New Books Network Podcast Summary

Episode: Justin L. Mann, "Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation" (Duke UP, 2026)

Host: Kendall Dineen
Guest: Dr. Justin L. Mann

Date: January 29, 2026

Overview

This episode centers on Dr. Justin L. Mann’s new book, Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation. The book explores how Black speculative fiction both critiques and reimagines dominant systems of security, focusing on the difference between state-driven securitization (often rooted in anti-Blackness) and the productive, radical potential of Black insecurity. Dr. Mann argues that speculative "world breaking" is crucial to the Black radical imagination and offers paths from worlds of oppression to worlds of liberation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin of the Project

• Podcasting, Speculation, & Security (02:01)
  • Dr. Mann recounts how a StarTalk Radio episode featuring Max Brooks (author of World War Z) consulting for the CDC sparked his initial curiosity about the intersection of speculative fiction and security policymaking.
  • He discovered that science fiction writers had historically shaped state security plans, including the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), yet notably excluded Black voices and authors such as Octavia E. Butler.
  • Quote:
    • “It seems kind of weird that this person who's writing about zombies should be like, the guy that the State Department—like, there's nobody better?” — Mann (04:01)
• Two Archives: White Futurism and Black Speculation
  • The book was born as a comparative project between “white, state-aligned futurism” and “Black speculation invested in alternate forms of cohesion.”

2. Defining Key Terms (08:17)

• Securitization
  • Not merely about markets, but systems, affects, and lived environments that promise safety—often in race- and place-neutral language but with real-world exclusionary effects.
  • Quote:
    • “Security is presenting itself as race and place neutral. … So, securitization is about elaborating those three things: infrastructures, ideas and affects.”
      — Mann, (08:50)
• Black Insecurity
  • Black speculative fiction authors continually resist and interrogate state promises of safety, acknowledging the impossibility of safety (“safety with a capital S”) for Black subjects.
  • Butler’s work exemplifies this, showing protagonists constantly aware of and suspicious of security apparatuses.
• Speculation & Worldbreaking
  • Speculative fiction uniquely visualizes the “invisible” infrastructures of security, offering stories where the destruction of the status quo (worldbreaking) is a site of creative transformation.
  • Quote:
    • “What if this wasn’t about ensuring the state living forever… What if it was instead about the zombies breaking down the walls and you gotta run?” — Mann, (16:20)

3. Black Feminism’s Role in Security Studies (18:08)

• Black feminism is often left out of surveillance and security studies, despite elaborating powerful theorizations of security and vulnerability (e.g., Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Patricia Williams, Simone Brown).
• Quote:
  • “Black feminism, I think, is a thing that sits unfortunately outside of surveillance and security studies … That's unfortunate because I think black feminism is one of the most robust… theorizations of security.” — Mann, (18:27)
• Black feminism teaches that exclusion is not individualized but patterned, and offers rigorous critiques of how security regimes produce vulnerability.

4. Chapter 1: Assuring Survival & Octavia Butler’s Critique (26:45)

• The chapter opens with Butler’s annotated response to a pro-civil defense LA Times op-ed by nuclear physicist Edward Teller. Butler interrogates assumptions of “assured survival,” stressing material, racial, and class vulnerability absent in policy discourse.
• Quote:
  • “Teller is writing from the standpoint of assured survival… and Butler is like, well, what about poverty? What about pollution? What about, you know, racism?” (29:58)
• Mann contrasts Butler’s personal experience of insecurity with state actors’ detached strategic thinking.

5. The Reagan Era: Science Fiction Authors and Securitization (33:09)

• Security policies like SDI were shaped by speculative imagination, evidenced by the involvement of authors such as Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Robert Heinlein in defense policy circles.
• Their works and white papers directly influenced state ambitions for space-based defense—yet their future visions excluded Black perspectives and were rooted in problematic colonial logics.
• Quote:
  • “What does it mean that these folks are writing this paper that sounds like a film script and that Ronald Reagan, former film actor, is like, that's the answer?” — Mann, (40:30)

6. Butler’s Dawn: Rejecting Assured Survival and SF Conventions (44:11)

• Butler’s Dawn subverts tropes of 1980s SF by foregrounding the costs and ambivalence of alien/human “salvation,” hybridity, and survival. The novel resists neat resolutions, instead focusing on difficult ethical decisions, complex agency, and critiques of securitization as a narrative of control.
• Quote:
  • “The giving over into fear… allowing securitization to be the thing that dictates life choices, isn’t living.” — Mann, (49:54)

7. Chapter 2: Multiculturalism, Military, and Black Insecurity (54:45)

• Examines how 1990s U.S. military interventions were wrapped in multicultural inclusion rhetoric.
• In novels like Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace, Black protagonists are used to signal “progress” while deeper inequities and racial insecurities remain embedded in the structure—mirrored by real-world shifts in military demographics and policy.
• Quote:
  • “Multiculturalism becomes a wedge to say… we can't talk about race. We can't talk about how race is the thing that is producing this problem because we all agree that racism happened and now it's over.” — Mann, (62:09)

8. War Trauma and Intersubjectivity (63:36)

• Haldeman’s novel also meditates on intersubjective connection via neural interfaces, arguing that deep empathy can dissolve racism—yet ultimately, the psychic toll of war is distributed unevenly, and veterans of color bear heavier burdens.

