the colonel’s dream and charles chesnutt’s afrofuturist vision of a utopian south

This essay reads Charles Chesnutt’s final published novel The Colonel’s Dream as an early work of Afrofuturism because of its speculation of the South as the site of a possible utopia for African Americans. The novel’s protagonist, Colonel Henry French, dreams of creating a capitalist utopia in his hometown of Clarendon, North Carolina, where both white Americans and African Americans who are eugenically fit can rise both socially and economically. However, in the end, the Colonel’s dream fails because he finds that the South has not progressed from the psychological hold that racism has on the mindset of white southerners.