Blackland
A Utopian Novel
by Richard A. Jones
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Pub Date 6 Aug 2021 | Archive Date 13 Aug 2021
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Description
When Jason Williams, an alienated and unemployed artist and poet, plots with his "homies" to construct an African American hydrogen bomb-Boom Shakalaka!!!-he has no idea this desperate quest for dignity will propel him to a new world. Opening doorways to the "many rooms in [his] father's house" leads him into the multiverse's mansion of 10 500 rooms. Jason finds himself riding the rails of a ridiculously sublime "underground railroad" to the utopias of stars and galaxies within each of us.
Blackland is an outrageous postmodern novel, seen through prisms of philosophy, physics, and poetry. As he swaggers and staggers through "the great conversation," Jason tags "Phew Yawk Shitty" with the graffiti of urban angst and humor, while "joning" with hood-rat desperation and bluster on the perversities of Black lives in America. Yet, could it be the banter disguises his grander ambitions to relocate the entire population of the earth to the Andromeda galaxy? In his ongoing search for "the best of all possible worlds," he awakens on a hay wagon in Blackland, a world where white people have opted for virtual reality and left the Earth to the mud people.
Blackland's satirical humor provokes both belly laughs and moral outrage. As political satire, Blackland questions the contemporary racialized imaginaries that create our shared futures. In the traditions of writers like Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium, Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Jason lives in a library of books. As his adventure evolves, he reads and writes himself not only into a world, but also into the multiverse, where he is everywhere at once. Blackland is an exuberant dreamscape, a paradoxical novel inscribed within itself that will fuel your imagination and, as it draws you on its fantastical journey, stoke your outrage, and drive you to fits of laughter.
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National Print Publicity Campaign, Reviews, and Features
National Radio Campaign
Online Publicity Campaign
Social Media Promotion
Book Giveaways, Advertisements, and E-blasts
Available Editions
| ISBN | 9781637528396 |
| PRICE | US$18.99 (USD) |
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Featured Reviews
Wyn L, Reviewer
“2044 in the year of our Lord”.
A race war between white and black America, precipitated by the assassination of the second black US President, has escalated to the use of nuclear weapons by the white army. Elsewhere (“elsewhen”?) an unemployed artist Jason Williams resolves to build the first African-American hydrogen bomb - the “Boom Shakalaka”. Or, at least, he builds the idea of “Da Bomb”; in this metaphysical masterpiece, nothing is really real - “the only thing that was real was that everything was FAKE”.
Exploring the logistics and possible consequences of his plan over the course of the story, while the overarching narrative brutally examines the Black experience, leads Jason to suddenly wake up in the fabled “Blackland”, a country without any white people, where he comes under the mentorship of one M. B. Asia, with whom he has an epic philosophical debate on the way to Liberty City, the seemingly Utopian capital city of Blackland. This leads to a darkly comic Kafka-esque meeting with the hidden security forces, and just when you think the book can’t get any better, the deeply profound ending takes your breath away.
I realise I am ineptly describing the plot because any attempt to describe this stunning book is doomed to failure. Sci-fi? Not really. The postmodern “Roots”? Possibly. I was not prepared for this book. A sentence towards the end of Chapter 5 nearly made me faint. There’s so much truth in this book, it’s almost painful. Prepare to be knocked senseless on every page.
Full of relentless energy and written in the kinetic, fluid, dense language of Black America, this is a powerful and vital work about the Black experience in a future USA, yet still recognisable as the world we live in now. A howl against racist “Amerikkka”, it is satirical, self-referential and fourth-wall shattering. But also very funny. “Blackland” is the Black “Ulysses” - it even ends with “Un huh”, a postmodern reinvention of Molly Bloom’s final, exultant“Yes”. According to the closing author’s note, “Blackland” took twenty-five years to write; I can think of no better way to spend a quarter of a century. This is a work to be read and read again. If this book isn’t declared a masterpiece, there’s no justice in the world. Which is what the book is actually about.
Many thanks to Atmosphere Press and NetGalley for allowing me to view an advanced reading copy of this title.
