Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction argues that the ‘Anthropocene’ and critiques of it rely on a geo-logic of the ‘cene’ that strands those seeking a different spatial future in the very logic to be un-done. We introduce a transdisciplinary framework, the Black Outdoors, to center attention on the circuitries of Black life-making that have continually emerged in contexts of racialized death. The text is divided into four parts. One addresses the spatial difference that ontology makes. It begins by examining the relational ontology of subSaharan Africa and how transAtlantic slavery transferred and expanded on it in the ‘new world.’ Capitalism and Marxian theories of capitalism are shown to be equally constrained in fathoming relationality’s revolutionary potential. ‘Two’ addresses how survival is premised on reckoning with Black and indigenous pasts and honoring Black knowledges and worldmaking systems. ‘Three’ interrogates how the territorial state and technology-accelerated, late-finance capitalism, mediate spatial futures in the present planetary emergency. ‘Four’ builds on science fiction’s audaciously creative powers of speculation to take the measure of the Anthropocene-in-crisis and its transmutation to different imagined post-Anthropocenes. In these fictional spacetimes, “Anthropos”—the human dimension—would be further defined and conditioned by its creative and destructive relationship to science and thinking machines.

What is the post-Anthropocene?

Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene anymore. We’re in the...the...the...[searching for the right word]...the Anthropocene! (Paul J Crutzen, Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist and Vice Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP); quoted in Caruthers 2019)

Paul Crutzen introduced the ‘Anthropocene’ at the annual meeting of the IGBP in 2000 in Cuernavaca, Mexico. For him and others, it was obvious that a new global stratigraphic sequence was accumulating, one marked by widespread species extinctions, toxic waste, pollutants, and the precipitates of global climate change.¹ Yet, no one was talking about it there. Later that year, Crutzen and his limnologist colleague, Eugene Stoermer, co-wrote the first scientific paper arguing for the formal adoption of the term, published in the IGBP Newsletter. New impetus for thinking this way emerged in 2009 when two geologists formed the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) through the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). It aimed to develop the criteria and collect the data needed to propose to the International Geological Congress, at its 2016 annual meeting in Cape Town, that the term be accepted into the geologic time scale (IGC; part of the IUGS). The proposal was indeed brought to a vote there but failed to pass, the main objection being that a broader range of data was needed to identify a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GBSSP; Carruthers 2019).² In 2019, a supermajority of the AWG membership affirmed in a binding vote that the Anthropocene should be a distinct chrono-stratigraphic unit, defined by a distinct GBSSP, which the AWG would establish using one of the main ‘stratigraphic signals’ of the mid-twentieth century. The AWG has since continued this work, crafting a new, more data-laden proposal that they hope will pass the ICG’s muster at its 2024 annual meeting (Anthropocene Working Group 2020, p. 3).

In 2009, the same year that the AWG formed, critical social thinkers in and outside academia began to question the generality implied by the ‘Anthropocene’. They pointed out that the accumulating devastations were not wrought equally by everyone, every human. Some subsequently began parsing the term to speak more forcefully to issues of power. In 2009, Andreas Malm, then a graduate student, proposed ‘Capitalocene,’ David Ruccio using the term independently in his blog, as did Donna Haraway in public lectures in 2012. In 2016, Jason Moore published his theoretical take on the ‘Capitalocene’ in his edited collection, Antbropocene or Capitalocene? (Haraway 2015, fn 6; Malm 2015; Moore 2016, pp. 5–6). As Moore (2016, p. 6) wrote, “the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies situated capitalist world ecology,” which he and Malm located in the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism accelerated fossil fuel extraction. Other critical wordplays on the ‘Anthropocene’ emerged at this time, such as the ‘Anthrobscene’ (Parikka 2014) and ‘misanthropocene’ (Patel 2013). In 2014, Ethnos editor and anthropology professor, Nils Bubandt, invited four established scholars from different countries and disciplines to Aarhaus University in Denmark to discuss the Anthropocene. One of the questions to address was: “Does Anthropocene scholarship signal the prospect of genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration, or does it sustain conventional hierarchies of knowledge and power?” (Haraway et al. 2016, p. 536). In the conversation that followed, Donna Haraway proposed ‘Plantationocene’ as an alternative to ‘Capitalocene’. The others agreed, noting that ‘Plantationocene’ acknowledges the “systematic practice of relocation for extraction” that took place in relation to slavery and colonization hundreds of years prior to the industrial revolution, which is where the ‘Capitalocene’ aligns (Haraway et al. 2016, p. 557).

Nicholas Mirzoeff began to question and complicate these critiques in 2018 with his essay, ‘White Supremacy Scene.’ He did so, first, by explaining how the boundary-making exercises of the GBSSP carries forward a disciplinal time–space logic in accordance with the racialized and spatialized teleologics of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is when various European thinkers created and organized the world geographically according to hierarchies of ‘race.’ European ‘races’ were placed at the top of these rankings, with certain writers further sub-dividing Europeans by racial rank, the identities of which depended on the provenance of the writer. Thus, each ‘race’ was hierarchically ontologized and mapped onto a similarly ontologized geographical location. Thus, a conceit was presented as a fact of nature, effecting imaginary boundaries with ‘insides’ and ‘outsides.’ This appeal to ‘nature,’ Mirzoeff argues, explained away the devastating effects of enslavement and colonization. As stratigraphy and paleontology developed into new fields, genocide became naturalized as a kind of species ‘extinction,’ nature becoming an arbiter of regard, ‘extinctions’ bearing little moral weight (see also Eze 1997). Mirzoeff points to anxieties that may have impelled forward the drive to contain, namely, increasing slave rebellions and the appearance of abolition movements. His critique thus re-aligns the stratigraphic as tools of coloniality and ‘race.’

Kathryn Yusoff (2018) argues similarly in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by re-theorizing what she calls the geological as a forcefield of power. Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars and other critical Black thinkers, she argues that the geological speaks itself through a ‘grammar’ and praxis centered on private property, enclosure, and colonial extraction. For her, the geological is the logic by which animate and inanimate life is proprietarily bound off and contained, the stratum thus enclosed becoming a stratum for extraction. Blackness is its own stratum. Placed in the domain of the ‘inhuman,’ it is “worked, cultivated, and used up as resource, disappearing personhood into a collective body of properties and as property” (Sirvent 2021, np). Yusoff’s geological critique applies not only to the ‘Anthropocene’ but to those criticisms of it that are relayed by a qualifying prefix, which leave the ‘cenic’ root in place, making it impossible to imagine a different world. Her stratigraphic understanding raises questions about the conditions under which ‘cenic’ interventions have been produced.

While Yusoff eschews what she calls ‘ontodeliverance’ (a way of presuming that ‘diversifying’ who or what holds value might somehow un-do the stratigraphic massiveness of geological undertakings), she continually cites the importance of the relational, which is ontological (below; Nast, Chapters 2 and 3). Unlike property, an ontological singularity that the Law wills into existence as the repository and measure of all value, relationality traffics in the unruly and unquantifiable. What relationality is or values (ontologizes) cannot be counted, contained, or captured. Its fluidity frustrates power and confounds the geological. Indeed, the spatial difference that the relational makes is precisely what the geological is set up to contain. The slave uprisings that Mirzoeff mentions exemplify the liquescence of the relational and the speed with which it can dissolve and overcome.

This appreciation of relationality is foregrounded in an important critique of early normative iterations of the Plantationocene leveled by Black geographies scholars (Davis et al. 2019). It is important in that it identities two toxic theoretical and analytical characteristics that many other ‘cenic’ interventions have carried, what could be described as glibness and provinciality. Glib in that those involved in first elaborating the Plantationocene did not theoretically consider, or consider the theoretical weight of, the racialized violences that generated plantation life. In so doing, they effected a “flattened multispecies ontology—where difference among and between forms of life is obscured” (p. 6), thereby flattening the political imagination, too.³ Its provinciality, meanwhile, comes from the fact that these early writers did not countenance the considerable body of theoretical work on the plantation carried out by Black diasporic thinkers, writers, activists, and creatives. This was especially the case with Black geographical work, which had already theorized the plantation as something much larger than itself (e.g., Woods 1998; McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007; McKittrick 2013; Wynter and McKittrick 2015; see also Pulido 2018). These drawbacks speak to the care-free feathering of privilege’s nest, which has material-symbolic repercussions when its boundaries are (finally) breached. The breach causes surprise rather than identification, those whose lives have long been disappeared appearing newly borne (see Mirzoeff 2017).

The Black Outdoors, Spatial Difference, and the Post-Anthropocene

In 2016, an ‘anti-geological’ understanding of space began taking shape around the idea of the ‘Black Outdoors’. The latter did not emerge to address planetary devastations, critique the Anthropocene, or engage with Yusoff’s ideas of the geological. Rather, it came out of a period of in-community study of how Black life has practiced survival and thrived against the odds. The life-making practices they studied were not about entering and more effectively competing in the world of private property. Rather, they studied worlds where relationality is valued over and against property, its intimacies generating subjectivities and spaces that push through and past the inside-outside divide that possession and enclosure impose. The ‘outness’ of the Black Outdoors thus, at one level, refers to past and present ‘elsewheres’ that exceed the geological ‘grammar’ and praxes of the ‘cenic,’ providing portals onto non-geological spatial futures, or what we call the post-Anthropocene.

The name, the Black Outdoors, comes from the eponymous Working Group and speakers series that took place at the Franklin Humanities Institute (Duke University) during the 2016–2017 academic year. It was meant to help participants think through how the enclosures of coloniality and slavery affected (Black) subjectivity and understandings of freedom, given that Blackness has always figured, “outside the state, unsettled, unhomed, and unmoored from sovereignty?” (Humanities Futures 2016, np).⁴ This, even after the “non-event of [Black] emancipation,” that led to “emergent modalities of servitude in the regime of the subject as defined by property.”⁵

Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman were the first guests in the speakers series (there were four events), two scholars for whom ‘space’ and freedom are intimately linked.⁶ This event was set up as a conversation, which the co-convenors initiated by asking them to relay what the ‘Black Outdoors’ meant to them. Over the next hour, Moten and Hartman talked about the importance of ‘outness’ to critical Black thought, drawing on the substance of their own scholarship. Scenes of subjection can be found, for instance, in Hartman’s insights about the spatial difference that abolitionism effected. As she puts it: “part of what a critical tradition of abolition [does] is produce a thought of the outside while on the inside…the enclosure is brutal but the practice is always about finding a way to produce an outside within that space.” “Always,” because,

the threat has not been eliminated: the terror, the violence, the threat of enclosure, and the vulnerability—the precarity of these makings, I mean…and we continue to make and to create because that’s all we can do…right? And that [creativity] also produces openings, but it’s, you know, there are, there’s the kind of structural container, the forces that are making living hard and impossible and those define so many of the circumstances in which these experiments-in-living unfold. (Humanities Futures 2016, 29.50 min; ellipses indicate pauses)

Hartman’s comments are theoretically in keeping with Moten’s about fugitivity, of which he writes at greater length in Stolen life. For him, fugitivity “is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument” (2018, p. 131). Hartman and Moten also reflected together on the inability of (the English) language to speak to the lived experiences and realities of Black life. Like Yusoff’s elaboration of the ‘grammar’ of the geological, the English language is structured to speak to and of power (below).

In 2020, Duke University Press launched the Black Outdoors book series, curated by the Franklin Humanities Center’s Working Group convenors. Within three short years, thirteen books were published, the authors and contributors coming from across the arts and social sciences. Collectively, the works speak to freedom as a relational practice, in the process pointing to a different reality, one where the ‘future’ is continually manifested when—and wherever—geographies of the relational unfold.⁷

We illustrate this unfolding in Fig. 1.1, a palimpsest map of the ‘Underground Railroad’ and the ‘Green Book.’⁸ The Underground Railroad refers to the pathways effected by fugitive slaves in the US as they found their way to freedom, assisted by others. Its ‘roads’ originated at the place from where fugitives began their journeys and often followed the contours of rivers, canals, bays, and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Destinations varied and included certain northern states and free territories, Native American lands, Canada, and Mexico, with some fugitives leaving the US for the Caribbean (Still 1879; Whitehead 2016).⁹ In reality, however, freedom-seeking followed no single mappable path but was conveyed relationally, the power, vitality, and force of which confounds the geological ‘grammar’ of slave-holding language. Thus, the most remarkable of ‘Outdoors’ is signified as ‘underground,’ a fearful place associated with darkness and death. The ‘railroad’ likewise conceals, burying the possibilities and ‘softness’ of the relational in a colonizing imaginary of steel.

