“By locating the everyday mechanisms of the neoliberal state in a progressive school in San Francisco, Savannah Shange brings the lived experiences of social actors often only talked about as ‘black and brown bodies’ into discussions of the afterlife of slavery. And in so doing, she reveals the fissures in Afropessimism and critical anthropology. Progressive Dystopia is scholarship at its finest and an essential contribution.” — Aimee Meredith Cox, author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship
“Who’s afraid of dystopia? Not Savannah Shange, whose provocative and audacious book exposes ‘progressive’ multiracial social justice initiatives for what they are: a golden noose. ‘Winning,’ she argues, does not disrupt state logics of captivity, containment, accumulation, and antiblackness. And fighting for utopias yet to be without attending to the dystopian present that is for the folks trapped in this ongoing settler-colonial catastrophe, will not make us free. Instead, Shange applies an abolitionist frame to reveal how Black and Brown kids who defy their saviors, disrupt liberal teleologies, and map new territory, make the road toward freedom by walking, talking, dancing, fighting, and thinking. Unsettling, persuasive, and beautiful, Progressive Dystopia is one of those rare books that will make you rethink everything.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“At the center of Savannah Shange’s powerful analysis in progressive dystopia: abolition, anthropology, and race in the new San Francisco are the multiple and seemingly conflicting forces brought to bear on the Black girls and boys who attend the Robeson Justice Academy in the contested space that makes up Frisco. Shange theorizes a set of ‘common sense’ ‘progressive’ logics that reproduce the carceral—what she names progressive dystopia and carceral progressivism—and then the willful defiance that characterizes the refusals and political demands of the Black girl students, in particular, who refuse to bear and internalize what Hartman names as ‘burdened individualism.’ This is a profoundly important book.” — Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being