Breaking the World
Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction
Published on 17. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
248 pages
978-1-4780-3326-4 (ISBN)
Description
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 MonAe, 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.
Reviews / Votes
"Mann brilliantly illuminates worldbreaking as a Black feminist practice of refusal. Reading across speculative fiction, comics, film and critical theory, Mann illuminates how Black science fiction breaks the world that is breaking us. A major intervention in Black feminist literary studies that gives us a strikingly rich history of the present, Breaking the World redefines the stakes of speculation and critique."-Erica R. Edwards, author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire"Breaking the World departs from science fiction and cultural criticism concerned with 'worldbuilding' to instead analyze 'worldbreaking' as a critical and sometimes dystopian response to security discourse. From biopolitics to necropolitics, security emerges as an objective of governmentality under late capitalism that is preoccupied with racialized and gendered/sexual subjection. The role of Blackness under this order makes Black insecurity a valuable source from which to speculate alternative ways of knowing and being."-andre carrington, author of Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
15 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
538 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-3326-4 (9781478033264)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Justin L. Mann is Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Northwestern University.
Content
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
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