Fig. 1.1

The relational (maternal) pathways of the Underground Railway (1860–65) and Mr. Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book (1947). Their spatiality was not borne by the centralizing mastery of abstraction or the singularity of the pen, but by the secretions of relationality and the pressing immediacies of freedom  (Source Nandhini Gulasingam and Heidi J. Nast)

The second set of lines refers to the circuits of caregiving that grew through Mr. Victor Hugo Green’s annual making and publishing of the Green Book between 1936 and 1967. A World War I veteran and postal worker living in Harlem, Mr. Green reached out to other postal workers and, through them, to still others, with a request: To let him know which roads, restaurants, hotels, motels, guest homes, gas stations, tourism sites, and other business establishments within the boundaries of their respective routes were safe, willing to accommodate, and of potential interest to Black travelers. The result was, The Negro Motorist Green Book, a Black Outdoors whose vital circuitries changed as new information was gathered and as the nature of Jim Crow laws and supremacist customs changed. The mortal threat posed by supremacy is evident in the Greenbook’s tagline: “Carry your Greenbook with you…you may need it…” (ellipses in original).

Documentarian, Yoruba Richen, who interviewed Black travelers for her 2019 documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom (2019) noted that the guidebook afforded travelers not only safety, but recreation, leisure, and enjoyment. In an interview with the Toronto Star (Canada’s largest daily newspaper), Richen notes that:

Everyone I was interviewing talked about the community that the Green Book created: a kind of parallel universe that was created by the book and this kind of secret road map that the Green Book outlined. (in Yeo 2019, emphasis added)¹⁰

The need and enthusiasm for the Green Book can be seen in how quickly its geography expanded: from New York City to the nation and, eventually, to parts of Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, not unlike the internationalization of the Underground Railroad. We emphasize geography, here, as the elevation of Black Geographies has influenced our approach to curating a conversation with the Black Outdoors.

As a subfield of the discipline of Geography, the contemporary emergence of Black Geographies can be traced to the early 2000s, where scholars primarily located in the United States and Canada began having conversations at meetings of the American Association of Geographers. These conversations are signaled, in some ways, through the 2007 publication of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods. The volume brought together scholars from across geography and Black studies to engage with spatial politics and Blackness. From this (now) canonical text, a new generation of scholars have taken up Black Geographies as a theoretical framework and methodological guide in research with Afro-Diasporic populations. That said, the field of Black Geographies has even earlier roots in research that engaged the lived experiences of Black people in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to thar time, scholarship in Geography failed to take Black placemaking or spatial knowledge production seriously (Donaldson 1969; Wilson and Jenkins 1972).

The emergence of Black Geographies must be signaled as a political project that centers and amplifies Black epistemologies and ontologies, drawing attention to the conditions under which Black populations made place and engage space. Such a project diverges from the approach commonly undertaken by “geographies of race,” which have tended to focus only on practices of anti-Blackness through colonization, displacement, dispossession, erasure, and epistemicide. In some forms, such geographic studies have resulted in monolithic productions of Blackness and a reduction of Blackness to enclosures (Noxolo 2022). It is at this place where Black Geographies and the Black Outdoors converge. The conceptual linkages between the two invite insurgent thinking and ‘doing’ around the pluralities of Blackness and the production of space outside of environmentally deterministic renderings. From Black agrarianism (McCutcheon 2019) to maroon geographies across the Americas (Bledsoe 2017; Winston 2021; Moulton 2023) and negotiations in and through the plantation’s afterlives (Purifoy 2021; Bruno 2023), from political activities in Europe (Hawthorne 2022) to respite and joy (Allen 2020), use of Black Geographies and the Black Outdoors invite revolutionary considerations of the production of Blackness and place.¹¹

Spatial futures: Difference and the post-Anthropocene invites readers to use the Black Outdoors to understand the spatial futures insinuated throughout the text rather than as a discursive center point. The contributors come from several sub-disciplines in geography and from fields outside the discipline. The chapters are bundled into four sections, each curated by one of the co-editors under a respective theme. We introduce the themed sections, in turn, below.

Relational Ontology, Death, and the Maternal

The Black Outdoors offers conceptual scaffolding for thinking about the world beyond the geological and stratigraphic. Its openness to the dynamism and expansiveness of life-making reveals its unique ontological capacity. Ontology is the study of what is understood to exist or be in the world and, thus, how value is constituted, apprehended, recognized, and relayed. Australian Aboriginal peoples historically ontologized (constituted and valued) the world through lineage-specific songlines or dreaming tracks. These epic event-stories relay how the ancestors of a lineage came relationally to be through engaging with the world along a specific and long geographical transect (line). The stories make plain that it is relationality itself that is existentially valued, not the individual (human or nonhuman; Aboagye 2022). This kind of beingness is referred to as a relational ontology, a relationality that only certain linguistic frameworks can carry or call to order, what Nast designates the mSymbolic (Chapter 1; van Inwagen 2011; de Freitas 2020; Attoe 2022; Oyěwùmí 2015).

Lineage members (until the colonial era) reconstituted the world each time they sang and walked their songline. The relationalities established through word, moment, movement, and place generated a universe that colonial time–space abstractions could not fathom or reach. When the British colonial government built several north–south-oriented fence lines between 1901 and 1907 to keep the rabbits (that they had introduced) from migrating into western Australian farm and pasture lands, it did not simply introduce a barrier (Rabbits introduced 2022; The rabbit-proof fence 2021). Rather, it cut into the relational ontological realities of the songlines, severing lineages from the fullness of their worldly relational existence; the barrier wiped out what is, the nature of its obliteration marked by where, along the transect, the songline was cut, and which part of a lineage was stranded on which side of the barrier (Chatwin 1987; see also Garimara 2002).

The Black Outdoors is powerful because it opens back onto relational ontology, even if the latter is not spoken as such. The relational traces of the Underground Railroad, like the Aboriginal songlines, were lived, hand passing intimately over hand, creating pathways that naturally exceed the geologic of survey and map. An enslaved person engaged the persons and paths that promised the most life, each point along the way subject to change, in the process changing all those involved. The insistence of Black relationality speaks to the dynamism, breadth, resilience, and long durée of Black creativity in the face of supremacy and death. This has meant, as Black geographer Katherine McKittrick (2017, p. 97) puts it, that:

black is in the break, it is fantastic, it is an absented presence, it is a ghost, a mirror, it is water, air; black is flying and underground; it is time-traveling, supernatural, inter-planetary, otherworldly; it is in between the lines and it is postcolonial; black is bulletproof and magical and in every dark corner; black is social death, afro-pessimist, afro-optimist, afrocentric, afropunk, afrofuturist, soulful, neosoul, blues; it is negritude, postslave, always enslaved; black is like who/black is like me; black is everywhere and everything; it is make-believe and magic. Black is fantastic.

Approaching the Black Outdoors through its relational ontological capacities raises a slew of new questions about the nature of property’s un-doing, not least historical geographical ones. How, for instance, do these capacities compare to those of various indigenous groups, past and present. This is of particular interest in relation to subSaharan Africa, where indigenous groups honed relationality for more than 100,000 years. And where it continued to be elaborated tens of millennia after H s sapiens out-migrated into Eurasia ~70,000 years ago. How is it that farming and pastoralism in Eurasia defeated this relationality linguistically, whereas in the subcontinent they did not? Was the intensity of relationality that emerged within the Black diaspora an effect of survivalist necessity, alone? Or did the millions of those enslaved bring with them the relational linguistic resiliencies of subSaharan life, which were subsequently, diasporically changed and re-worked (Chapters 2 and 3)? Such questioning suggests that there is a difference that relationality makes, something foregrounded in the BlackSpace Manifesto (Chapter 4). The New York-based urbanist collective, BlackSpace, created the latter as an experimental platform and pedagogy for cultivating anti-racist, relational design values, principles, and aims. Lastly, how might the Black Outdoors speak to other exploitative and repressive contexts, like those that obtained in communist (Maoist) and post-socialist China or under conditions of financialization in the US (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively)? The chapters in Part 1, “Relational Ontology, Death, and the Maternal”, address these and other questions.

Chapter 2 “Part One. The maternal ≠ {Mother + Child}: Relational ontology and the mattering of Black lives (planetary pasts),” presents some of the empirical ground for considering how anti-Black racism and capitalism, on the one hand, and the mattering of Black lives, on the other, might be theorized as part of a prehistoric struggle of ontological and Symbolic proportions in which the Saharan Desert and Congo River Basin figured largely. Connecting ontology (‘being’) to the Symbolic (language, cultural practices) allows for a radical re-imagining of what value is, how it is carried, and what makes value valuable. Together with Chapter 3, it addresses two ontologically inflected Symbolics. The first is a relational ontology (or relationality) whose corresponding mSymbolic emerged out of the eco-relational intensities of subSaharan hunting and gathering (HG) life more than 100,000 years ago through an imaginary of the ‘bodily maternal’.¹² Second is a singularizing (anti-maternal or nonrelational) Symbolic that appears in Eurasia (and, later, North Africa) during the Neolithic era (10,000–4500 BCE), as intensive farming is invented and becomes important. It was fed by ‘paternity-seeking anxieties organized through  an imaginary of possession. Chapter 2 centers on Eurasia and how and why ‘paternity-seeking’ set itself against the mSymbolic and ‘bodily maternal’ imaginary. In so doing, it connects paternity-seeking to two sorts of violence, maternal alienation and enclosure. These manifested as domestic violence as early as 6000 years ago and, later, through maternal veiling, seclusion, and monogamy for women-only (MFW,O), all of these later elaborated further and codified into written (cuneiform and hieroglyphic) Law. These violences worked ontologically to cut the bodily maternal imaginary into two imaginary possessable parts, {Mother + Child}, collapsing the open armature of maternal ‘holding’ into enclosures of ‘containment’ in the Name of the Father. The rest of Chapter 2 explores how slavery found itself across Neolithic Eurasia (and, later, North Africa), extending paternity-seeking’s ambit and effectively doubling maternal alienation, represented by a doubling of the brackets containing the binary: {{Mother + Child}}. Such doubling is partly discernible in the simultaneous making across Eurasia of ranked categories of Mother, such as those of wife, concubine, and slave. Supremacy used ‘race,’ Nast argues, to leverage the doubled alienation of slavery, in turn. Blackness was used in Atlantic and transAtlantic slavery, first, to negate the very existence (value) of the bodily maternal from which it derived its wealth and, secondly, to disavow that that negation had taken place. Nast symbolizes this coupling of ‘negation and disavowal’ by placing a bar through the binary sum of the unequal equation, making plain the sadism of this racialized accumulation, {{Mother + Child}}.

Chapter 3, “Part Two. The maternal ≠ {Mother + Child}: Relational ontology and the mattering of Black lives (planetary futures),” explores how the mSymbolic grew and traveled through subSaharan African farming and pastoral contexts and its resiliency in the face of two millennia of slavery, introduced systematically from outside the subcontinent as early as 500 BCE. It suggests, further, that the enormous numbers, geographical concentration, and cultural diversity of those enslaved through the Atlantic and transAtlantic slave trades, in particular, created conditions that paradoxically worked against bare life and death, pushing forward a diasporic mSymbolic that grew beyond the eco-particularities of lineage and language. Here, relational ontology becomes its own horizon of intelligibility, expanding the signifying capacities of the mSymbolic and inaugurating spatial relational futures beyond the ‘cene.’¹³

In “The BlackSpace Manifesto: ‘Living’ Black liberatory futures” (Chapter 4), Peter Robinson, a Working Board member of BlackSpace, shows just how granular and expansive maternal-love-making can be. A New York-based Collective of Black urbanist practitioners and activists that started organizing in 2015, BlackSpace works to un-do an urban system that, since slavery, has rendered ‘ordinary’ the segregation, warehousing, and abandoning of Black life. BlackSpace ‘un-makes’ and ‘makes’ as magically as it does in part because of the formidable professional, activist, and life skills and experiences its members have in urban and urban-adjacent arenas, like: Planning (social impact, community, equity-centered transit-related, urban and regional); community storytelling, arts and design; education and pedagogical innovation; abolitionist work; public defense; and more. This, and the fact that many of its members have worked in nonprofit and state sectors, means that BlackSpace, as a relational collective, knows where the fissures and gaps of the private propertied, regulatory order of things lie and, thereby, where dyadic (transformative) love and care might be cultivated and grown.

At one level, the ‘lack’ designed into (and lodged within) the city’s fabric constitutes a spatial ‘outside’ to those who have long been comfortably (and nonrelationally) ensconced in the ‘within.’ Yet, the spatiality of this ‘outside’ has its own contradictory presence and force, illegible to an ‘inside’ insulated by meanness and disregard. The ability of BlackSpace to creatively maneuver through these spatial contradictions represents a certain clarity about ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘how’ to relationally un-do what nonrelationality has done. BlackSpace’s un-doings widen the interstices of, or openings within, the regulatory matrix, from here de-ontologizing private property and thus its Symbolic force. BlackSpace’s agenda might sound idealistic if not for the dozens of transformational connectivities that BlackSpace have already made and continue to make with and through other Black creatives and change-makers in and outside. New York City Its successes speak to how BlackSpace scaffolds the relational organizationally, its members working with each other (and others) to enact and practice relational change wherever opportunities present themselves.

