Author Talk: Detroiter Aaron Robertson With Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is a lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia―and sought to transform their lives. Author Aaron Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit―the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start: The Shrine of the Black Madonna.

The Author Series Committee is pleased to welcome Aaron back home to Detroit for a special conversation about The Black Utopians. He will be joined by Wayne State University Associate Profession of African American Studies Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.

Copies of The Black Utopians will be available for purchase from Detroit's own Source Booksellers!

About Aaron: Aaron Robertson is a writer, translator from Italian, and editor. His debut book, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2024, a Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2024, one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and one of the New York Public Library’s 10 Best Books of 2024. It was also recognized as a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, ELLE, Essence, Literary Hub, and the Chicago Public Library. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, among others, and in 2021, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation. Aaron previously served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association and is currently an advisory editor for The Paris Review. His work has appeared in various outlets, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and more.

About Dr. Burden-Stelly: Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and political and historical sociology. Her research pursues three complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression. The second excavates twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis. Her third area of focus examines theories and discourses of economic development in the African diaspora.

She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. I am also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings and of Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State with Dr. Aaron Kamugisha and Dr. Percy Hintzen. Additionally, she guest edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality.

Her published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History. My words are featured in popular venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, Essence magazine, Teen Vogue, Jacobin, The Nation, and Black Agenda Report. She has been interviewed on podcasts, radio shows, and news shows including The Real News Network, Breakthrough News, Black Myths, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, The Red Nation, AJ+, Bad Faith, The Katie Halper Show, Revolutionary Left Radio, Guerilla History, Upstream and the New Books Network.

Finally, she is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders.

This is NOT a ticketed event. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-term basis. Please arrive early and sign up for reminders!

Questions? Email [email protected]!

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