"Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From W. E. B. Du Bois to Sun Ra to Octavia Butler, Tavia Nyong'o shows that the end of the world is crucial to the concept of afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities. Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness" --
"Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse is a book I can’t stop talking about. Remember Kafka’s axe that shatters the frozen sea within us? The text in this book is wounding, stabbing, in its deconstruction of anti-black racism, Afro-pessimism and Black counter-speculation. The world needs, now more than ever, writers and readers who embrace prolific differentiation and survivalist self-invention in the speculative estrangement that Afrofuturism affords in an apocalyptic era. Fuck Trump. I hate to be a gate keeper and you may have heard some texts refer to me as the ‘queen of genre-bending.’ I love the playfulness of text, Roland Barthes’ revolutionary thinking in text as a discovery and a continuum in the pleasure of the text. Why constrain anything to a single genre? Afrofuturistic texts can be speculative—encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror and their subgenres. Did you ever consider that Afrofuturism can be more than text? And, as I wrote in Afro-Centered Futurisms in our Speculative Fiction , “embrace art, literature, architecture, music, even style from within Africa and the diaspora, where Afrocentric creatives identify with it and some—like me—embrace it in association with our works.”"