The BlackSpace Manifesto is a ground-breaking part of this scaffolding, not only because of what it says but because of its experimental visual form. The fourteen values are written out on a single page, for instance, conveying their coherence in a way easily seen by any public, like the visual immediacy of a poster. The values are not listed in a single (linear) column, enumerated, and/or ranked. Instead, each one is disposed spatially to convey their mutual integrity. Placed alongside each value is a Sankofa-like glyph, created in-community, intimating in figural ways how that value might be relationally imagined and accomplished. These innovations make tangible BlackSpace’s commitment to a relational aesthetic and symbolic whose pleasures exceed those of the nonrelational, which come from seeking to pull the dyadic apart. This pleasuring helps to explain why many Black urbanists outside New York City have reached out to BlackSpace from cities like, Atlanta, Chicago, Oklahoma City, and Indiana, cities that by 1922 were key to the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence.¹⁴ BlackSpace calls these groups, “Cousins,” describing them on their website as “the extended family of BlackSpace. They localize the (un)learnings of our Manifesto.”¹⁵

Chapter 3, “Remaindered commons: Notes toward post-socialist futures in China vis-à-vis the Black Outdoors,” by Liujia Tian, introduces the idea of a remaindered commons, a relational space of life-making not unlike the Black Outdoors. Tian devised the remaindered commons to address what he finds are theoretical shortcomings in mainstream scholarly notions of ‘the commons’. These latter are, in Yusoff’s (2018) and Mirzoeff’s terms (2018; above), ‘stratigraphic’ or ‘geological’ in that they gain intelligibility through ‘grammar and praxes’ that divide the world into objective resource blocs, whether these be natural, economic, social, cultural, and so on. Along these divisive lines, debates about the commons have centered on characterizing resources; identifying who holds ‘the rights’ to them; and/or determining how a resource should be distributed. All of these concerns gain discursive standing through ideas of property and ownership that have allowed for questions to be raised about the kind of property that the commons should be—communal, collective, or public. The feminist theorist, Silvia Federici, has added to these debates by arguing that such resources be assessed and distributed according to the exigencies of reproduction rather than production (see Bollier and Helfrich 2012).

For Tian, these resource- and rights-based understandings of the commons are too limiting. They rely on a geologic of power that has already decided what exists, what needs to change, and the most important actors involved. In this way, debates center on which substances are to be included in the ‘commons,’ where its boundaries lie, and contestations over who uses it and how it is used, for instance, water use by the state versus private interests or indigenous communities. Discussions about un-doing power are thus entrained and contained within a stratigraphy of the nonrelational, keeping the force of relationality illegible, in check. The remaindered commons, by contrast, speaks of an ontological and psychical register where the excesses of the relational are made and homed. While this openness to relationality is shared by BlackSpace and the Black Outdoors, its bodily, material, and geographical contradictions are significantly different, something that Tian explores through two case studies of workers in socialist and post-socialist China, respectively.

The first involves impoverished rural women who, in the 1970s, worked in a state-run tin mining collective, their lives encumbered by the cruelties of Chairman Mao’s (1949–1976) rural initiatives. A little more than twenty years earlier, two million rural landlords had been publicly beaten to death in the name of land reform, with 36 million farmers dying of famine several years later due to agricultural reforms borne by Mao’s narcissism (Jisheng 2012). The second case study focuses on women who migrated from impoverished rural areas to Shenzhen (one of China’s first four Special Economic Zones opened in 1979; SEZs) to take up highly surveilled, hyper-exploitative factory work (Zhou 2020; Tregenna and İzdeş 2020). For Tian, workers in both instances were freed and pleasured through spatial and bodily intimacies sparked in recognizing and tending to the immediacies of one another’s needs. Tian finds the remaindered commons in the shared excessiveness of these intimacies (unplanned and generative), which lie outside the discursive contours of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction,’ where reproduction refers to the social and biological processes that make a mode of production intelligible and normatively good. The term ‘remaindered’ draws attention to that which remains after the nonrelationality of productivist-reproductivist thinking is subtracted from the whole of life-making.

Tian’s interest in remaindering is intimate, personal. An anarchist and queer activist whose existence troubles the Chinese state, he has had to recognize, develop, and grow the freedoms of relationality, seeding spatial futures in the aporias of power. Yet, the kinds of repressions against which the remaindered commons comes into relief are significantly different from those of ‘race.’ The excesses documented in his case studies, while gesturing toward the post-Anthropocene, do not have the immense metacultural capacity, global diasporic presence, long durée, furrowed spatiality, or coherence that ‘race’ has given the Black Outdoors and BlackSpace. Tian explores this difference theoretically, creating an opening for international and transnational conversations about the contradictions through which relational ontology works. At one level, Tian’s case studies describe impulses toward freedom that flash onto flattening landscapes of power. Against the historical force of Mao and the use of the workplace as a site of (state) repression and surveillance, Tian provides a different ontological view of freedom. His work invites us to question the relationship between politics and relationality under different cultural and material.

The ground-breaking aesthetic practices of the renowned Beijing- and New York-based artist, Cai Guo-Qiang (whose work Tian refers to), are instructive in this regard. Cai ‘paints’ mainly with gunpowder and fireworks (densely encapsulated gunpowder), media whose energetics, following ignition, can be directionally engaged but never controlled. The fact that fireworks were invented and used widely in ancient China gives their explosiveness a cultural currency for Cai to use otherwise. In this case, as a vital, spectacular force whose excessiveness and pleasures contradict the aesthetic strictures of the Chinese state (Sky Ladder 2016; Schama 2021). The pedagogical potential of Cai’s ‘paintings,’ borne by contradictions that they also enunciate, remain largely opaque to a state inured to spectacle (Sky Ladder 2016). The sparks of life to which Tian’s documentarian work speaks may not be as spectacular as those with which Cai engages on canvas, but they are similarly instructive. Both help in imagining the radical possibilities that relational ontology holds, even if, for now, it is recognized in glimpses and the seemingly innocuous prevue.

Chapter 5 “The necromancy of derivative violence: finance capitalism, planetary pandemics, and speculative wagers on death in the Anthropocene” by Jim Tyner explores how the life insurance industry in the 1980s began re-assembling and expanding a profit-seeking logic tied to the alienation of policy owners from their death benefits. While initially this seeking was the ken of insurers, in the 1990s corporate interests (from banking to retail and industry) entered the game. Their drive to alienate policyholders from the ‘value’ of their own deaths resonates with insurance practices associated with the transAtlantic slave trade where a special instrument was invented to indemnify those with interests in slave ‘cargo’ shipments crossing the Atlantic to the US.¹⁶ In the latter instance the slave was never the intended beneficiary: The ‘owner’ received the death benefit should the enslaved person die en route. This logic would be closely approximated as corporations entered the insurance arena.

The insurance products brought to market in the 1980s involved a third party—an insurer who worked through legal means to alienate the ‘insured’ from their own death benefits to claim them as their own, instead. The earliest such initiatives preyed on policyholders facing imminent death, the quid pro quo of which was as follows: The third-party insurer offers to buy an individual’s life insurance policy for a certain amount—a cash settlement—proposing that the payment will help the individual pay their medical bills. If the offer is accepted, the third party agrees to continue paying the insurance premiums until the original owner dies, at which time the third party gets the benefit. Tyner reviews the various products through which this necro-logic advanced. The first such product brought to market, for instance, was the viatical, an instrument designed to take advantage of the high mortality rate of gay men with AIDS in the early years of the crisis. The thinking was as follows: Those infected died soon after diagnosis; they had no children; and needed cash to pay for medical care and outstanding medical bills. The state and other private interests were implicated in this scheme to the extent that they initially showed little to no concern for the population involved. He refers to this and later conjurings as necromancy.

The viatical was lucrative because of the enormous scale of the crisis and the immediacy of death (mandated to be less than 24 months), both factors minimizing risk. The secondary market that emerged through this actuarial calculus did not disappear after anti-viral drugs entered the market and significantly reduced mortality and, hence, insurance profit rates. Rather, it began mining medical records to find other policyholders with similar risk-of-death characteristics, finding them in those advanced in age or suffering from the end stages of cancer. The various parties involved—whom Tyner refers to as necromancers—also began innovating along similar lines, creating ‘life settlement’ policies, for instance, for those expected to live for another 6–7 years, and for those wealthy seniors whose large death benefits were large enough to make up for any additional years a company might have to pay premiums (viaticals.org 2014). Despite the considerable profits, there were costs involved in researching potential candidates, funding cash settlements, and paying insurance premiums.

One workaround came in the form of the corporately owned life insurance (COLI) policy, which incentivized corporations to become a third party that, rather than preying on those facing imminent death, preyed on their own workers, irrespective of their blue, white, or grey collar status. This is because the COLI is taken out on rather than for employees, an investment that, prior to regulatory reforms, was made without employee knowledge. By unencumbering the corporation from having to think about worker wellbeing, the COLI deepens the power of nonrelationality, leading to a profit-seeking calculus that naturally bends toward accelerating worker death; for instance, by offering blue collar workers little to no health insurance or otherwise rendering their lives bare. Between 1993 and 1995, Walmart took out nearly 350,000 such policies, its excesses immediately prompting a series of reforms. Despite these, COLIs still exist and are highly profitable. The corporation not only collects the deceased employee’s death benefits—positioning itself as third party and beneficiary; it doesn’t have to pay a cash settlement or taxes on its death benefit ‘earnings.’ In some states, moreover, a corporation can deduct from their gross earnings the insurance premiums they regularly pay out as well as the interest paid to the banks or insurers that loaned them monies to purchase the policies. The actual settlement monies, meanwhile, become capital as they are ploughed into future worker’s COLI policies, benefits, and training (Lamb 2004; Burns 2014).

Tyner’s larger point is to show how necromancy has been psychically internalized. He demonstrates this anecdotally in relation to a lawsuit brought by a migrant worker against plant managers in a Tyson Foods pork processing facility in Iowa that employs mostly Spanish-speaking migrant workers, many of them undocumented. The stage was set when Trump signed an executive order within the first month of the pandemic, requiring meat processing plants to remain open. This, combined with Tyson’s decision to not modify the production layout, despite it having demonstrably heightened viral transmission rates, forced workers to absorb untenably high levels of risk or be fired. A high percentage of workers sickened, and many died. Tyson plant managers had vigorously denied worker risks, their cynicism belied by them studiously staying away from the plant. Within the space-making of this distance, the managers pleasured themselves, starting an informal cash-buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool to wager on the number of workers they thought would test positive for the virus. Their necromantic behavior is emblematic of the broader death-seeking impulses that work to pry apart and feed off the intimacies borne by grief and bereavement and the desire to care for others.

The future of labor organizing is unclear, its strategies having traditionally drawn on the same nonrelational ontology out of which capitalism emerged. With the neo-industrialization of former colonized lands and the rise of finance capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, different labor ‘kinds’ proliferated, creating a confusing array of colorized-collar-inflected identities. Alongside industry’s changing white and blue have emerged the grey, pink, red, orange (prison), and more (Gibson-Light 2022; Paliszkiewicz and Varoglu 2023; Cao 2023, pp. 103–104). Tyner ends his chapter by looking at HEAL Food Alliance (Health Environment Agriculture Labor), a BIPOC coalition-building organization founded in 2017 that now includes 60 core organizations and over two million persons. HEAL’s leadership is young, innovative, and energizing. The change it envisions “is not yet politically possible”, which means that “it is up to us to make it so.” One way they have begun working toward ‘making it so’ is an innovative School of Political Leadership, whose graduates are expanding ways of imagining and practicing relational change, an approach that builds on Audrey Lorde’s insight that, “[t]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 2018).

This emphasis on relationality is seen in its 2020–2022 three-year plan, “Realizing our vision for transformation,” where HEAL writes of the relational deficits fueling planetary death, something that cannot be solved by focusing on labor ‘rights,’ alone. It requires building up the relational capacities of life-making and, hence, what relational pleasure and power looks like. Presently, US governmental policies, “including cross-border economic policies, legislations that define access to credit, loans, and land, education, and healthcare, and laws that govern punitive systems—use ‘divide and conquer’ tactics” to “continue to oppress Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).” The breadth of the challenges requires working toward relational healing and repair that will “restore right relationships with the land, labor, and each other.” HEAL’s choice of where they work is significant in this respect in that food is where human relationality first begins. Food, HEAL writes, “is our most intimate and powerful connection to each other, to our cultures, and to the earth,” making it the most natural of places to begin “healing our bodies, our economy, and our environment.”¹⁷

Section “Relational Ontology, Death, and the Maternal” proposes that relational power and ‘value’ are vectors of the ontological. This can be seen in historic and diasporic terms in Chapters 2 and 3 and in relation to the stratigraphic constraints of the ‘commons’ and ‘labor,’ as explored in Chapters  4 and 5. Whereas in the nonrelational Symbolic, ‘difference’ is categorical, in the relationality of the mSymbolic, ‘difference’ emerges as an effect of the dyadic; a terrain of surprise, excess, the generational, and the generative. The metacultural workings of the post—‘Anthropocene’ in the Black Outdoors suggest spatial futures whose differences manifest as an ontological unfolding in keeping with Octavia Butler’s understanding that, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” (Parable of the Trickster, unpublished).

