This article will delve deeper into African American literary criticism, what it is, and how we can apply it to Robin DG Kelley's introduction, “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.” » as well as a brief summary and interpretation of the text. Another work we will discuss through the lens of African American criticism is the video interview on The Laura Flanders Show: “Freedom Dreaming & Liberation: Robin DG Kelley.” By analyzing these sources, I hope to compose a reading of Freedom Dreams, as well as develop an interpretation that the purpose of this text is: Hope; while using the perspective of African-American literary criticism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get an Original EssayThe basis of African American literary criticism theory is that African American/Black writing emerges from a point of sociological, political, ideological and cultural view marked by oppression and marginalization. “‘Black’ reading must then negotiate the difficult boundaries between textual and cultural meanings, between ‘aesthetic’ and ideological impacts.” African-American criticism is marked by the awareness that the black experience is historical and cultural. This means that it has links with the African language, with spiritual and cultural practices, with attitudes; all of which are formed through the experience of slavery and violence. In African American literary criticism, it is also evident that those involved have endured a long and difficult negotiation with white culture "to the point where black aesthetic production in white cultures is marked positively and negatively by white culture." African American literary criticism is used to recognize and celebrate what is distinctively and positively black in black art. In other words, “anything that owes its meaning and expression to the particular expressions and traditions of black culture and experience.” This gives us the feeling that “criticism is inevitably ideological and political” and that being black or expressing oneself black is a historical and cultural form of oppression. “The “art” of black art is therefore inevitably a very complex cultural formation. Black criticism has substantial links with postcolonial criticism and with questions of the representation of the "other", the claim of identity in the forms and language of the oppressor, and notions of parody, Mimicry and Hybridity (Department of English)”. “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” is composed by renowned historian, activist and writer Robin DG Kelley; the story is a kind of collective history of the black radical imagination. Each chapter of this book explores a distinct topic and was written at different times over the course of 20 years; the first chapter dates back to the author's college years. This text is an attempt to write about black radical social movements and focus on what the members of these particular movements dreamed of, thought, fought for, what they articulated as a New World, and what made them pushed us to fight in the first place. Kelley says, “The reason I always studied history was to try to find the path forward. He goes on to say, "Scholarship inspired by political questions and concerns about the future contributes to good history...it makes it more precise and more urgent." Scholarship raises questions about the way forward rather than simply being curious about the past. I'm not really curious about the past, I'm really curious about how we can createa new future, and he is still motivated by work.” Robin Kelley goes on to explain that as an African American author and historian, his work must have a goal in mind. I think it's relevant because we can see in all African American literature there is a goal or purpose. Sometimes the goal is as simple as "stop making me feel like an outsider, stop othering myself," other times the goal is more radical, like in Kelley's case where he recreate and imagine a whole new world. “Sometimes when you're a historian and you write in the moment, you end up writing a history that focuses on the institutional projects and the institutional constraints that movements face,” he goes on to say that literary works like the his must have a long history. term, whether it is socialism or something else (Freedom Dreaming). “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” is not a manual or guide, and it is certainly not intended to provide a blueprint for radical social movements. On the contrary, this text is a work of historical recovery and interpretation. The essays in this book attempt to explore the radical utopian dreams of some black political activists, artists, and black movements in general of the 20th century. In a way, the book is a meditation on the black radical imagination, a third-eye view of history that attempts to recapture the dreams of a New World that have not yet been realized. In this analytical and imaginative book, Kelley traces the historical movements of the black, nationalist, communist, feminist, and liberal movements. The book begins with a premise that “the catalyst for all political engagement has never been misery, poverty or oppression, but hope. » Robin Kelley details this homemade decision: “…All the evidence suggests that hope is far more important than misery, poverty and oppression. Hope is what DRIVES people into these movements! It is the promise of building a new world radically different from the one we inherited” (Freedom Dreaming). The first chapter is entitled “When History Sleeps”; This is the introductory and most important chapter of the book. It's about the main character (Kelley) examining her mother's political "third eye" and detailing how that examination shaped Robin Kelley's own utopian dreams of analytical politics. Kelley's observations during his youth in the Black Panther party fueled his curiosity; he describes himself as being “surrounded by these people (his mother and his sister) who are always looking to make a ‘movement’”. Kelley details his political maturity and how “all this activism and participation forced me to think about what were we doing in the first place? What is the long term goal? (Freedom Dreaming). “When History Sleeps” demonstrates the hope that Kelley aspired to convey to his audience; he begins the chapter with a hopeful passage about the third eye and his mother's meditation rituals: “My mother has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with his regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her room, her third eye opens to a new world, a beautiful place filled with light as peaceful as her state of mind... Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, the drug dealers, the social workers, the rusty tap water, the cockroaches and rodents... Yet she didn't allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who inherited this land. We were supposed to help every living thing in need, even if it meant giving up our lastpiece of bread” (Freedom Dreams). This passage is significant because we can already see that this text adopts a point of view marked by oppression. What is important is the idea that even if the world oppresses them, they cannot be victims. What also strikes me is that even if they have nothing to give, they must always reach out to those who need it. I define this as humanity or being human, and beliefs like this are often presented in African American literature. The goal or objective in mind is this: Just because you haven't had the upper hand in life doesn't mean you can't achieve it in some way. Robin Kelley also has a passage in this section about "othering", but instead of discussing what it means to be "othered", he talks about his mother who taught him how to: Be the Other. The passage is: “We were supposed to stand out from the crowd and befriend the outcasts, and hug the kids who stuttered or smelled or had holes in their clothes. My mother taught us that the Wonderful One was free... She simply wanted us to live through our third eye, to see life as a possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world without patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and the prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a broader, fluid, and “cosmopolitan” definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not simply the heirs of a culture but its creators” (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination). The second chapter is called “Dreams”. of the New Earth,” this chapter explores and examines freedom in the Exodus movement and the Redeemer movement within the black political party. This chapter draws on famous leaders like Marcus Garvey and WEB Dubois, but the importance of this chapter is that Kelley uses this space to describe the task of redefining freedom and community, without exploitation. The third chapter and the last chapter that I will summarize, is called “The Negro Question”. This essay analyzes the views of race relations of white leftists and white radicals, who NEVER address the black question: what to do with work so as not to have to address the worker directly? Kelley traces this issue to several different organizations and approaches; He demonstrates that a common pattern is the link between race and economics, following the belief that "if we can kill capitalism, racism will disappear." Through these proposals, it became clear that racism, race, socialism, and labor were all interconnected. “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class and gender, as they apply to a given individual or group, seen to create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage , is defined as “intersectionality”” (Webster’s Dictionary). The Final Conclusion The important passage I wish to analyze concerns the surrealism of “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination”. The text defines surrealism as an exaltation of freedom, revolt and imagination; it's about what we see with our third eye rather than the two on our face. This passage also defines Kelley's idea of ​​what a utopia is. The text states: “The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations – that is, “nowhere” – is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother's belief that the map of a new.