, and Honduras. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the term Third World came to be used less frequently. Kelley refers to the Third World especially in the context of anticolonial movements in those nations that animated Black radical politics in the United States.

Surrealism is an artistic movement begun in the aftermath of World War I that deploys the absurd, uncanny, and marvelous to contest traditional rules and conventions. Paris, France was the original epicenter of the surrealist movement, and many of its original works were written in French. One of the leaders of the surrealist movement was André Breton, who published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Surrealism was also concerned with political advocacy and is broadly associated with leftist politics, although Salvador Dali, one of its most famous practitioners, was an admirer of both Hitler and the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Kelley is drawn to surrealism as an imaginative practice that can energize leftist movements. For example, Kelley identifies the surrealism of Aimé Césaire’s protest poetry as an expression of hope and imagination. While surrealism is a historic movement, its influence can be seen in writers, artists, and activists today that Kelley admires.