How I Got Over: On Black Tomorrows

Verse

Verse How I got over How I got over You know my soul look back and wonder How I got over … Clara Ward

Black placemaking in the Americas (and truly, globally) is entangled with empire. Empire’s practices from the fifteenth century onward have not ceased to exist, of course. They have changed formed but have not changed function. The creation of difference is one way to trace shifting forms of imperialism. The imposition of Blackness as a node of constraint and regulation, and its accompanying anti-Blackness, has caused the Earth to be restructured in profound and present ways. The exploitation of Blackness through kidnapping, theft, rape, murder, and other crimes that have yet to be adjudicated has been, at times, satiated through spatio-temporal civic rights with little to no accountability to the ways in which those rights were granted in limited/partial ways.

As evidence, on December 23, 2013, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted a resolution that declared 2015–2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent. The UN’s Proclamation “to further underline the important contribution made by people of African descent to our societies and to propose concrete measures to promote their full inclusion and to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance” (United Nations 2013, np). This Proclamation follows the 2011 International Year of People of African Descent, after which the International Decade, which recognized African-descended people who are “a specific victim group who continue to suffer racial discrimination as the historic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade” (United Nations 2011, np). The decision of the UN to recognize the atrocities that African-descended people have and continue to face provides an opportunity to engage with world endings.

The concept of world endings represents the ruptures in life and placemaking undergirded by the last six centuries of European colonization in the making of difference. World endings include the theft of land and resources, the intentional violent erasure of indigenous epistemologies of non-Europeans all over the planet, including language, ecological practices, religion, and kinship, and innumerable practices of dispossession. In a discussion on crisis and abolitionist horizons by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, authors of the insurgent text Rehearsals for Living, Maynard remarked,

As we have the increased droughts and hurricanes, Black people being slaughtered in the streets and in their homes, and indigenous land defenders arrested for defending their homelands, something that was important for me to sit with, too, was that there are some world endings that I'm comfortable with. That I'm comfortable with the end of the world white supremacy built. That I'm comfortable with the end of the world that racial capitalism built. And thinking about all the other kinds of world-makings that had been partially eclipsed but never quite, right? Where we saw these continual ongoing insistences that we could build forms of organizing life and land otherwise. (Haymarket Books 2022)

We who are living in the Anthropocene are being met with questions of catastrophe on a nearly daily basis. Importantly, though, Black people have long imagined new worlds. While hegemonic archives have largely failed to account for Black world visioning (Roberts and Butler 2022), we can rely on Black cultural expressions and traditions of explanation to explore these ideas. Among these expressions are Black faith traditions. I am thinking particularly about those traditions created from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Americas and elsewhere and the practice of merging traditional religions in “new world” spaces and indigenous lands. Black faith traditions reckon with how to navigate the current world, much of which is rooted in the struggle created by anti-Blackness with globalization. Even more, these traditions have rendered futures, constructing lands through discourses of heavens, other worlds, and next lives. World-renowned gospel artist Clara Ward composed the hymn “How I Got Over,” in which she described reflections on an experience of struggle and where she found strength:Verse

Verse I'm gonna sing somewhere ‘round the alter (oh yes) I'm gonna shout all my troubles over Lord, I got to thank You Thank You for being so good to me

Made more popular by the version recorded by gospel giant Mahalia Jackson, the song imagines a new world, in fact referring to the place as “New Jerusalem,” that leaves behind crying “in the midnight hour” and being tired of the old world. The description of the new world includes descriptions of how the new world will look and feel. Such imagining of world endings and new worlds provides an opportunity to think through Black views of the Anthropogenic world.

The built and natural environments we live in today are so because of human activities in the decades and handful of centuries that came before us. More explicitly, our environments are as they are because of racial capitalism, European imperialism, and global domination. These processes functioned because they created violently enforced global hierarchies, inequalities in the form of race, class, gender, and sexualities as well as land, labor, and capital. Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us that “inequality requires capitalism and racism enshrines it” (Antipode Foundation 2020). Her definition of racism—“the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies” (2002, p. 261)—is powerful. Indeed, our built and natural environments are what they are because of the “exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”

So, if the built and natural environments we live in today are so because of systems of exploitation and domination, what is possible for us in imagining spatial futures? What does it mean to make new worlds at the end of current worlds? We suggest that if we orient our perspective to the Black Outdoors, Black Geographies, and Black Ecologies, we can engage systems of investigation and explanation indicative of indigenous ways of knowing. This is what Clyde Woods calls blues epistemology:

The blues tradition of investigation and interpretation is one of the central institutions of African American life. It is a newly indigenous knowledge system that has been used repeatedly by multiple generations of working-class African Americans to organize communities of consciousness. The blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction. It was used to confront the daily efforts of plantation powers to erase African American leadership and the memory of social progress. It produced a new type of African American intellectual through a system of teachers, professors, apprentices, and schools. The blues and its extensions are actively engaged in providing intellectually brutal confrontations with the "truths" of working-class African American life. It draws on African American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working-class communities facing severe fragmentation. This tradition has been engaged in the production and teaching of African American history from its inception. Many of the subsequent African American cultural traditions can be viewed as movements designed to revitalize the blues ethic of social justice. (Woods 2005, p. 1008)

Woods takes up blues epistemology first in his 1998 monograph Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. In the wake of a new crisis in 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, he revisits the blues tradition of explanation to critique the “neoplantation development tradition,” which elucidates “bonds of dependency” resulting in overlapping and compounding systems of oppression and containment for Black communities of New Orleans. The urgency by which Woods positions blues epistemology and indigenous ways of knowing is important to center in the wake of new worlds.

For geography to accommodate “indigenous ways of knowing” requires transforming and shifting power relations to account for the landscapes of white supremacy and imperialist practices that shape epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical climates. The critique of the Anthropocene and the imagining of futures requires us to question freedom and agency differently alongside spatializing new worlds. Black geographies is positioned to continue this critique of “neoplantation politics.” Katherine McKittrick conceptualizes plantation futures as “the sites through which particular forces of empire (oppression/resistance, black immortality, racial violence, urbicide) bring forth a poetics that envisions a decolonial future” working to “enable a new discursive space” (p. 5).

As part of a longer intellectual tradition elucidated by Black geographies, the chapters in this section unsettle hierarchies and spaces of domination to advance possibilities of Black tomorrows. Provocations on the Anthropocene have failed to account for the exploitation of Black people—their forced displacement and bodily domination central to capitalist formations and the focus of white supremacist maintenance. Even in the wake of epistemological guttings of Black ways of knowing, methods of Black placemaking and survival have been maintained despite the enduring hierarchical formations of race and the plantation. As such, the authors in this section engage with the inventive work of the unthought. The authors’ work can be traced along three overlapping themes. First, the authors emphasize Black ontologies in the “out there somewhere.” Put differently, the chapters invite us to consider what varying kinds of world endings and “absented presences” mean for Black Tomorrows. For example, Bowden draws attention to the ongoing battles over white supremacist iconography to do so, challenging these products of colonization and the structures of racial capitalism as a result. Haynes draws orients us to absences in the climate crisis conversations and uses climate fiction to guide our communicating spatial futures. Hyman turns to geospatial technologies as a tool of critical geography that can be paired with Black Geographies to amplify the livingness of enslaved people on the journey to freedom.

Second, their collective conversation considers the ways in which galvanizing Black ways of knowing is necessary for impending spatial survival. Hyman does this by using Black geographic networks to trace Black movement and mobility across the Great Dismal Swamp, a coastal plain ecology that blurs the political border of the U.S. states of Virginia and North Carolina, with the Atlantic Ocean as their eastern neighbor. Bowden does so through considering coalitional partnerships among Black and indigenous activists. Finally, the authors reflect on the pasts and presents of Black world-making, intersecting with indigeneity and queerness. Haynes uses cli-fi that emphasizes the intersections of queerness and Blackness as a system of explanation, understanding that imagining spatial futures is impossible without such a centering. Bowden does so by emphasizing the relationship between Black and indigenous activists in New Orleans as they approach decolonial memory work in city. By revisiting the Black and Indigenous pasts—through monuments, lands, and literatures—the invitation to consider the lesson of Black people’s ontological methods persists.

Before closing, we want to briefly nod toward the ways that the current moment has reshaped opportunity, in the wake (Sharpe 2016), for Black public space, as Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (2007) argued, “Black geographies will play a central role in the reconstruction of the global community” (p. 6). In September 2020, news outlets began reporting on a group of people organized under the name The Freedom Georgia Initiative (TFGI). The group purchased 97 acres of land in central Georgia with the purpose of creating a planned Black community.

In “the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation” (Sharpe 2016, p. 5), TFGI emerges as an opportunity to challenge the parameters of the current/continuing multi-sited struggle for Black liberation. Planned Black communities and Black towns are not new phenomena (Rose 1965; Purifoy 2019; Slocum 2019) but their origins and imaginaries have similar trajectories. The purchasing of 97 acres of land in Toomsboro, Georgia, as TFGI has done is with the intentional centering of a Black sense of place (McKittrick 2011). The organizers note:

The Freedom Georgia Initiative was established out of an extreme sense of urgency to create a thriving safe haven for black families in the midst of racial trauma, a global pandemic, and economic instabilities across the United States of America brought on by COVID-19. Calls are being made for police reform while cries for justice and reparations ring out on the streets. Communities are working together to feed food-insecure families, provide masks, and direct payments to families in need. We wanted to do our part to do what we can to create safe spaces for black faces and their allies...We are doing a new thing. We are building for ourselves!. (Freedom Georgia Initiative 2020)

The repositioning of land and place into what centers liberation and racial justice augments the theoretical and material foundations of future spatial possibilities. TFGI and the chapters in this section invite us to ask: What tools and methodologies can be used in the future? What do we learn from the current moment and Black pasts—the overlooked, the “absented presences” (McKittrick 2006) that lend to post-Anthropocene world? The speculation requires dismantling the Anthropocence’s contradictions—the colonizing ideas of progress precluded on/requiring violence, erasure, and exploitation, advancing a moral code of “forward,” linear movement.

Sovereignty in the Capitalocene as the Crucible of Difference in the Post-Anthropocene

In this section, we concern ourselves with how the territorial state and technology-accelerated, late-finance capitalism mediate spatial futures in the present planetary emergency. It was the emergence of the nineteenth-century industrial era, and the scientific and technological revolutions it birthed, that gave rise to new ways of controlling and exploiting the planet’s “spheres.”¹⁸

While the causes and effects of the planetary emergency implicate Earth and human systems and are spatially distributed across scales, the sovereign territorial state and its economic superstructure remain the loci of power and the terrain of contestation for rights and resources. Jason Moore conceived the Capitalocene as “a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life” (2017) and the forge and mirror of inequality in the Anthropocene. By denying that the ontologies of Nature and “the human” are relational and co-constructive of the planet, capitalism focuses on growth and development actions that maximize profit while offloading the cost of social and environmental externalities to others, unable to mitigate them. Despite the commonplace assumption that globalization and neoliberalization have undermined state sovereignty, the state remains seminally powerful in territorial management and social control. It has also had varying success in building regulatory guardrails to mitigate market effects on its population. More often, they have been complicit in facilitating the marketization of their economies for short-term political advantage to the detriment of equity and sustainability.

What should surprise us in the late Anthropocene is not the emergence of new types of rules-based regionalisms or a novel form of political-territorial governance that includes post-state organs and processes, as in the case of the European Union, but instead the remarkable 350-year-long durability of ontologies of the territorial state and state sovereignty. Andrew Schonfield presented it as the essential superstructure of liberal, statist, and corporatist capitalisms (1965). However, the oil shocks of the 1970s, the GATT Tokyo Round’s success in harmonizing trade and reducing international tariff and non-tariff barriers (Letiche 1982; Deardorff and Stern 1983), and the growing reach of European integration in the drive to complete its Single Market, signaled a new forward-thrust for corporatism and the relative retreat of the state. The 1980s, by contrast, saw the state “back in” (Evans et al. 1985) as the entity uniquely equipped to manage global economic recessions and mitigate the geopolitical instability of the late-stage Cold War.

