Overview

In Breaking the World, Justin L. Mann argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the modern security ambitions of the United States. Foregrounding how the contemporary security state renders Black life insecure, Mann theorizes worldbreaking: speculative narrative, aesthetic, and ethical strategies that Black writers, musicians, and artists employ to unmake the processes by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. He shows how the techniques of worldbreaking in the works of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle MonÁe, and the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes chart the distinction between securitization and Black insecurity. These works illuminate the difference between the antiblackness of state security and the power of Black collectivity. Contending that speculative worldbreaking is a vital part of the Black radical imagination, Mann shows that its destructive strategies can help transform worlds of securitization to worlds of liberation.

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9781478033264

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Reviews

""Mann brilliantly illuminates worldbreaking as a Black feminist practice of refusal. Reading across speculative fiction, comics, film and critical theory, Mann illuminates how Black science fiction breaks the world that is breaking us. A major intervention in Black feminist literary studies that gives us a strikingly rich history of the present, Breaking the World redefines the stakes of speculation and critique.""--Erica R. Edwards, author of, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire ""Breaking the World departs from science fiction and cultural criticism concerned with 'worldbuilding' to instead analyze 'worldbreaking' as a critical and sometimes dystopian response to security discourse. From biopolitics to necropolitics, security emerges as an objective of governmentality under late capitalism that is preoccupied with racialized and gendered/sexual subjection. The role of Blackness under this order makes Black insecurity a valuable source from which to speculate alternative ways of knowing and being.""--andré carrington, author of, Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination

""Mann brilliantly illuminates worldbreaking as a Black feminist practice of refusal. Reading across speculative fiction, comics, film and critical theory, Mann illuminates how Black science fiction breaks the world that is breaking us. A major intervention in Black feminist literary studies that gives us a strikingly rich history of the present, Breaking the World redefines the stakes of speculation and critique.""--Erica R. Edwards, author of, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire

Author Information

Justin L. Mann is Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Northwestern University.

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