William M. Paris’s book Race, Time, and Utopia provides a perceptive, original, and conceptually rich analysis of the struggle toward emancipatory forms of life and the abolition of racial oppression. The book’s main claim is that utopia forms a critical theory used in black political thought to break with the domination of historical racialized practices and begin a new time. Paris makes several theoretical and conceptual innovations. First, he offers a new conception of utopia not as a blueprint for an ideal society, but as a response to problems in social life that break the grip of existing justification and formulate possible future forms of life, a ‘not-yet’ instead of a ‘not-place’ (pp. 2, 9, 216). Second, he presents an analysis of racial injustice as a domination of time. Domination crystalizes a non-synchronous time, the discrepancy of the predominant temporality in a society with that of marginalized classes, through social practices and institutions in a way that reinforce the alienation felt by the dominated and hinders them from negotiating, challenging, and transforming the practical organization of their time (pp. 12–14, 59–62).

This crystallized non-synchronicity of time entails a form of unfreedom as arbitrary interferences, like the imposition of a certain labor time. But it also exercises control over one’s identity, history, and future, arbitrarily stipulating an unsurpassable horizon (pp. 12–18). Utopian projects build on marginalized temporalities to force upon the present a new horizon, an alternative space of reason, justification, and norms (p. 111). The book aims to diagnose and conceptualize racial injustice as a form of temporal domination in order to formulate resources to create emancipatory forms of life.

Chapter 1 reflects on the central problem of social change and why it is so difficult to build durable constituencies to struggle for racial justice. The book then illustrates, with Du Bois’s work, the idea of non-synchronicity of time. Chapter 3 turns toward the black nationalism of Delany and Garvey as a utopian yearning to open up futures foreclosed by the racial domination of time. Chapter 4 discusses the concept of racial fetishism in Fanon’s writings as the anchoring of past injustice into present societal structures. Chapter 5 focuses on James Boggs’s work, which locates racism in capitalist structures and presents black power as an alternative form of life based on solidarity.

The book engages with the debates around social change, hegemony, and counterhegemony. Paris contributes to these literatures by asking how utopia, as a form of social critique and political imaginary, can produce resources to transform oppressive institutions and social practices. He intervenes in the specific question of why the status quo is so resilient despite recurrent social, economic, and political crises. Paris makes the conceptual distinction between crisis-consciousness and utopian-consciousness. Crisis-consciousness is the lived experience and realization of the unjustifiability of a form of life (pp. 36–38). Utopian-consciousness, instead, is the insight into the structural possibilities of a form of life not yet lived (p. 43). Both forms of consciousness are necessary conditions for social change; people need to grasp the failure of their form of life, but also envision a potential alternative life in order to come into a movement to bring about change.

With the idea of utopian-consciousness, Paris also intervenes in debates over ideology-critique and the attempt to move away from a conception of ideology as a form of manipulation. The idea of utopian-consciousness explains why a form of life may remain in place even though beliefs about the legitimacy of the system may have shifted significantly through the emergence of crisis-consciousness (pp. 29, 30). Instead of ill-will or manipulation, inaction may be the rational response of agents aware of injustice but who see no other plausible way to reorganize social life.

Paris develops this idea further in Chapter 4, where he discusses Fanon and the concept of racial fetishism. He argues that this is not a form of mind control or collective delusion; it is instead an objectified set of justifications that appear to be unassailable (pp. 147, 149, 150). In this sense, racial domination and ideologies are not reducible to forms of cognition, but rather entail structures, practices, memories, and habits sedimented from the past that shape current practice and impose a meaning on society (p. 151). This fetishism, despite being a social product, forecloses the future, ingraining present forms of life even though many people across society know that such a form of life is unjustifiable. To open up the future requires more than asserting the equality of all citizens; it requires a collective estrangement from those forms of life that have been taken to be natural to move toward a structural transformation of society (p. 162).

The need for structural transformation is fleshed out in Chapter 5, which discusses Boggs’s conception of black power and presents racism as anchored in capitalist social relations. According to Boggs, the capitalist logic of accumulation gives justificatory reasons that can only lead to ‘power over’, to exploitation and racialization (pp. 189, 196, 197, 208). The struggle for civil rights is bound to be ineffective in bringing about equality and solidarity because its narrow focus on rights functions within the justificatory space of class society (pp. 198–202). In contrast, black power rejects integration in class society; instead, it forms through cadre organizations an autonomous political space that organizes black citizens around a counterpower based on norms of solidarity (p.212). Black power rejects integration in American, i.e., capitalist, society, but it builds a ground of solidarity across races, including workers from all ethnicities. Boggs casts this project as the self-conscious inheritance of a trans-ethnic revolutionary history from the French Revolution to the anti-colonial movements, making black power a revolutionary ideology instead of an ethnic ideology (p. 214).

Finally, Paris makes a nuanced and insightful contribution to the literature that focuses on the different authors discussed in the book. In doing so, Paris does not compromise between the broader project and an in-depth analysis of individual scholars. For example, Paris contributes to the debate in the Du Boisian scholarship around his conception of leadership, with some arguing that he abandons his focus on the Talented Tenth in later writings, while others argue that he kept this top-down conception of politics throughout his life. Paris acknowledges that Du Bois does have problematic elitist elements in his conception of leadership, but he also makes the case that his early writings, like The Souls of Black Folk, already problematize the vanguard status of the Talented Tenth (p. 84). Paris argues that Du Bois sees the Talented Tenth not as saving the black masses through their education but as being saved by the masses from double consciousness through their cultural practices that express another form of life (p.93).

However, for all the strengths of the book, and despite the thought-provoking reconceptualization of the concept utopia, I remain hesitant whether utopia is the best term to capture the project Paris is referring to. By equating utopia with the ‘bursting asunder of ideological bonds of justification’ (p. 216), Paris ends up talking about something different from utopia instead of uncovering a new truth about this concept. Admittedly, there is something to utopia as the imagination of alternative societies that helps us unlearn our habits of naturalizing the present, but is that not a feature of imagination more generally? What seems unique to utopia is that, if not a blueprint, it does offer a glimpse of the ultimately just society, and that promise of peace, justice, and happiness. Paris is right to argue that theorists, maybe in contrast to artists, should refrain from formulating such an image since it could foreclose alternative forms of life (pp. 2, 220, 222, 223). But is it still utopia?

Furthermore, because Paris emphasizes the open-endedness of his project and the idea that it is grounded in existing subaltern practice, the project bears closer resemblance to Antonio Gramsci’s Sorelian myth—a concrete phantasy that acts on a shattered people organizing their passion into a collective will—or Deva Woodly’s pragmatic imagination—a creative divergence from habitual paths that formulates a bridge between present and future condition—than to what is often seen as utopia (Gramsci, 1971, p. 126; Woodly, 2022, pp. 52, 53). In all fairness, these other concepts have their own limitations. For example, using the term utopia would avoid the connotation of reformism that the term pragmatism carries (p. 35). I hope to hear more from Paris in further works about what sets his concept of utopia apart from these other terms.

But all things considered, whether one calls it utopia, pragmatic imagination, or Sorelian myth, Paris offers a persuasive account of the importance and resources in black political thought of formulating ‘not-yet’ forms of social life in order to free the future from contemporary norms and practices of racial and capitalist domination. Therefore Race, Time, and Utopia is an excellent, thought-provoking book that will be relevant for scholars of ideology, critical theory, and black political thought.