Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in
Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research
Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American
Society for Theatre Research
Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds
post-blackness and conditions of loss
In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural
critic and historian Tavia Nyong'o surveys the conditions of
contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness.
Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960's and the
intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations
challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity
to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival
erasure.
If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race
against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory
and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is
invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in
queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as "angular sociality,"
drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and
rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with
itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from
speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence
to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma
against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers
of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and
play of black life.