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Justin L. Mann, "Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation" (Duke UP, 2026)
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Dineen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Justin Ellman about his new book, Breaking the Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction, out from Duke University Press on March 17th of this year. Justin is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and his book considers black speculative fiction to chart the distinction between securitization and black insecurity. Breaking the World examines works that illuminate the difference between the anti blackness of state security and the power of black collectivity, ultimately contending that speculative world breaking is a vital part of the black radical imagination that provides destructive strategies that can help transform worlds of securitization into worlds of liberation. Thank you so much for being here, Justin.
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Thank you for having me. Very excited to chat.
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B
Me too. So to kick us off, can you tell me a little bit about what brought you to the project or the question of the book?
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A
Absolutely. It's a little bit of a funny story. I was listening to an episode of Neil Degrasse. It starts with a podcast. I was listening to an episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson StarTalk radio in 2013 and Tyson had on Max Brooks, who's the author of World War Z and other such zombie stories, and. And Tyson and his co Hosts were talking to Neil Degrasse Tyson and his co host were talking to Max Brooks, and they were talking about zombies and, you know, disaster preparedness and the science behind zombies and, you know, that kind of like very, you know, whatever. And then in the middle of this interview, Max Brooks reveals that he's been consulting for the center for Centers for Disease Control on disaster preparedness. And I was like, wait, what? That seems very odd. So I started to, like, follow the breadcrumbs. And it was not only the cdc, but I believe he was also consulting for the Department of Defense and for various other, like, state and para state institutions around disaster preparedness. And I was like, okay, this 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. And the rabbit hole revealed to me that this is not the first time that science fiction authors have been involved in planning for security strategy and disaster preparedness. It's not the first time that the state and Paris state agencies have invested a lot of money in speculative fiction or speculation as a kind of, like, policymaking process. So this brought me to the 1980s, to this moment, when a group of science fiction authors got involved with a. A kind of array of other figures in security policy, including many of them, like aerospace engineers, former military brass, people like that. This group was called the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, the cac, nsp. And they were really, really avid about particle weapons being the wave of the future and being the thing that could win the Cold War. They write these policy papers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These papers make their way to the. Eventually to the Reagan departments, Reagan administration's Science Department. And these papers are the basis of what we now call the Strategic Defense Initiative, the sdi, which I cover in chapter one, and which I'm sure we'll talk about later. Okay, so we've got these two people. We got Brooks and like, Jerry Pornell and Larry Niven, who are these, like, figures in SF studies who are kind of like, you know, Brooks is like this kind of liberal, moderate liberal, right? And Pornell and Ng and Niven are these kind of. They just really like the millennial. They really like disaster in ways that I find kind of icky. But nowhere is there a black person, not anywhere. And I knew that Butler, Octavia E. Butler, had written dawn about nuclear war. I had read it before. I had done some work on it in some other places. And so I was like, well, why? You know, she's in Pasadena. This CSE NSP is working out of Southern California as well. There's like this Jet Propulsion Lab, the jpl and this like, you know, Raytheon. There's like a lot of defense money in Southern California. So Southern California seems like it's like she's right there. Why wouldn't they invite her to the cookout? You know? And I think the answer is pretty clear, which is that she, you know, would have been just have abhorred the policy position that they put forward, which is that space is a frontier in the kind of traditional sense. It offers various forms of strategic advantage, economic, military. It could be colonized, you know, in all kinds of ways. These white science fiction cishet men are like imagining space as reinvigorating the kind of American century. And, you know, I'm not a Cold War historian by any means, but I think it's arguable that the Strategic Defense Initiative is one of the mechanisms that the Reagan administration will use by the late mid to late 80s to win. Win the most recent phase of the formal Cold War. And so they get their wish, right? They really are getting their wish. But that's the origin of this, of the project then 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? Or to take us back to Brooks Brooks's idea of survival and the way that he's sort of imagining the ends of an apocalypse. Why isn't it Colson Whitehead, who's in the sense a sort of similar moment, writing this really important book about zombies that is imagining a very different end to the state. So the book, which began as a dissertation, was really about kind of hinging between these two archives, right? An archive of like white sort of futurism that's state aligned and then black speculation that's really invested in alternate forms of cohesion, collaboration and group, you know, community organizing and. Yeah, I kind of follow that through in the book. Sometimes it comes out, sometimes it goes away, sometimes it's very strong, and sometimes it's a bit weaker. But ultimately my interests were just like, why, you know, what does it mean to think about security from the standpoint of black life? From. As a black feminist, like what. What does black feminism offer securitization as like a confrontation or a, you know, disruption. Yeah. You can say more if you. If you want.
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B
No, that's perfect. Thank you for that. Before we sort of launch into talking about the first chapter, can you discuss some of the key terms in the book to sort of situate our readers. So I'm thinking about terms like securitization, block insecurity, speculative and world breaking that are, you know, particularly important for your project.
