James Cobb on Tavia Nyong’O’s *Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World*

Tavia Nyong’O’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World brilliantly brings the afropessimist theorizations of Frank Wilderson III, amongst others, into engagement with a wide range of afrofuturist cultural production of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. His interweaving of afrofuturism and afropessimism is a welcome intervention, especially as the two schools of thought often appear at odds. Afropessimism looks backwards. It contemplates how little black positionality has diverged from the time of slavery. Afrofuturism, on the other hand, is invested in the speculative, towards other worlds. It imagines how black life might exist differently. Black Apocalypse presents these endeavors as two sides to the same coin via a shared emphasis on antiblackness. Nyong’O understands antiblackness, the eponymous black apocalypse, to be a reality of the world, as afropessimism contends. If we treat antiblackness as reality then imagined worlds must be created. To put it bluntly, if the afropessimists are right, then we need the afrofuturists.

What is most impactful in his argument, but at once hamstrings these new worlds, is that the speculative must contain antiblackness, the other side of the coin cannot be too far removed. Nyong’O’s work is not an attempt to imagine a world in which the black apocalypse never happened, but rather that these imagined worlds allow us new and necessary avenues through which to contemplate and articulate our actual apocalypse. The artists and authors are not so much writing away the political position of black being but showing how it endures and what this perseverance of antiblackness reveals about our figurations of race. It must also be noted that Nyong’O goes everywhere to find afrofuturists: fiction, film, television, eBay. The scope of his engagement is astoundingly vast.

Nyong’O organizes his intervention around his concept of black counter-speculation. Black counter-speculation is his refinement of the science fiction theorist Darko Suvin’s idea of cognitive estrangement. Cognitive estrangement fosters “critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural aspects of our reality” via imagined worlds that challenge our preconceived notions.[i] Suvin’s concept has been widely useful in the study of science fiction. Nyong’O’s work is to modify Suvin’s idea towards afrofuturism. He rearticulates the “reality” of cognitive estrangement to be antiblackness and he interprets the “worlds that challenge our preconceived notions” as “counter-systems of thought and feeling”.[ii] The modifications are necessary as the fabric of the world that afrofuturists respond to is antiblack. The counter-systems that they propose are to this reality.

Nyong’O’s revelation is that the imagined worlds of afrofuturism are reliant upon the unchanging reality of black social death. The counter-systems created by the speculative artists, instead of postulating an independent post-racial world, demonstrate the degree to which afrofuturism takes with it the antiblack grammar of our own world.

For Nyong’O, the absence of futurity in the antiblackness of American afropessimism makes it useful to queer theorizations of afrofuturism, that forego futurity. In his second chapter he provides a quite useful history of afropessimism as a means of demonstrating its insistence on this lack of progress. Nyong’O distinguishes the contemporary American afropessimism from the earlier African afropessimism of the 1980s. While the African afropessimism was concerned with “the routine failure and disappointments of the independence era”,[iii] the later American afropessimism of Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, and Jared Sexton concerns itself with the enduring legacy of slavery. Nyong’O similarly distinguishes American afropessimism from Cedric Robinson’s black Marxism. As both African afropessimism and black Marxism are based on narratives of progress, they are less useful to Nyong’O.

This differentiation is imperative because it permits his employment of cognitive estrangement, which is only possible if we imagine that we won’t arrive at the speculative world of the text. Wilderson’s afropessimism is divorced from a progressive model: antiblackness is here to stay. Therefore, the cognitive estrangement that occurs is not further down the line in our reality. It is, instead, a completely different option to the world in which we inhabit. He explains, “the concept of disjunctive synthesis permits the nonlinear combination of different elements outside the requirements of meaning and order”.[iv]  This non-linear progression is crucial to black counter-speculation. Nyong’O’s analysis of afropessimism becomes aligned with afrofuturism because black counter-speculation seeks out “a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of what constitutes the world”.[v]

For Nyong’O our analyses of afrofuturistic art must not come through a need for futurity, here he is indebted to Lee Edelman. In his reading of Sylvia Wynter’s “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to my Colleagues”, Nyong’O demonstrates his concern with the ease with which systems of power reproduce structural exclusion.[vi] He argues that systems of meaning will not change because we desire them to. One cannot simply grant humanity. Humanity, for the excluded, must be accompanied via a new conception. If we attempt to incorporate existing (non-humans) into our current conception of the human, the antiblack grammar will continue to exist. Something new must be added. We must speculate on other potentialities for the human. Nyong’O argues that this happened in afrofuturism’s engagement with the term cyberpunk following the “Rodney King urban rebellion”.[vii] The term cyberpunk, though existent, became a means of attempting to name the unnamable. Black authors and filmmakers, such as Ngozi Onwurah, utilized cyberpunk as a means of articulating the future.

What precisely is this future? Though Nyong’O presents phenomenal work in interweaving theorizations of afropessimism and afrofuturism as a means of dismantling antiblackness and heteronormativity, his final chapter again asks us to think of futurity differently. He performs a close reading of the “Fifteen Million Merits” episode of the science fiction television show Black Mirror. In the world of this episode, every person must ride an exercise bicycle in order to produce electricity. The only way out is a televised contest. The black protagonist (Bing, played by Daniel Kaluya) enters the contest and during it, rebels against the society. He gives an eloquent, televised speech against authority. However, society isn’t torn down. Bing is ultimately given his own talk show. He is reincorporated into the system only on a slightly higher level. Nyong’O’s reading presents the ontological trap of Black Apocalypse, “[e]ven when an individual black person escapes the hold of postmodern slavery, or rather, especially when they do so, their prominent visibility within the mediated networks of command and control ensures that the vice grip of power only tightens”.[viii] Nyong’O argues that the antiblack grammar of the world is so foundational that even when it appears to be written out, it is merely repurposed. As we draw our considerations about speculative worlds from our own, these formulations will contain antiblackness, simply reorganized.

Nyong’O’s insight is in understanding that what is most useful in afrofuturism is not the futurity, but rather in the black counter-speculation that is provided so that we can alter the reality of the world in which we exist. He asks, “[w]hat forms of imagination and refusal are required to recast black near futurity as something other than the scapegoat figure for natural shortcomings?”.[ix] I’m not sure that he has an answer for this. I also don’t think that is the task of this work.

The book is a short one and though there is significant critical engagement the work moves quickly through profound ideas. It is useful to those entering either the field of afropessimism or afrofuturism as a means of orienting yourself to key contemporary discussions, and his crosspollination of critical methods broadens the existing debate. Nyong’O poses significant questions that he and other critics will continue to debate.

Nyong’O ultimately urges his reader to not think of the world of afrofuturism as weighted in the success of a particular black future. Instead, he ends the work in a discussion of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series of novels. Notably, Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, never succeeds in her dream of reaching the stars, as the series was never completed. However, the hope instilled by Butler and afrofuturism is less weighted in the actual conquering of space and instead concerned with providing the present with tools to articulate blackness. It is these very tools that Nyong’O provides.

1. Tavia Nyong’O, Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025), 36–37.
2. Nyong’O, 24.
3. Nyong’O, 48.
4. Nyong’O, 56.
5. Nyong’O, 59.
6. Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I. 1, no. 1 (1994): 42-73.
7. Nyong’O, 62.
8. Nyong’O, 70.
9. Nyong’O, 75.