Breaking the World

Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction

Justin L. Mann

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478033264
  9781478029816
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Getting Lost in the Dark
• 1. Assuring Survival
• 2. How’s Your Security?
• 3. Hazardous Bodies
• 4. Secret Wars
• 5. Racial Tectonics
• Conclusion. The Stars Are Closer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index