The end of the Cold War and clear signs of neoliberalism’s global expansion anticipated another retreat from classic sovereigntism. With American hegemony affirmed, the completion of the European Single Market on track (Papadopoulos 1991) and the transformation of the European Communities into the European Union in 1993, the territorial state could have assumed a range of reduced- or post-sovereignty forms that would be less Napoleonic, less about security system maintenance, and more about the pursuit of prosperity and collective responsibility. Optimally, the Cold War’s peace dividend would have unfettered the corporatist global financial system to produce wealth, allowed the European Union to be enlarged and integration “deepened” and, optimistically, see high- and middle-income countries apply resources to eradicate poverty and disease, as well as protect the environment (Murphy 1996; Pollack 2000).

The Post-Cold War respite from global geopolitical strife was short, shattered by “9–11.” Although continuous and largely unabated, wealth creation did not reduce inequality but increased it. Further, the George W Bush administration’s War on Terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq imposed a new type of sovereigntism that greatly expanded states’ powers of surveillance, policing, and interdiction across scales. Sovereigntism paired with neoliberalism has produced a durable amalgam that, when unchecked, disciplines individuals, communities, and states that do not conform.¹⁹

There is little space for difference in such a political environment. Yet sovereignty is contestable. If difference is “the crucible on which institutional actors and subjects sort out their relationship to state, nation, and liberty, [then] accepting that difference exists in the state enables subaltern communities to claim a place in politics and engage in contestatory politics” (Papadopoulos 2021, p. 1). If contestatory politics is where the state and opposing stakeholders come together to arbitrate the contours of rights, then in a democracy that politics need to reflect and mitigate the inherent power asymmetry between the State and subaltern communities (pp. 265–266). If democracy is the terrain for cooperative, practical, and transformative activity, in that case it is essential that political subjects, communities, and institutions—and foremost the state—write positive law to support it (Habermas 1996), either by updating lex lata (already existing law) or lex ferenda (concluding after deliberation that such law ought to exist and if so, what its contours should be).

A democratic deficit that does not provide for fair contestatory politics and an unwillingness to embrace ontologies of difference as fundamental to human life set the stage for deepening social crises in the Anthropocene. These struggles occur in the state, although their capillaries are rooted at different geographical scales.

So, who bears political responsibility for state and market agency? Hannah Arendt’s argument about the banality of evil invites rethinking political responsibility in the late Anthropocene era. Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil kindled Ward Churchill’s argument about the complicity of globally situated financial services, operating out of powerful countries like the United States and global cities like New York, in injustice and inequality. Following Arendt, in his controversial essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2001), Churchill pointed out the cascade effects of micro-deeds of individual agent-technicians who, at once, operate as ‘cogs’ of processes they did not author or organize, and as essential facilitators, executors, and perpetrators of consequential acts that impact communities and places far beyond their daily lived experience. Further, his argument reflects Arendt’s practical supposition that “all that matters is the insight that no man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others” (Arendt 1964, p. 31). She asserts the collective nature of evil-doing (we are all partners in crime to some degree) and claims it as a feature of modernity, the structural complexity of which diminishes the scope, profile, and impact of most human action.

Churchill applied the principles in arguments that simultaneously raised a political storm and failed to expand beyond the news cycle and academia a critical consideration of the implications of US power. It also demonstrated the personal cost of exercising freedom of speech in the US (he was dismissed from his academic position in 2007)²⁰: He posited “To the extent that any of [the technocrats] were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind, and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants” (Churchill 2001). Churchill does not appear to spare from culpability the hundreds of low-wage workers laboring that day in the World Trade Center.

There are ample grounds to argue against Churchill’s facts and characterizations of both the perpetrators of “9–11” and their victims; however, relitigating them is beyond the scope of this chapter. Still, his core argument about responsibility cannot be dismissed, primarily because he extends Arendt’s philosophical discourse to a critique of finance capitalism. Churchill attributes Wall Street “technocrats,” a belief system that claims capitalism and American exceptionalism as the best organizing scaffolds for their success. Here, Arendt and Churchill appear to diverge. For Arendt, ideology is not as important—if important—as a trigger of action. It is the action alone that ultimately matters. However, for Churchill, globally situated financial executives and traders—and presumably, the technologists who support their actions—are partisans, if not ideologues of capitalism and national exceptionalism. They are implicated by proxy in what amounts to a White supremacy scene (a Supremacene) that distributes wealth and opportunity unequally along the Anthropocene’s geologic color line (Mirzoeff 2018).

Measuring the State in the Late Anthropocene

The territorial state as the primate unit of analysis in international relations theory lends itself to useful classification: de facto or de jure sovereign (nominally functioning or “failed”); possessing a unitary, federal, or confederal governance structure reflecting different degrees of governmentality (also internalizing statism to varying degrees); expressing a liberal or an illiberal regime type; possessing “small,” “middle,” or “great” power profiles, allied or non-allied, member of regional and/or global collective security organizations (in extremis isolationist); maintaining nuclear and/or non-nuclear energy or military establishments (relatedly, a proliferating or non-proliferating state); a member of an intergovernmental (or a mixed intergovernmental-supranational) regional integration organization; with an high-, upper-middle-, lower-middle, or low-income economy, further differentiated structurally by the rate of mixes of state and markets in the domestic economy; and environmentally resilient or at-risk. However, instead of embracing such sovereigntist classifications as structurally exclusive to the state, geographers interpret their attributes, qualities, and capacities as transcending the national scale, as expressed in multiple geographic scales with the bodily and social subject at their epicenter. In discussing this statist geographical assumption in international relations theory—“the territorial trap”—John Agnew (1994) posits that [e]ven when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it.” Political and cultural attributes related to the dialectics of difference, such as intersectional identity and coloniality, are marginal to international relations theory, providing opportunities for geographers to build critiques of the state and statecraft that include considerations of the Anthropocene as a dynamic, multiscalar, nature-society construct.

The State endures robust and axiomatically violent into the twenty-first century. As a “sovereignty-property corollary” (Fig. 1.2) the State structures conditions for exclusion (by fostering epistemicide expressed as a violence-prone national exceptionalist/Supremacist political-territorial paradigm). Also, a State where subaltern communities can constitutionally engage in contestatory politics in a low/no violence polity, can structure conditions for (or at least tolerates) epistemic emergences and make space for difference. Ultimately, ‘change’ outside (or in defiance) state sovereignty faces extraordinary challenges.

Fig. 1.2

(Source Alex G. Papadopoulos)

The “sovereignty-property corollary” serves as a utility-maximizing modulator of structural violence and the accommodation (or, commonly, not) of difference

States represent a range of historical formation experiences (in some cases, a series of such experiences distributed across the early modern, modern, and late-modern eras). Coloniality and post-coloniality define a durable and critical cleavage in the state formation experiences of contemporary territorial states outside Europe, North America, Japan, and the Peoples’ Republic of China. Moreover, the circumstances of state formation significantly differentiate the origin stories and evolutionary arc of each state: in the indexical case of French state formation, we observe its convulsive transformation by the Wars of Religion (the 1520s–1590s) and the Thirty Years War (1620–1648) from a loosely centralized monarchy to a thicker, absolutist, bureaucratic, mercantile, expansionist one. The Ancien Régime was overturned in 1789 by a paradigm-setting revolution that produced a new secularist mode of governance and a re-stratified social-economic order. The condominium of state and capital is notable to the regimes that followed in the Long nineteenth century. In the age of democratic, nationalist, and industrial revolutions, France experienced periodic refounding of the state as a reflection of rapid social change, economic reorganization, coups d’état, civil and international wars, the gain of an empire, and later its loss along with its Great Power status. In the post-Second World War and the Cold War eras, French statecraft would accede to newly articulated forms of politics and governance that moved the state from a national to a civil society locus thereby blunting and blending market capitalism with social democratic welfarist objectives and integrating national domestic politics to European regional collective. The devolution of powers under the European aqui notwithstanding, France is still sovereign and statist.

Post-colonial state formation experiences in the non-European world were partly shaped by the historical European experience and colonial administration legacies axiomatically contrary to alternative, indigenous nation- and statecraft configurations. Critics like Franz Fanon (1961) stressed that preserving, in the post-colonial state, institutional and economic scaffolds of the colonial state and dependent relations with the metropolitan state negated vital aspects of the anti-colonial struggle. Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere supported Socialism, self-reliance, regional integration, and Pan-Africanist collective action to unhinge their respective states, Ghana and Tanzania, from colonial legacy bonds with Europe. The limits of statehood and sovereignty prescribed these strategies. In the late Anthropocene and substantially because of neoliberalism, non-Western, indigenous epistemes of governance face significant challenges. Navigating the established, dominant, and restrictive political economic environment and creating Black Outdoors to build resilient communities would require invention, mobilization, and collective action in or beyond the territorial state.

The chapters in this section explore state sovereignty in the late Anthropocene, anticipating the contours of future sovereignties. The case studies lay bare problematic entanglements of statecraft, technology, financial markets, and environmental unsustainability and set the table for future conversations on how states and markets underwrite epistemicide, contain the agency of difference in the shaping of spatial futures, and contribute, if not author, paths to “the post-human.” The contributors reveal terrains and contestatory practices of resistance and emancipation—a Black Outdoors—that make space for more humane spatial futures in the post-Anthropocene: Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Richard Ek study the transformation of Barcelona’s urbanism and the political subject by globalized tourism into a Tourismocene; David Janssen analyzes the evolution of automobility-as-transmotion in Sweden’s exceptionalist national project and its implications for its First Nations Sumi communities’ futures; Tarmo Pikner explains the post-Soviet urban and environmental present and futures of once-covert atomic cities in Estonia, and Thomas Skou Grindsted argues the algorithmic futures of global financial markets as a factor in the planetary climate emergency.

In Algorithmic finance and the Anthropogenic environmental crisis in accelerando, Thomas Skou Grindsted examines how algorithmic finance is increasingly related to climate change and produces peculiar iterative patterns of accommodation and reinforcement of climate change. High-frequency trading and other trading venues have accelerated global stock markets significantly and the rate at which shares change hands. This increases the possibility of crises in accelerando. Grindsted explores how the advent of the post-Anthropocene shapes relations between techno-financial acceleration and deteriorating Earth systems. He examines how high-frequency trading reconfigures the dynamics of finance and changes the global financial system in different spatio-temporal ways, as well as produces political ecologies of difference, divergence, and convergence between the financial and Earth Systems, ultimately contributing to inequality. To that end, he traces the course of technological change and stock market algorithmic strategies as the bases of a dominant algorithmic capitalist paradigm. He interrogates the connections between stock exchange algorithms and how algorithmic financialization intersects the Anthropocene debate. The supremacy of these proto-AI-driven financial paradigms leaves little space for less well-capitalized and indigenous technological approaches to wealth-building. It is financial epistemicide by algorithm. Grindsted concludes that algorithmic financial adaptation to climate change and posits how algorithmic economies may singularly contribute to worsening environmental crises by producing spatial futures of difference and inequality.

Society is left with an existential quandary: It is not the creative élan of mathematical sciences that is the cause of socio-spatial inequality and the climate emergency. It is that algorithmic mathematics, plus capital, plus the state's consent, animate increasingly climate-relevant economic-technological paradigms that overwhelmingly serve capital accumulation. Collectives such as the Algorithmic Justice League work to counter the financial industry movement on four fronts: They raise awareness of the social and environmental impacts of these paradigms; they politicize the apparent apolitical character of algorithmic mathematics and science by applying pressure on the state to regulate them; they mobilize algorithmic science in the service of equity and environmental sustainability thereby creating a parallel, critical mathematical and technological episteme; and they serve as moderators of an essential public, transnational, and intersectional conversation on the impacts of the finance-technology complex.

In Barcelona as the Tourismocene. Overtourism in the late Anthropocene as a threat to the ‘polis,’ Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Richard conceive of tourism as a mobility machine. From that vantage point, they address tourism’s neoliberal (re)territorialization as the Tourismocene. They postulate that tourism is more than an industry and claim that we live in a thoroughly touristified world order—a Nomos. The principles of the Nomos of tourism have their antecedents in colonialism: specifically, the triadic processes of domination, reform, and integration. Overtourism is more the culmination of the logics of tourism rather than a product of destination mismanagement, as usually asserted. It possesses a logic consistent with privileged stratified hypermobility of people, capital, non-humans, and material culture (as in hospitality industry tech). In other words, to paraphrase Marx, tourism is mobile capital that lives off “dead destinations.” Overtourism is the outcome of the well-functioning sovereignty-late finance capitalism complex. Conceived as a condensed material instantiation of tourism at large, overtourism is complicit in the Anthropocene emergency and gestures to tourism futures that transcend the polis, the citizen, and the community. In short, it manifests post-political futures and attendant tourism subjectivities, epistemes, and orders.