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A
Sure thing, yeah. So securitization, I think, is where I'll start and then that kind of unfolds the rest of them. So securitization can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, especially in like, the financialization realm. Securitization has a certain kind of purchase. In terms of futures, like financial futures and market futures. I am using securitization in a sort of. In a different kind of way. It's still about the future, right? So it's still about kind of future interior. What will have happened, what might have happened in. Outside of the kind of traceable expectation or like a thing that can be known. But rather than thinking about markets, I'm thinking about, you know, infrastructures, ideas and affects. So like the sort of terrain that we move around in, the way we feel about moving around in that terrain. And what ultimately, what we can think about the fact of moving around in that terrain. And so here I'm following scholars like Elijah, Ellie Shapiro and Erica Edwards and some black feminists, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Patricia Williams, even folks like Christina Sharp and Jet Nash, who are thinking about the relationship between the body, space and race. And in the sort of realm of securitization, one of the things I think we know, but I try to call out, is that security is presenting itself as race and place neutral. Right? So if we think about the Reagan example and Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI is talking about the human and it's talking about a kind of global west, right? So that's, that's. It's. The investment is to. To sort of cast a broad. The broad is not possible as a part of the process of, like, I'll use the word inculcation, but as part of the process of like, encouraging people to align themselves with the. And identify with the state's ambition to make people safe. There are scare quotes for your. This is a. This is an audio format. So securitization is about elaborating those three things, right? Infrastructures, ideas and affects. And the way that those things work together is that the state and parastate agencies, the market, right. These sort of structures will present an idea of safety as not only possible, but the thing we should be living towards and then present an avenue of that living towards that includes more technological, ideological and effective buildup in that way. So, you know, Cameras, right? Like security camera ring. The ring device on your, on your door, right, Is saying like, you should feel, you should feel secure in your home. We're going to put this thing on your, on your front door. It'll make you lose fewer packages. It will ensure that people don't just like crash in if some. There's a medical emergency. The ring can be called right in all kinds of ways. It seems like a net good. Of course, like our critical thinking can tell us that like, not everyone has access to a ring, not everyone has access to a front door, not everyone who crosses the ring camera should be identified as a target of suspicion. And black feminism immediately intervenes and says, oh yeah, and by the way, the people that we think are the culprits, the people that we think are the dangers are going to always over index to racialized people, people of color, queer people and poor people. So the temporal horizon of securitization, so that's like the process of securitization, right? Is our increasing investment are kind of broadly from the state and market, but also as an individual, we want more safety. Is an increasing investment in those infrastructures, technologies, effects and ideas over time. And so the book moves Forward from the 1980s to the Obama administration. There's some discussion of the very, very up to the minute contemporary, but I tried to hold that off for reasons. And securitization as a policy, as like a temporal policy is unfolding over time. So the book also tries to mark these different moments when security speaks in a different language. Right. So what missile defense meant in the 1980s is not the same thing as we would. We don't really think about nuclear war in the same way. Right. We don't think about it because of terrorism or the way the body has become like a site of security. So securitization is like a process of the state. It's the thing the state does. And black insecurity to me is a thing that emerges from the archive of speculative fiction where black authors, and in a couple of cases, texts that are written not necessarily by black people, but about black people, reveal sometimes ironically, a different relationship to the feeling of safety and to the idea of safety. So if we think about Butler, again, a favorite of mine, Butler is like almost always already suspicious of safety. And that is almost like. So the book I write about don't. Is about this woman who gets. Who experiences the end of the world, experiences a nuclear war that wipes out almost. It's like 96%, I think, of life on Earth and It is only through the intervention of an alien species that humanity is able to survive. And when the narrative begins with this kind of jarring gasp of life and her protagonist is aware that she's being watched, she's aware that her body has been modified. She's got this scar across her belly where we later learn she has had like this sort of devastating cancer removed. She's aware of the apparatus of security. She's constantly. Lilith is. And she has this kind of beautiful. The narration has this kind of beautiful meditation on Lilith's investment in wanting to feel safe and also her awareness as a. She's a black woman. Her awareness as a black woman that safety is not a thing she can have, right? And so the book comes to kind of dilate and move back and forth over whether or not and how Lilith can achieve safety. There are sort of momentary safeties as opposed to safety with like a capital S and long dure. And how the desire for safety can sometimes be. Can undermine like collectivity, solidarity, liberation, resilience, all of it, like the kind of things that we think of as security or that we're told security is supposed to achieve. So I again, in thinking about across these different regimes of securitization, I also think about how black people imagine a relation to security and differently, how they. How the. How we embody black insecure insecurity as a. In a kind of different forms. And like the last piece is the last thing to say then about speculation and worldbreaking is this. All of. Is that I read this all through the prism of speculative fiction. So I see something unique about what speculative fiction does in terms of how cannily it draws up and lays out the infrastructure of securitization which is intentionally made to disappear, right? So again, if we go back to the camera, we're not supposed to see them or we supposed to. They become a part of the pattern of everyday life, such that we experience, you know, walking into a CVS and seeing ourselves on camera or checking out and seeing. Right. But we're not jarred by it in ways that I think we maybe should be. And in speculative fiction, right, there's a couple of different ways to read speculative