Comments on Tavia Nyong’o´s presentation “Blacceleration Then and Now”
SPAN Workshop «Critical Fabulation as Queer Method«, May 16, 2025, Northwestern University

One: Acknowledgment

We stand on stolen land. Many people in this room descend from stolen people. Even the whites here can feel the ghosts of kidnapped female bodies that make them. That’s how the world works, we’ve been told: with violence and theft of land and people. But it is not the only way. Humans are a strange species: we dream counter-narratives.

Two: Contextualization

In “Blacceleration Then and Now,» Professor Tavia Nyong’o proposes exploring «Black fabulation as a mode of dwelling within disaster,» since we already are in the apocalypse. From the get-go, it is not complicated to deduce that for him, bad readings of science fiction equal disaster. As a prime subject for state-sponsored techno-vigilance (victim) and language teacher (victimizer), I concur.

Professor Tavia develops his thesis using concrete, but not always tangible, examples of Black fabulations in different fields that he labels cultural products of Black counter-speculation. In the temporal terms of chronos, or linear clock time, we went from Marylebone, London, where Samuel Delany lived while he wrote Dhalgren in the first half of the 1970s, to Doechii’s Floridian bedroom, where she has been listening to Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” since 2019 to deal with the shared “Anxiety” of dwelling within disaster.

In the temporal terms of chairos, or open-ended temporality, we just witnessed a time-travelling scavenger hunt of self-datamining where writers, philosophers, historians, musicians, and technobros fuel a recursivity engine of poiesis. Within Nyong’o’s recursivity engine, references are interwoven to memories, and the “looping movement that returns to itself to determine itself, with each iteration open to contingency, thus determining its singularity,» allows the author to offer a semi-stable version of his thought process. These people, characters, and institutional processes are the references that inform his claim that «Black counter-speculation matters for how it turns the strange into a refuge and teaches us to live through the nightmare of someone else’s dream.”

From that perspective, this reading can be understood as an addendum to “The Glitch at the End of the World”, the conclusion of his Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025). Or, you know, something you can feed ChatGPT with along the instruction “explain what Tavia Nyong’o understands as Black counter-speculation and how it becomes a place of emancipation”. Not sure what kind of assignment response will come from that. But we inhabit the present of Back to the Future and Parable of the Sower: I suppose it will be an expression of technodiversity. Likely ontologically opposed to Black techno and its technodivergent practices of resistance.

Three: Where’s the library of the black spaceship?

One of the elements that piques my curiosity in this reading is the issue with the archive and «the structural conditions that render black cultural memory precarious” in the “shift from analog to digital” that produces its current ephemeral condition. I would appreciate a longer reflection on the Black ephemera issue concerning: 1) popular memory, or how the weight of the normalized material precarity of black lives impacts the process of give meaning and memorialize our lives, and 2) the dyad politics/policy, or how the power of the white suprematist state impacts an increasingly intangible cultural production.

My second question is related to your proposal of a method less interested “in writing about sound and more so writing through sound. Today, you brought Eshun’s idea of sonic fiction as a sound that “isn’t responding to history—it’s sketching blueprints for lives not yet recognized.” but it seems that you align toward Weheliye’s proposal of the BlackFem voice with a “sonic modality that scrambles the binaries” and “emerges from ungendering and natal alienation as a residue, a remainder, and a resource”. Thus, in Doechii’s “Anxiety” the BlackFem voice becomes “a site of both sonic excess and critical recomposition.” You went from hard, unquestionable science fiction objects, like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, to a song where we can recognize a soundtrack that strategizes technodivergence, but where text and music video are painfully realistic, even for a story about an anxiety that “refuses the depoliticizing label of mental illness». Where, then, is science fiction? Is all Black counter-speculation science fictional? Or has realism displaced the speculative from the center of Black counter-speculation cultural production?