The epistemics and practices of the post-political tourist increasingly undermine the epistemics and practices of the political citizen and the polis. Contrary to discourses of political philosophy that conceive the tourist as an insignificant, even ridiculous figure, Mekonnen and Ek claim that the tourist depart is emblematic of subjectivities and ways of being in and relating to the world, and hence the doubleganger of the political citizen. The tourist is symptomatic of the contemporary Nomos—the camp as the hidden matrix of political space—abetted if not encouraged to travel by markets across scales, and the state across the municipal, regional, and national scales.

In Transmotion in the folkhem: Automobility, epistemicide, and the Post-Anthropocene, David Jansson considers the epistemic intersections between Sweden’s colonization of the Sámi in Lapland, the establishment of the folkhem, and the embrace of automobility, as phenomena of the post-Anthropocene, in an analysis that is inspired by the concept of transmotion. The production of difference is at the heart of these three elements, and the difference(s) produced here are grounded in the binary thinking characteristic of modern Western thought. This poses a challenge as we interrogate these binaries: While we reject the binary that views humans as distinct from “nature,” discussing these topics without relying on the conventional Western understanding of these terms is difficult. While humans are indeed a part of nature (and are thus not distinct or different from nature), it is possible to make distinctions between different parts of nature, such as human and non-human animals.

Jansson begins with a discussion of the experience of the Sámi in Sweden, emphasizing their “difference” from mainstream Swedish society (concerning both material lifestyle and knowledge traditions). He then connects this perspective to the larger projects of the Swedish folkhem, which produce difference among groups of people (and between “Swedes”) and nature.

Finally, Jansson returns to automobility as the “end game” of modern industrial society, grounded in fantasies of autonomy and mobility that elide the production of social inequality and environmental degradation. Instead, in the post-Anthropocene, growing automation as autonomous factories and driverless transport is more likely to further undermine the cohesiveness of communities of difference, such as the Sámi, by unhinging them from “nature.”

In The Soviet nuclear legacies and post-Soviet futures of the Baltic coastal towns of Paldiski and Sillamäe, Estonia: Peril and opportunity, Tarmo Pikner reveals how environmental disturbances become enacted, (de)territorialised and harnessed through politics. He ‘ground truthed’ this analysis in studies of two communities on Estonia’s Baltic Sea coast that host legacy military-nuclear assemblages of the Soviet era—Paldiskie and Sillamäe. In their post-Soviet incarnation, these communities deal with the encounter and consequences of their nuclear past’s entanglements with neoliberalism and urbanization. The towns’ social geography and built environment exhibit diverse inter-dependencies between the Soviet nuclear assemblages and, more recently, planned infrastructure and urban development. These cases point to continuing tensions between atmospheric/environmental politics for sustaining life and the (re)territorializing of post-Soviet and post-nuclear spatial futures.

The resurgence of Russia in global geopolitics and the specific political-territorial perils it represents for the Baltic states poses existential and philosophical quandaries for Estonian society and the state: As Pikner suggests, they are not new in the region: how to rethink and manage the Soviet past (nuclear and geopolitical); relatedly, how to mitigate the potentially lethal legacies of nuclear waste; how to foster cohesion between Estonians and Russians in a state in peril from Russian aggression; how can localities promote economic development and nurture the social state circumscribed by non-negotiable frames of neoliberal Europeanization, and, finally, how to live full lives in precarity, reconciled with the materiality of the Soviet nuclear past.

Neoliberalism as a counter-the-state, deregulatory, privatist, securitized, profit-maximizing, inequality-producing complex of transnational finance capital, commodity, information, technology, and control flows explains much of what we shorthand as globalization. In the late crisis of globalization caused by the derailment of commodity chains by the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War, the territorial State reasserts itself as the principal generative and biopolitical and lethal and necropolitical loci in the international system. Geographers in this section have contributed important critiques of state sovereignty by revealing the stresses and contradictions of markets, technology, and nation- and statecraft. Importantly, they provide new explanations on how difference (as intersectional, relational, and spatially situated), technologies, markets, and political territoriality are co-constructed at different scales, thereby linking and hinging the body to spatially nested and entangled futures of human and Earth systems.

Speculative Fiction as Lens on ‘Staying Human in the Cataclysm’

On Science- and Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction and science fiction, in their literary and pulp incarnations and the various modalities they are expressed and delivered—literature, films, graphic novels, manga, video, and computer or console games—filter and mirror our best and worst selves, our hopes and anxieties about life and death in some future world constructed by the author. From that basic premise, writers, their critics, and academia have produced many definitions of SF. We attempt to distill them as follows: What distinguishes SF from other fiction genres is that “fictitious” and “speculative” occupy different epistemic niches and intentionalities.

In the Greek language, “science fiction” translates as “epistemic fantasy,” an appropriate characterization for a genre of writing that is axiomatically about never-before-experienced ways of seeing and knowing the world—about inventing new ontologies and epistemes or imagining epistemicide, the destruction of the epistemes of our day. Authors posit “what if…” to instantiate in word human futures too far-fetched to consider in the present. What may have appeared in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), an implausible future of reproductive rights, does not look so entirely outrageous after the US Supreme Court’s Roe take-down and the Court’s religious turn on education. From social critique, Atwood’s novel becomes a cautionary tale—a warning.

The original epistemes rely on spacetime—“whens” and “wheres”—that serve the author’s creative and critical intent. The speculative or the fantastic simultaneously draws on lived human experience to build them. Thus, speculative fiction world-building engages in and animates futurist world-building that epitomizes fraught and problematized associations with the authors’ present—the non-fictional world. Kim Stanley Robinson likens SF’s aesthetics to “‘3D glasses to reality’… It’s not prediction. It has, rather, a double-action, like the lenses of 3D glasses. Through one lens, we make a serious attempt to portray a possible future. Through the other, we see our present metaphorically, in a kind of heroic simile that says, ‘It is as if our world is like this.’ When these two visions merge, the artificial third dimension that pops into being is simply history… So, really, it’s the fourth dimension that leaps into view: deep time, and our place in it” (Robinson 2017, pp. 330–331).

Since the atomic dawn, scientific studies on potential or ongoing apocalypses have flourished (Carson 1962; McCarthy 2006; Pynchon 1974; Rees 2004; Gore 2006; Weisman 2007; Kolbert 2014; Walsh 2018; Wallace-Wells 2019). Speculative and SF writers have been part of that exercise in foresight. They explore our fear of species annihilation by nuclear war (Stewart 1949; Shute 1957; Miller 1959), biological war (Bear 2002), totalitarianism and epistemic annihilation (Orwell 1949; Bradbury 1953; Saramago 1995), totalitarian control of women and reproduction (Atwood 1995, 2021), fertility collapse (James 1992), pandemics (King 1978; St John Mandel 2016) climate change (Robinson 1996, 2004, 2005, 2007), and asteroid strikes (Niven and Purnell 1977). They can or need to be read as stories of canaries in the mine.

In the utopian/dystopian subgenre, speculative and SF have explored the consequences of totalitarianism (Zamyatin 1924; Orwell 1949; Bradbury 1953), reproductive politics (Atwood 1985, 2019), single-gender societies as female utopias (Russ 1975), female physical dominance (Alderman 2016), and eugenics (Huxley 1932). Betting against dystopian futures and death, other genres of science fiction dream of lives of plenty and gender and racial equity, ecological restoration, and freedom from the toil of work by the grace of exquisite and well-managed technologies, although also fearing losing control to machines—and in the era of the singularity, possibly, to thinking machines). Space and first-contact fiction reflect our desire for planetary communion with other beings (while fearing enslavement or annihilation by them).

In this section, we build on science fiction’s audaciously creative powers of speculation to take the measure of the Anthropocene-in-crisis and its transmutation to a post-Anthropocene when “Anthropos”—the human dimension—would be further defined and conditioned by its creative and destructive relations to science and machines.

The three contributors to this section approach the Anthropocene crises of epistemicide, the implications of the geologic color line, and the emergence of “the post-human” by drawing on different pools and traditions of speculative fiction and ways of knowing: Afrofuturism, cyberpunk and silkpunk science fiction, philosophical humanism, and art theory. The literature and commentaries we deploy here do not aim to cover speculative fiction’s perspectives on the future but to understand what qualitatively new and different perspectives may yield imaginings of the future free from the manacles of academic inquiry. We value them not for speculative fiction’s predictive value (the accuracy score is low: where are the flying cars and the moon colonies?!) but for its ability to place humans in unexpected and often overwhelming circumstances that challenge their worldview and humanity. Ken Liu posits that “science fiction that ages well has always centred on constructing humanistic narratives – or souls, if you want to use that word – in the face of cataclysmic change. I sense, although I cannot predict, that this is one skill we’ll increasingly need in the coming uncertainties” (Liu 2017, p. 331).

As we move forward, we keep in mind that the creative works span nearly 100 years—from the publication of Dark Princess in 1928 to Cory Doctorow’s publication of the short story “Unauthorized Bread” in the Radicalized anthology, published in 2019. Two chronologies to mind: the places in the current timeline when the authors publish their speculative stories (authors and their creations reflect upon their times) and the imagined future spacetime of the stories themselves:

Amor Kohli’s But that’s just mad! Reading the utopian impulse in Dark princess and Black empire examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark princess, A romance, and George Schuyler’s Black empire, as foundations of a literary and philosophical Afrofuturist project intimately connected to the poetics of speculative prophecy and driven by the dynamics of utopia. Lauren Beukes describes Afrofuturism as an artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical movement and creative platform that “dares to imagine a future for what has been historically, abhorrently dismissed as ‘the dark continent.” Combining science fiction, fantasy and magic, traditional beliefs, and the black historical experience, “it is not necessarily about imagined alternative cities, but about the real ways in which disruption and decolonization are happening across the continent now” (Beukes 2017, p. 330). Dark princess and Black empire are foundational in precisely those terms.

Du Bois’ and Schuyler’s books reflect on the conditions of their respective times and imagine Black futures and Black utopias with the same end goal—global emancipation from white supremacy—but travel different roads to reach it.²¹ Both novels illustrate a type of racial utopian vision for the future in which a transformed global social order would emerge. However, seen through the lens of the Interwar period in which they were published, Dark princess and Black empire engage the often uneasy relationship between the utopian possible and the more constrictive, anti-utopian probable. By examining how Du Bois and Schuyler use their utopian novels to that end, Kohli explores how the trajectories of possibility in the two novels provide insights into the politics and poetics of their speculative writings. Moreover, Kohli helps us situate them as early classics of Afrofuturism in the long arc of speculative literature that engages the contestation of difference in humanity’s future.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess. A Romance (1928)

Dark princess draws on social realism, which defined much of Du Bois’ work on the Black experience, and on the romantic fiction genre, which on the surface appears like an aberration, to tell a political and personal story of emancipation that could shape humanity’s future. Despite the mixed reviews, mainly because of the unlikely fusion of genres, its fantastical enplotment, and its lush, often explicit eroticism, Du Bois counted Dark Princess as one of his favorite and most important works.

By anchoring his story in the 1920s and to the real world of white supremacy and Western imperialism, Du Bois engaged in a radical thought experiment about a possible future when peoples of color exercise their collective agency and free themselves by extinguishing white supremacy. Du Bois envisions the endgame as Black Messianic liberation. His protagonist, Matthew Townes, and Princess Kautilya, the architect of a covert, international activist organization dedicated to the emancipation of peoples of color, make an unlikely first acquaintance in Berlin before they entangle their political mission and their passion for one another in an erotic and romantic relationship that produces a child—a male heir—who is proclaimed at the very end of the book the “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds” (Du Bois 1928/1995, p. 318).

The dialogue close to the end of the book between Brabat Singh, a representative of the Maharanee of Bwodpur, and Matthew Townes lays out the dilemma of that historic objective:

We are, of course, in factions – that ought to be the most heartening thing in human conference – but with enemies ready to spring and spring again, it scares one… One group of us of whom I am one, believes in the path of Peace and Reason, or cooperation among the best and the poorest, of gradual emancipation, self-rule, and world-wide abolition of the color line, and of poverty and war… The strongest group among us believes only in Force. Nothing but bloody defeat in a world-wide war of dark against white will, in their opinion, ever beat sense and decency into Europe and America and Australia. They have no faith in mere reason, in alliance with oppressed labor, white and colored; in liberal thought, religion, nothing! Pound their arrogance into submission, they cry; kill them; conquer them; humiliate them… They may be right – that’s the horror, the nightmare of it: they may be right. (pp. 296–297)²²

A work that celebrates Black exceptionalism more than Black nationalism, Dark princess’s political project of global emancipation can only be realized through cooperation and collective action among peoples of color.²³ Du Bois claims the right for love and jouissance for Black people in his time and the future of an emancipated world. His affinity for the book and his decision to animate its political project through love’s agency casts it as great humanist literature and a ground-breaking work of Afrofuturism.

