2 - Ode to Utopia

Summary

This chapter argues that an analysis of the racial capitalist state cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Drawing on the queer utopianism of José Esteban Muñoz and the other-worldly space-jazz of Sun Ra, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. I contrast this with recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism, which largely have focused on radical labour and trade union movements in the global periphery. Unlike these traditions, the antipolitical is a promise of liberation whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in dreams and fantasy, the magical and the divine.