Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction
Justin L. Mann
Duke University Press
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. 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.