Buy Tickets: Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World: Book Launch and Conversation with author, Tavia Nyong'o in conversation with Jonathan González

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Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World: Book Launch and Conversation with author, Tavia Nyong'o in conversation with Jonathan González

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 7:00PM

Performance Space New York

150 First Avenue

New York, NY 10009

Nyong'o will read excerpts from Black Apocalypse, and engage in conversation with artist and choreographer Jonathan González. A Q&A with refreshments will follow.

About the book: Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.

Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.

Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.