White Apocalypses, Global Antiblackness, and the Art of Living through and against Death-Worlds

Abstract

Implicit in what follows is our attempt to answer a complicated question: How do we mourn the loss of Black life globally in a way that does not reproduce the primacy of the Human over Nature or the Global Black Male over all other differentially positioned Black gendered subjects? Or, put otherwise, what happens when Black mourning goes global, who gets to be mourned, what is being mourned, and what do we risk reifying when we mourn Black life through the heuristics of the “global” or when holding grieving fantasies about the Human project, as Sylvia Wynter would have it? To explore these questions, we first frame how it is that we think about Black globality to then geospatialize it in locally grounded and rooted places and temporalities. From there, we reflect on the competing temporal dimensions of global Black life by interrogating how racial capitalism informs our desires for a new normal, sometimes prefigured as a return to the old normal—a mourning for lost time that quickly forgets the colonial ordering that never ceased and therefore always already awaits our return. We end in honoring the dead by listening to the living, amplifying the voices of our contributors, who serve as conduits for our ancestors. We see them engaging in what Sharon P. Holland calls the “ultimate queer act” of “bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death).” In this way, we see our entire issue as a kind of memorial. Accordingly, we chose to forego an introduction to instead reflect upon and re-collect with the reader the offerings provided by the talented group of scholars and activists who made this issue come to life, even as it was born out of global Black death(s).