Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.

Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to 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. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

About the Author

Tavia Nyong’o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. He is a professor of performance studies at Yale University and a curator at the Park Avenue Armory.

Reviews

"Black Apocalypse argues that there is no fixing the place of blackness and antiblackness in contemporary radical thought. Tavia Nyong’o contends that neither utopian nor nihilistic schools of thought are properly equipped for the possible futures envisioned in black creative practice: futures that are even worse than we dream of in our philosophy."—andré carrington, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

“In Black Apocalypse, Nyong’o puts the African back into afropessimism, while nimbly dancing through several traditions of black thought. He refuses to choose between afrofuturism and afropessimism and proposes that this is a false choice. We can be pessimistic, he insists, but we can and must also acknowledge that the future is black, fierce, and coming soon.”—Jack Halberstam, author of Trans*

"Nyong’o parses urgent questions in contemporary black thought with signal clarity, insight, and elegance. Black Apocalypse is an important and necessary book."—Ekow Eshun, author of In the Black Fantastic

"In Black Apocalypse, Nyong’o brings his deep intellectual rigor to the question of how black futures can be imagined in a world that has already ended many times over for black people. Having had the privilege of working with Tavia at the Park Avenue Armory during my show Assembly, I’ve seen firsthand his ability to engage with radical ideas of black survival, resilience, and imagination. His book resonates with my own explorations of black interiority and afrofuturist utopias, as we both seek to dismantle limiting narratives about black life. Black Apocalypse boldly reframes the apocalypse not as an ending, but as an opportunity for black cultural regeneration and collective liberation—a vision that inspires and challenges artists like myself who aim to decolonize the future."––Dr. Rashaad Newsome, multidisciplinary artist