Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is author or co-editor of numerous award-winning books including Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original(The Free Press, 2009); Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997); and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994), among others.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.