In Breaking the World, Justin L. Mann argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the modern security ambitions of the United States. Foregrounding how the contemporary security state renders Black life insecure, Mann theorizes worldbreaking: speculative narrative, aesthetic, and ethical strategies that Black writers, musicians, and artists employ to unmake the processes by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. He shows how the techniques of worldbreaking in the works of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monáe, and the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes chart the distinction between securitization and Black insecurity. These works illuminate the difference between the antiblackness of state security and the power of Black collectivity. Contending that speculative worldbreaking is a vital part of the Black radical imagination, Mann shows that its destructive strategies can help transform worlds of securitization to worlds of liberation.

Justin L. Mann is Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Northwestern University.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Getting Lost in the Dark  1
1. Assuring Survival  23
2. How’s Your Security?  53
3. Hazardous Bodies  81
4. Secret Wars  115
5. Racial Tectonics  151
Conclusion: The Stars Are Closer  181
Notes  193
Bibliography  213
Index  227