9. Chapter 3: Bioinsecurity, Disease, and Racialization (67:47)

• Colson Whitehead’s Zone One uses the zombie pandemic to examine the fallacy of bodily integrity and how the securitization of disease draws and reinforces racial boundaries.
• State responses to disease reveal that infrastructure for “safety” is always uneven and racialized (e.g., Ebola, COVID).
• Quote:
  • “What Whitehead does… is acknowledge that the virus doesn’t care. The pathogen doesn’t care about race or class, right? It's coming for everybody. … But where they depart … is that for Brooks, race is the answer to disease, and for Whitehead, the answer is to reframe the temporality of survival.” — Mann, (75:00)

10. Chapter 4 (Teased): The Black Body and Health/Super Soldier Themes (82:22)

• Mann discusses graphic novels like Truth: Red, White & Black, which consider the legacy of medical experimentation and the biopolitics of the Black body in superhero narratives.

11. Chapter 5: Racial Tectonics and Climate Security (84:33–96:16)

• “Racial tectonics” describes how climate security is conceptualized through, and often at the expense of, the lived realities and deep knowledge of climate-vulnerable (and typically racialized) communities.
• N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is discussed as an allegory for how societal and geological upheavals are interconnected, with rage (born of historic trauma and exclusion) emerging as a force capable of literally breaking the world.
• Quote:
  • “The safety of the people … is literally built on a human-machine infrastructure of enslavement. … the solution is to destroy the world.” — Mann, (91:00)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On White Futurism vs. Black Speculation:
  • “The origin of the project … is like, well, why not Butler? What is Octavia Butler doing differently or thinking differently than is happening in this meeting with a group of ostensibly mostly white people?” — Mann (06:03)
• On Worldbreaking:
  • “What if anger is the form that Black feminist expression should take? … What if disappointment and loss are at the center of the ethical project?” — Mann (17:43)
• On State Securitization:
  • “The cost of securitization is that it’s doomed to fail. It can’t work, right? And the state wants us to believe that it can work so that it can perpetuate all kinds of violence.” — Mann (25:39)
• On Multiculturalism:
  • “We have multiculturalism as policy, as language, even as representation, but the structure of the military, who fights, who suffers, who is excluded from care, is still deeply racialized.” — Mann (62:53)
• On Disease & Racialization:
  • “The wall is racism, right? … It is so deeply embedded in the logic and practice of life under the liberal state that the only possible way out is to have the whole state collapse and to force us to imagine a life we can’t imagine.” — Mann (77:47)
• On Abolition and Infrastructure:
  • “A healthy suspicion of infrastructure that’s promising ease, comfort or safety.” — Mann (96:25)
  • “We should be critical of reform as the only offer or only answer to the myriad violences of securitization…” — Mann (99:10)

Important Timestamps

• 02:01 — Origin story: Spec fiction authors consulting for state security; motivation for the research.
• 08:17–18:08 — Defining terms: securitization, Black insecurity, speculation, worldbreaking, Black feminist theory.
• 26:45 — Butler’s LA Times letter: revealed contradiction between civil defense logic & Black lived experience.
• 33:09/40:30 — Reagan, SDI, and science fiction authors shaping real-world security policy.
• 44:11–53:50 — Dawn: Butler’s disruption of spatial, familial, and racial norms in SF.
• 54:45–63:36 — The 1990s, military multiculturalism, Haldeman’s Forever Peace and downstream racialization/trauma.
• 67:47 — Biosecurity, disease, and the body in Zone One; infrastructural racism and policy.
• 84:33–96:16 — Racial tectonics: climate, anger, and world-shattering in Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
• 96:25/99:10 — Final takeaways: skepticism of tech/policy promises; real abolition beyond reform.

Conclusion: What Should Readers Do?

• Healthy skepticism: Mann calls for critical attention to infrastructures or technologies that claim to deliver safety and ease—especially when they profit from and further marginalize vulnerable populations.
• Beyond reform: He challenges listeners to “think about the ends of things like the state as not so far-fetched” and to envision abolition as more than just police or prison abolition, but also encompassing military structures—and to invest in “human creativity as the answer to the problems of human creativity” (99:25).
• Reading Black speculative fiction: Encourages deeper engagement with works and theories from Black feminism, abolition, and radical Black imagination.

What’s Next for Dr. Mann?

• Book on Black dreams: Investigating the diversity of “dream” in Black thought, ranging from King’s "Dream" of integration to separatist, communal, or subversive visions.
• Black feminist critique of muscle: Exploratory work on the Black muscular body in aesthetics and biopolitics.

Tone & Language

The episode weaves critical and theoretical rigor with moments of wit, candor, and warmth reflective of the speaker's commitment to both scholarly depth and accessibility.

Summary by New Books Network Podcast Summarizer