In Dark princess, Du Bois posits what would the world look like and how would world society bend to liberty through the collective action of people of color? And how could the individual succeed in such a titanic feat? For Du Bois, ‘how’ is through love. Thus, the book’s subtitle A romance reveals that emancipation would scale up from love and the erotically actualized body to smash the world of empires. Princess Kautilya and Matthew Townes bring the Black Messiah to the world as progenitors of a new, free, and equitable world. Claudia Tate posits that “a conviction that had defined his entire life was that others would strive just as he had. They would seek the greatest and fullest possibilities of life with passion like that inscribed in Dark Princess” (Du Bois 1928/1995, p xxix).

George S. Schuyler’s Black Empire (1936–1938)

George S. Schuyler and W E B Du Bois were contemporaries and aware of each other’s contributions to the efflorescence of Black culture in the United States. Du Bois was both a high-order intellectual and an activist with a long record in the political trenches. Schuyler was a journalist, an essayist, and an author with a clear professional interest in commercial publishing.²⁴

Like in Du Bois’s Dark princess, Schuyler stages the Black Internationale and Black empire stories sometime after the Great War: the Great Powers are in disarray and discredited, their industrial economies smashed by the Great Depression; ergo, despite white supremacy, they are vulnerable. Evocative of Du Bois’s Princess Kautilya’s global team of persons of color, Schuyler’s protagonist, Dr. Henry Belsidus, forms the Black Internationale—a secret, global society of black scientists and technocrats—to devise stratagems that would annihilate white opposition and supremacy and reclaim Africa as a dominant world power. Dr. Belsidus asserts that “we can build here on [Africa], the second largest continent, an empire of black men and women working toward a cooperative civilization unexcelled in this world” (p. 142). Like Du Bois, Schuyler imagines Black futures free of white dominance and imperialism. Like Du Bois, he frames the struggle in Black exceptionalist terms. That is where the similarities end. Dark Princess and Black Empire part ways on how emancipation could be achieved. If Du Bois’s Matthew Townes and Princess Kautilya believed in the redemptionist power of love, Schuyler’s Dr. Belsidus believed in the vindicationist qualities of Force, making these two Afrofuturist works a map of contrarian Black futures.²⁵

Schuyler’s conviction that scientific discovery and technology are the catalysts and instruments for Black liberation and futurity transcends his speculative fiction and journalistic commentaries. It is a strongly held personal view. In Schuyler’s view, political achievement would be attainable by directing Black youth to the sciences and technology-producing professions, thereby transforming Black society from within to attain its highest goals without. He writes in 1931, “Science offers a wonderfully thrilling field for the young man and woman… Here are always new worlds to conquer, new vistas to open, and set society marveling. It has always seemed to me that more Negroes should be active in the exact sciences such as engineering, chemistry, physics, geology, etc.” (Schuyler and Hill 1991, p. 301). The spatial futures he imagined for peoples of color would be attained through the mastery of machines. In Black Internationale and Black empire, technologies more exotic than would have been imaginable in the Interwar period evoke a Black accelerando. In BlackeEmpire, in perfect pulp fiction fashion, Dr. Belsidus deploys a death ray machine that, as deus-ex-machina, guarantees the destruction of European forces attempting to reclaim Africa. Dr. Belsidus declares that liberation is coming by the grace of war technology developed by Black science.²⁶ Thus, the Machine is existentially—not merely operationally—connected to Black survival and futurity.²⁷

Unlike Dark princess’s hopeful message, there is no Black Outdoors in Black empire. It is the opposite. It is not about updating the ‘plantation surround’ by devising and constructing spaces and social frames to reclaim Black jouissance and build a future where difference is embraced and diverse epistemic creation a vital part of human development. Like Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, Schuyler’s malevolent but justifiably furious protagonist posits that only violence can eradicate a violent regime and make space for difference, equity, and justice.

In Smart and cruel. Cities in the thrall of AI in the fiction of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, Alex Papadopoulos traces philosophical interactions between Artificial Intelligence as a science field with increasingly transformative real-world applications and literary creative works that serve as early warnings of its real-world consequences. Among subgenres of SF, cyberpunk constructs literary visions—almost always dystopian—of the intersection of some of the momentous transformations of our age: the rapid and accelerating development of information technologies (quantum computing and AI among them) as extensions of the human sensorium; our ability to become trans-human or post-human by radically modifying the human body through information technology-laden genome manipulation and biohacking; and the emergence of new types of urban settlement and urban forms and planning that reflect utopian and dystopian applications of information technology.

The baseline cyberpunk worldview is of an environmentally degraded planet and a socially spatially polarized society resulting from the hollowing out of the state by vast corporations acting as planetary arbiters and architects of hyper-commodification. Personal liberty and privacy have been compromised by surveillance and dominant social and market media platforms; the world of work has been transformed by automation and ‘informatization’ (AI in its most extreme form). There are new heroes and anti-heroes: the hacker is the iconic denizen of the cyberpunk universe—not the Google software engineer. Lastly, society and the world economy (now also bleeding into near-space factories) is ruled by super-empowered individuals. They pull the strings for profit, revenge, or out of sheer boredom and malice. Though imagined as future worlds, the relationship to our current economic, political, and environmental crises is clear. Papadopoulos taps cyberpunk fiction authors who build on the crisis events of our times to imagine more or less likely future endgames.

Stanley Kim Robinson describes speculative SF as “the realism of our time. It describes the present in the way a skeet shooter targets a clay pigeon, aiming a bit ahead of the moment to reveal what is not yet present but is already having an impact” (Robinson 2017, p. 331). Among cyberpunk pioneers, William Gibson was able to crystalize actual and speculative intersections of futurist technological innovation and an overgrown, out-of-control, global finance capitalism. He wrote Neuromancer in 1984 when nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a dire prospect, the Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl triumvirate was setting down the political frame for neoliberalism and globalization, and the information revolution was already reshaping life and business with the introduction of desktop computers. Gibson was the first to articulate the idea of “cyberspace,” and credits Marge Piercy’s feminist SF classics Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) for some of his novel’s core ideas about a dystopian future society dominated by Earth orbit-dwelling elites controlling the Earth-bound population with complete power over knowledge and technology.

Cory Doctorow’s speculative fiction (2009; 2017; 2019) wells out of his deep understanding of technology trends in laboratories and markets in an Anthropocene on the brink of social and ecological collapse. He is a blogger and a journalist publishing in influential technology magazines like Popular Science, Wired, and Make, and a speculative fiction writer who often builds around the Faustian character of technology—ultimately, the core quest of much of this collection: the tradeoff between humanity’s material and scientific advancement and its social solidarity as a species.

Already in the 1990s, the profound impact of information technology on society and urbanization was unquestionable and irreversible. In 1996, Manuel Castells described the information-driven “urban” as the network of cities and the vast, material scaffold of supporting information technology infrastructure as ‘spaces of flows’ that increasingly channel decision-making and support command structures. The material extent of this infrastructure and the thickening of the information vectors riding it distinguished it from the ‘spaces of places’ we inhabit and socially reproduce. In 2010, he wrote about the profound impacts of the network society on cities in more concrete terms:

The network society is a global society because networks have no boundaries. Spatial transformation is a fundamental dimension of this new social structure. The global process of urbanization that we are experiencing in the early 21st century is characterized by the formation of a new spatial architecture on our planet, made up of global networks connecting major metropolitan regions and their areas of influence. (Castells 2010, p. 2737)

In the last decade, private sector ‘informatization’ of the building professions (architecture, urban planning, and design) has been yielding prototype buildings, urban quarters, and master plans claiming the rise of the next generation city: ‘connected,’ efficient, safe, green, sustainable, and resilient to hazards. Although much advertising capital is spent on showcasing how information tech-, data-driven neighborhoods and towns are visioned with diversity at their core, there is scant evidence that this revolution embraces the importance of social-spatial equity in design in the concrete and practical ways the BlackSpace Manifesto does (Robinson, this volume).

At its launch in 2015, Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s (Google’s parent corporation) venture on smart urbanism proposed the transformation of Quayside, a 4.8 hectare (12-acre) parcel of land on Toronto’s deindustrialized waterfront into a model mixed land-use community. Sidewalk Labs collaborated with a public–private entity—Waterfront Toronto—on the draft master plan to much fanfare. The planning concept was built on a dynamic system of data acquisition from residents’ activities. The “smart quarter” would learn from and act in the interest of residents: Increased UV exposure on that sunny day? Awnings would be automatically deployed along the commercial thoroughfares. More intrusively, the movement of residents and visitors would be monitored putatively to regulate traffic but also to establish behavioral profiles. Residents would be encouraged to share their information and would be rewarded based, in part, on the volume and types of shared data. However, by 2019, public resistance to the venture on privacy grounds, equity protections over housing, and concerns over ceding municipal sovereignty over taxation to a private entity grew and Alphabet and Waterfront Toronto scuttled the project.

The COVID-19 epidemic provided Alphabet cover to rewrite Sidewalk Labs’ corporate mission as climate change mitigation and retrench its scope to a number of special-purpose technology products. Among them is Pebble, which provides sensors to municipalities and real estate developers to monitor real-time data for parking spaces, a product reminiscent of Quayside’s data acquisition model but very much scaled back. The setback notwithstanding, the movement toward commercially expanding the “Internet of Things” to manage domestic and increasingly public spaces is unstoppable. As Grindsted notes in this volume in his study on algorithmic financialization, algorithms’ role as “short/micro-term” switching devices, by the grace of iterative programming, are also in a “perpetual”/“always” state of readiness.” The IT ‘manager’ never sleeps. It does what its algorithmic programming prescribes. The programming depends on data and a data architecture assembled and constructed by programmers and database engineers. No matter how sophisticated, no digital utility or program in use today can operate outside that algorithmic architecture and set of inputs. It is not sentient in making decisions and undertaking actions independent of its creators and the data they input. Although the timeframe for endowing machines with more than ‘general intelligence’—full ‘artificial intelligence’—is unclear, the pervasiveness of thinking machines is growing. They “know the world” through sensors and inputs. However, they do not have the reflexive capacity to understand the ethical implications of their function.²⁸ As the Chinese security state's growing effectiveness reveals, innovations are applied without ethical restraints.

We are well on the path to developing the technologies that underpin the techno-social urban planning paradigm promised by cities and clubs of investors. Our rate of discovery, acquisition of knowledge, and its applications through the force and will of finance capital accelerate by the day. However, the parallel development of a global, critical conversation about the implications of innovation in IT lacks scope, breadth, and speculative depth. It is unclear where we are heading. Gibson and Doctorow speculate on the direction and the destination.

In Troubling the anthropos in the Post-Anthropocene: Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy (2006–2010), John Shanahan examines how Liu troubles both realism and uncritical ideas of the Anthropocene, in turn creating innovative depictions of a post-Anthropocene and post-human condition. Liu’s narrative arc spans millennia. At the starting point, astrophysicist Ye Wenji’s interstellar transmission—an act of sedition against the oppressive Chinese state (and in a sense against humanity)—reveals the existence of the Earth to an alien civilization—Trisolaris. The orbital mechanics of their native system have condemned the Trisolarians to extinction, making the Earth a target of colonization and condemning humanity to potential annihilation. At the endpoint, in the far future, and after humanity survives the Trisolaran challenge, humanity and its native solar system are annihilated by aliens crossing the sector in a banal act of risk-minimization. Yet the cosmic scale employment is not serving space operatic ends. Unfolding across three magisterial novels, Liu explores the ethics of human and non-human/alien agency in the face of annihilation through the lens of a cosmic sociology of his invention.

Shanahan shows that Liu’s SF masterpiece complicates any association of a particular literary form with the Anthropocene by finding all genres and modes inadequate to the demands facing humans, such as the need for humanity, born bound to the planet, to reinvent itself if it is to survive in a universe where alien encounter is not an invitation for cultural exchange but a struggle for species survival. In mounting their defense, humans face demands that force them to confront the limitations of their physical and social ontologies and take the measure of the aliens’ ontologies that are gradually revealed in their actions. Although not an Afrofuturist work, Liu’s work taps and shares similar unease and discomfort with colonial thinking about ‘the alien.’ Writing about different kinds of space aliens, Tade Thompson reflects on that sentiment: [R]eality is more fluid than we think, and aliens must be aliens. I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking. It’s one of the reasons I tried to avoid empires and massive space battles. I just have people who want to survive in the wider universe (2021, pp. 351–352). Without anthropomorphizing them physically or otherwise, Liu works diligently to imagine a worldview that is, at once, shaped by the unique cosmological circumstances of the home system and the desire for species preservation that cuts across the actions of humans and aliens across the board.

