Black Insecurity at the End of the World

MELUS

“Black Insecurity at the End of the World” examines the sensibility I term “black insecurity” by reading Colson Whitehead’s 2010 novel Zone One against a backdrop of bioinsecurity and police murder of black people. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and uprisings in Ferguson, MO from the same year, when situated in dialogue with Whitehead’s text, show that black insecurity reframes the spatio-temporal notion of survival by unmasking security structures as dead and dying. Engaged from the standpoint of ongoing racial justice protests and stay-at-home conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Black Insecurity at the End of the World” argues that black speculative fictions uniquely expose the false premises of securitization and show that black love is an essential process for unmaking the forces of antiblackness.

Pessimistic Futurism

Feminist Theory

This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn , which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking and writing black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience.

The ‘Vigilante Spirit’

Surveillance & Society

This article details the “vigilante spirit,” a term used by New York Governor Mario Cuomo to describe the seizure and execution of state power by Bernhard Goetz in his attack on four black teenagers in December of 1984. It argues that the vigilante spirit is an expression of thoughts, feelings, and practices that produce threats and then assemble the tools it deems necessary to combat them. It further argues that the vigilante spirit, expressed by Goetz in his attack, was also encoded in various cultural texts produced in the 1980s and uses Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns as an example. By reading these two case studies together, it seeks to explain the cultural politics that underpinned racial violence in the 1980s.

“What’s Your Emergency?”

Feminist Studies

This essay interrogates the phenomenon of white people calling the police on black people. It seeks to situate this phenomenon in the context of increased security and surveillance that have characterized the last forty years of American, and indeed, global life. The essay ends with a rumination on the power of humor to disrupt the potential violence of the policing of public space.

Breaking the World

Breaking the World: Blackness and Insecurity after the New World Order argues that Black speculative fiction is a critical but overlooked archive, containing critical insight into America’s security ambitions since the Reagan administration. Bringing works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin into conversation with security policy and practice, Breaking the World mobilizes the analytic “worldbreaking” in order to reveal how Black sf contends with, subverts, and ultimately reimagines the ways and means of security and securitization in post-Cold War and the War on Terror. For more information, please email me at justin.mann@northwestern.edu.