The Follies of Racial Tribalism: Mat Johnson and Anti-Utopian Satire

The utopian impulse to imagine a world free of racial oppression has a storied history within the African American literary tradition, from abolitionist slave narratives to Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, from Marcus Garvey to Black-Power Afrocentrism, from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to contemporary Afrofuturism. Posing alternatives to a world dominated by racial hierarchy and white oppression of darker peoples, African American utopian texts have run the ideological gamut, imagining societies predicated on principles of color blindness, the eradication of race, egalitarianism, multiethnic pluralism, or black supremacy. While Afrocentrists envision monoracial utopias based on the rebirth of ancient African cultures or on achieving safety through isolation in all-black communities, other African American thinkers reconceive the "promised land" as a pluralist heterotopia or a society beyond race.¹ The post-race rhetoric of the multiracial movement, for example, often posits an idealized future where racial categories are nullified by the increased frequency of race mixing. In 2008, the election of the first African American and/or mixed-race president of the United States gave new life to utopian dreams of a post-race America, bolstered by Obama's faith in "the audacity of hope."

Whereas utopianism in all its varieties has sustained African American hope in the possibility of a better world, running counter to such optimism is a more skeptical strain of black cultural life―the irreverent tradition of African American satire. Justin E. H. Smith argues that there is an "unending war between … the earnest ones [who] do what they can to build a perfect society" and satirists who mock the inevitable failure of their efforts (B12). Displaying a "tragicomic recognition of the apparent endlessness of the struggle" for racial justice (Carpio 20), satirists such as Charles Chesnutt, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed provide "criticism of … African American political and cultural trends, and indictment of specifically American forms of racism" (Dickson-Carr, African-American Satire 16). African American satire employs the "signifying" practices of trickster folklore and the black vernacular, casting aspersion through indirect or ironic commentary on the texts and cultural practices of racist America, while also offering "intragroup satire" of the follies of the black community (Dickson-Carr, African-American Satire 123). The contemporary author Mat Johnson is the descendant of a long line of African American satirists whose targets include not only white racism but also the foibles of black culture. Johnson's 2011 novel Pym, in particular, signifies on an intertext of the white canon, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), while also satirizing elements of contemporary black discourse and behavior.

As a satirical writer, Mat Johnson often employs his wit to expose a particular human folly―the pursuit of utopia―which he renders as dangerous at worst and delusional at best. This essay argues that Johnson's Pym examines the failures of both white and black utopias, exposing how human fear of otherness and the desire for power undermine utopian experiments. Pym critiques not only the white supremacist utopian rhetoric of the past and present, but also Afrofuturist idealizations and Afrocentric utopias based on a romanticization of a primitive past. Although scholars and reviewers have called Pym a dystopian text, this essay categorizes the novel more precisely as "anti-utopian" because it satirizes Enlightenment beliefs that undergird many utopian philosophies, beliefs such as the perfectibility of humanity, teleological progress, and the concept of race itself.² According to Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, dystopias still "maintain utopian impulse[s]" (7), whereas the "anti-utopian disposition … forecloses all utopian possibility" (6). I argue that Johnson's anti-utopian satirical novel Pym shines a harsh light on problematic and recurrent patterns of human communities that render racially based utopias implausible, impossible, or simply undesirable. Pym's anti-utopian critique is further developed and complicated in Johnson's newest novel, Loving Day (winner of the 2016 American Book Award), which takes aim at an interracial utopia that falls prey to many of the same failings...