Shanahan discerned Liu’s judicious patterning of visual elements and spatial qualities drawn from Eastern and Western art to explain the different ways humans and Trisolarians engage in and with a multidimensional universe (where space folds and unfolds) where difference is expressed at the cosmic scale. Instead, the trilogy shows that an informed reader of the visual arts, particularly classical Chinese painting, can have a more comprehensive grasp of the nature of the universe and the place of (human) life within it. With China as the center of narrative gravity, Liu’s work provides a novel optic on the Anthropocene problematic and generates an authentic transnational post-Anthropocene vision.

This perspective is insightful as “the Anthropocene” is not a singular condition across the planet, has not had equally distributed causation, and certainly is not creating equal effects. The Anthropocene is an engine of inequality and “not attributable to all of humanity but only to a small subset of humans clustered mainly in the West” (Baldwin and Erickson, p. 4). More saliently, they also remind us that uncritical use of the idea of abstract humanity (anthropos) to subtend the Anthropocene can be oblivious to racialized experience, and “when the category of the Anthropos is assumed to be universal, it repeats the ‘liberal forgetting’ of modernity as a racial project built upon the affirmation of white progress” and therefore ignores, or projects, dimensions of the condition it seeks to explain.

By spanning both East Asian and Western cultural traditions (both are well-represented in the trilogy), Liu Cixin moves beyond simple models premised on diffusions of a singular and self-propelled, Euro-American modernity to instead document a cosmopolitan, if still highly unequal, post-Anthropocene course of history. Shanahan explains that The Three-Body trilogy draws upon artifacts from multiple rival epistemologies to show how aesthetics are relevant to physics and ethics. In fact, he posits that Three Body demonstrates a consilience of “the two cultures” of the arts and sciences in such a way that it has become perhaps the first truly global science fiction epic.

Speculating on the Ethics of the New Materialism of Thinking Machines and Alien Encounters

The quest for knowledge (and self-knowledge) is a distinctive characteristic of homo sapiens—ontological anxiety initially expressed in the Renaissance’s and the Enlightenment’s ubermenschen’s materialist turn. The German Werkbund’s aspiration for a universal language of design and industrial production (its motto was Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau: from sofa cushions to city-building) directly inspired the Bauhaus movement and by proxy, the futuristic aesthetics of technological innovations and the managerial exigencies of mass-production/mass consumption, and the spacetime logics of commodity chain economies and efficiency.

The relentlessness of that drive is now embodied in the sense of new materialism befitting the Information Age. Rosi Braidotti frames this new materialism or “a more radical sense of materialism” as “[r]ethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity after Foucault” (Braidotti 2000, p. 158). The consequence of her proposition is that the human subject’s and the human collective’s futures were traditionally controlled and regulated by established power holders (states, international institutions, and transnational corporate firms). However, the explosion and commodification of scientific knowledge in the Internet era and the ever-easier development of technological applications are challenging the knowledge monopolies of these traditional sites of control and regulation. The ability to create information tools with programming and compose new biological components using Crisper tools are examples of how both the intent and control of technology have escaped national, corporate, and university laboratories to live in garage and basement labs.

The question of the age is whether this new exquisite materialism produced by relentless technological innovation can satisfy our search for ontological fulfillment across difference. Du Bois’s Dark princess and Schuyler’s Black empire pose that question in the Interwar era, when science provided hope and tools for emancipating peoples of color (a Black utopia made real), even if it was the science of war. Gibson’s Neuromancer and Doctorow’s “Unlicensed Bread” pose it in near and not-so-near futures when information technology has become fully entangled in human life, and in Gibson’s world, the human genome and an imagined sentient digital genome of general artificial intelligence. Liu Cixin dilates the future-historical and geographic scopes from the actions of an individual to the Universe to reflect upon how ontological fulfillment is never separate from the struggle for survival no matter when, where, or who is concerned. Together, they reveal how difficult it is to stay human (or Trisolaran) in the cataclysm.

Notes

• 1. The AWG associates a range of phenomena the Anthropocene, including: an order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic ‘dead zones’; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new ‘minerals’ and ‘rocks’ including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad ‘technofossils’ produced from these and other materials. Many of these changes will persist for millennia or longer, and are altering the trajectory of the Earth System, some with permanent effect. They are being reflected in a distinctive body of geological strata now accumulating, with potential to be preserved into the far future. From http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/ (2019; Accessed 5 February 2023).

• 2. GBSS; a stratigraphic section used to identify the lower boundary of a stage on the geologic time scale, for which the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has established criteria.

• 3. The violences of this flattening can be seen in the following exchange between participants at one of the inaugural meetings where the idea of the Plantationocene was discursively framed (Davis et al. 2019, p. 6).Verse

  Verse Noboru (Ishikawa): To me, plantations are just the slavery of plants Anna (Tsing)—I agree. Donna (Haraway)—And microbes.

• 4. The full name of the yearlong programming was, The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession. J. Kameron Carter (Duke Divinity School) and Sarah Cervenak (UNC Greensboro) created and convened the program.

• 5. Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Fred Moten during the first of four speakers events (Humanities Futures 2016, 58 min; see also Hartman 1997, p. 116).

• 6. Unfortunately, video-recordings are available on YouTube only for this first speakers’ event (23 September 2016; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc) and for part of the last event on 24 March 2017, “There is no end to out”. The latter includes the full presentation and performance by poet, M. Nourbese Philip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLQIlExEYmw.) For a complete listing of the speakers series participants and themes see, https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/the-black-outdoors-humanities-futures-after-property-and-possession/.

• 7. See https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/Black-Outdoors-Innovations-in-the-Poetics-of-Study (Accessed 1 January 2023).

• 8. See Cavalieri and Lanza (2020) for a discussion of changing ideas of the palimpsest map.

• 9. The National Park System has mapped out the paths created by ‘freedom seekers’ and ‘those who assisted along the way,’ updating the map as new information becomes available. It is accompanied by a wide array of primary materials with links to other relevant sites. See: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/undergroundrailroad/ntf-listings.htm, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/undergroundrailroad/index.htm. See also the remarkable Amazon Prime Video series, The Underground Railroad, a fictionalized account of the difficulties involved in making and using the ‘railway’ based on Colson Whitehead’s (2016) novel of the same name.

• 10. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2019/02/19/the-real-book-behind-green-book-a-means-to-keep-black-americans-safe-but-also-a-guide-to-having-fun.html (Accessed 27 January 2019).

• 11. Davis et al.’s (2019, pp. 8–11) elaboration of Black geographical work on the plantation ‘plot’ is apropos, here. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Escobar, and Fanon, they show the ‘plot’ to be a relationality whose flexibility is manifold: a plot of ground, a narrative plot, secret plotting, a site of conservation (of African foodways) and sociality, and ground that can be held in common (see also Brown 2022). The linguistic-material flexibility of the plot speaks likewise at different scales, to wit, the fugitive settlement whose members (in order to survive) must work to ‘leave no trace,’ effecting Black ecological sensibilities commented on in conversation by Moten in the first Black Outdoors seminar (above).

• 12. There are many renditions of relational ontology. This paper refers to those of African scholars, particular that of the Yoruba sociologist, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (2015), in her path-breaking book, What gender is motherhood?, which draws inspiration from the Yoruba language. The idea of the Imaginary (imaginary) and Symbolic take their inspiration (and departure) from Jacques Lacan’s three registers of psychical life, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which he continually re-elaborated and re-worked. The Symbolic refers to language and the totality of linguistic means, such as laws, rules, rituals, customs, gestures, and so on. For a thorough overview and related references, see: Johnston, Adrian. 2023. Jacques Lacan. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring Edition). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/lacan/ (Accessed 3 April 2023).

• 13. But see Keller’s (2014) important intervention about the dangers of not parsing theoretically what is meant by the relational.

• 14. See https://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/ (Accessed 1 March 2023).

• 15. See https://blackspace.org/who-we-are/?group=working-board (Accessed 1 March 2023).

• 16. See the M. NourbeSe Philip’s (2008), Zong! Poems, the throwing overboard of 130 enslaved Africans in the Middle Passage for insurance. Her work, “attempts the story that must be told that can’t be told—a story that can only be told through its untelling” (Philip 2008, p. 80).

• 17. https://healfoodalliance.org/#:~:text=Food%20is%20our%20most%20intimate,cultures%2C%20and%20to%20the%20earth.

• 18. The term ‘spheres’ refers to the lithosphere (soils, minerals, fossil fuels, “land,” “space,”); the hydrosphere (for transportation, the alimentation of agriculture, power generation, for human consumption and entertainment); the biosphere (used for the harvesting of plants and animals; the atmosphere—a shield against ultraviolet radiation—as the domain of weather and climate), all systemically interlocked and producing feedback loops that impact regions, states, economies, and communities differently and unequally.

• 19. If such is the case in the United States, the European Union’s treaty commitments to “solidarity” among the member states and peoples of Europe provide ground for political and social policy alternatives its commitment to building a neoliberal globally competitive economy notwithstanding.

• 20. The University of Colorado alleged that Churchill committed acts of academic dishonesty, although none was confirmed by courts. Churchill asserts that he was dismissed for his views on 9–11 and the plagiarism charge was a pretext for punishment. The epiphenomena support his view.

• 21. The two books were published respectively right before the Great Economic Crisis of 1929 and once the New Deal’s structural reforms started to take root. Du Bois wrote Dark Princess in the glow of the Harlem Renaissance and the world’s collective promise that “Never again” would humanity descend into a global war of annihilation. Schuyler’s Black Empire was published in an age of growing uncertainty and peril. William E B Du Bois’ Dark Princess, A Romance (1928) and George S Schuyler’s Black Empire (1937) (writing as Samuel I Brooks) are published during the Interwar Period following the breaking or weakening of Europe’s great empires. That historical turn opened the door to the possibility of defeat of Western imperialism worldwide, including America’s unnamed empire in the Caribbean Sea and the Indo-Pacific region. Most urgently, it signaled the possibility of internal decolonization in the United States, the rollback of Jim Crow laws, and the ‘reset’ of the political process in full recognition of the injustice of racism.

• 22. Du Bois is one who believed in the “path of Peace and Reason” and abhorred the idea that violence can be a solution to violence. He was a believer in education as the surest path to social enlightenment. He considered racial prejudice and discrimination the result of ignorance (Du Bois 1928/1995, p. xxix). Moreover, he played a significant role in developing a Black episteme of belles lettres in a world hostile to it.

• 23. The connection to Du Bois’s extensive activist work is evident. He was instrumental in, if not the primary architect of several critical organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1910), that struggled for and advocated social and political equality for African Americans, Africans, and peoples of color throughout the world.

• 24. It is hard to discern whether the outrageousness of Schuyler’s ideas in his pulp fiction works stems from his satirical spirit, his socialist leanings (he later became an ultra-conservative), his skepticism about the political and artistic projects of the Harlem Renaissance (where better to skewer it than in speculative pulp fiction), and, importantly, his controversial, at the time, views on race. Two of his works—Black Internationale. Story of Black Genius Against the World and Black Empire. An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa—build on the understanding that race is not a biological manifestation but a social construction that can be the subject of deconstruction and, controversially, satire. These structuralist views put him ahead of the times and made him an unpredictable political ally in the United States’ fraught racial politics.

• 25. Schuyler speaking through Dr. Belsidus, vents the rage of peoples of color against the colonizers and calls for vindication. To balance the scales of justice, White supremacy and White violence against Blacks can only be countered with even greater violence or even with annihilation. The crimes are so great that they require a commensurate violent response. It is time for payback. In one scene in Black Empire, Dr. Belsidus invites the flower of Britain’s scientific and technological establishment to a performance of African ballet and cold-bloodedly gasses them to death at the intermission (Schuyler and Hill 1991, p. 304).

• 26. Near-space travel and solar engines aside, only lethal military technology would guarantee, Black liberation first, then the rollback of white supremacy, and ultimately the emancipation of Africa. The goal is not to match Whites' power on the battlefield but to far surpass it. Dr. Belsidus claims, “[w]e are now as far ahead of the white man in armaments as he was ahead of black men in the past when we fought his cannon with spears” (241).

• 27. Schuyler’s veneration of science and technology and its militarist applications begs the question of a connection to the futurist movement of that same era. At the outset, they share the unshakable belief that humanity’s future is the ever-perfected Machine. They are both committed (Schuyler in fictional terms) to the pureness of war, destruction, and death as a means of erasing the past and creating the conditions for a forward thrust into the future. Robert Hill notes that “The very story that [Schuyler] belittled as ‘hokum’… not only presents ‘the American Negro as a product of machine civilization’; it also depicts him as a master of ‘machine civilization”—one who even exceeds the level attained by supposedly superior whites” (Schuyler and Hill 1991, p. 300).

• 28. The development of quantum computing is the likely road to what is sometimes referred to with a wink as “the rise of robots.”