The Human Bridge from Slavery to Freedom: Nalo Hopkinson’s Critical Hope for Utopia in Midnight Robber

Abstract

By positioning themselves as able to simply ‘evolve out’ of social injustices, utopias turn a blind eye to the conditions that create such injustices in the first place; they ignore history and refuse—inadvertently or not—to engage critically with the present (Smith 48). This uncritical imagining comes from what José Esteban Muñoz calls a “banal optimism” (3). Muñoz contrasts this abstract utopia with the methodology of “educated hope” (3-4): a relational collective’s desire that allows us to visualize a future that transforms current social dynamics and imagines a concrete utopia, or a utopia grounded in history (1, 3, 9). By positioning Midnight Robber’s Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree as “dub-version[s]” of each other (Hopkinson 2), Nalo Hopkinson critiques this banal utopia and articulates potentialities for a better future grounded in history.

This essay was a co-winner of the 2023 Intersectional Social Justice Essay Prize (2nd/3rd year category)