Breaking the World

“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