Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World

"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.”"