fiction. One of the really important ones is to read speculative fiction as allegory or as a kind of like patterning the everyday or patterning the experience of the everyday, which is very important and which I think is very present in the text that I work through. But another way for me is to think about world making, right? So that speculative fiction, what it does in ways that are not necessarily not possible in realism or historical fiction or whatever, but in ways that are unique to speculation. Speculative fiction enables us to imagine different kinds of worlds, right? To think about a world where aliens might save us from ourselves or where zombies might actually do the thing that humans couldn't do, which is destroy the. Destroy the state in like really provocative ways, right? And world making is a very important habit of thought in black feminisms and queer color critique. And I'm not the first to theorize worldbreaking, but for me, what's exciting about how black authors take up the apparatus of securitization in speculative fiction is that often they're like, what if this wasn't about ensuring the state living forever in the way that Max Brooks kind of imagines? What if it was instead about the zombies breaking down the walls and you gotta run and you don't. We don't know if you're gonna survive and we don't know if you're gonna eat or get eaten, but you get. You just gotta run, you know. And so that world, the breaking part, I think I read it through kind of aesthetics, right, where like the actual narrative is kind of breaking. I read it through like the prose where in, for example, in N.K. jemisin's Broken Earth, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, right, where like the actual narration erodes in ways that kind of mirror like, you know, long standing practice in black feminists literary form and in the kind of ethical turn away from the desire to make whole, right? Or the sort of the like expectation, especially for racialized people, that our bodies and queer people and femme people, right, that our bodies are required for the whole, like the making whole of the nation state and, or the, you know, the body politic, however we want to organize it. And instead these texts are like, what if, what if anger is the form that black feminist expression should take, you know, what if, what if disappointment and, you know, loss are at the center of the ethical project? Like, what happens? And again, that's not like a novel thought for me. That is definitely coming out of the black feminist archive, critical archive. But it gets articulated pretty uniquely and coolly in speculation where it's like, okay, well that means you love a tentacle man, you know, or you like, you can control the earth and you build, tear a building down. So that was like a kind of long pathway through these terms. Obviously there's much more to say, but I hope it was clear.
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B
Yes, it was. Thank you. Okay, so we've talked Quite a bit already, or you've talked about quite a bit already about black feminism. But I'm wondering if you can sort of give us some more insight into specifically how your project is mobilizing black feminisms and black feminist theory to make the argument that you are.
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A
Absolutely, yeah. So in the same way that Octavia Butler has been overlooked or was overlooked in her moment by this group that might have learned something from her, Black feminism, I think, is a thing that sits unfortunately outside of surveillance and security studies and especially outside of critical surveillance and critical security studies. Right. So as a field, surveillance and security studies are about in some ways, like figuring out securitization, Right. Like, how do we do the puzzle? And critical security studies are about, like, taking the puzzle apart so we understand its components. In both cases, often black feminism is thought as a thing or is. Well, I just don't see it in the fields. I don't see it in those fields. I've kind of stopped reading critical security studies. I read more in Critical security studies, but even there, it's kind of not happening. And that's unfortunate because I think black feminism is one of the most robust, has one of the most robust theorizations of security, even if they're not using the term security. Right. So I think a lot about Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work and especially the way she's writing about war. She's writing about the relationship between the military and the ngo, the kind of descriptions of group generalized vulnerability to premature death that is like, what is that if not a critique of security? Or in the book, I spend a bit of time. There was more in draft, but, you know, word counts or whatever, thinking about this really beautiful and, like, devastating moment that Patricia Williams describes in the Alchemy of Race and Rights, where she goes to a. She goes trying to go to a department store, to United College of Benetton in New York City. She rings the buzzer because the opening line of this chapter is, buzzers are big in New York City, or something like that, okay? And so there we see, like, the surveillance apparatus has intervened. We have the camera and the buzzer if I want to go to a store, which, you know, not should be able to do, right. I've got to ring myself in. And she's misrecognized by this young white clerk as not a patron. And she writes beautifully about that. What would it mean for surveillance studies to kind of take that as its. As the organizing thesis of what surveillance looks like under a regime of, like, technological surveillance? Or what would it Mean generally, broadly, for security studies to think with and how, you know, how the archive of slave narratives tell us about policing in ways that contemporary policing just are built on. And Simone Brown, obviously, in Dark Matters, did a beautiful job of just describing what slave catching policy did for contemporary policing and surveillance as a practice, broadly. Those kinds of questions, I think, unfortunately, sit outside of critical security studies especially. And it kind of. There's a way that. And again, like, I'm sort of adjacent to the field, but I know enough about it, I guess, to say this that, like, it doesn't. It would stand to gain so much by thinking with those texts. And I'm kind of holding at bay feminists like feminist critiques of. Of security studies and critical security studies. So here I'm thinking about Ender, Paul Graywall and Karen Kaplan and Jennifer Terry and folks in that camp because they're very attentive to race and are like. I see them as in partnership with black feminism. And so this is kind of like a. Kind of like a transnational feminist critiques of security and securitization that are deeply. Jasper Puar should be maybe the first to come to mind, right? The slight difference that I see in, say, terrorist assemblages is that Puar's really thinking at the level of the state in ways that I'm trying to move between states desires and then individuals desires. And that's not critique at all. I think that book is in many ways sacrosanct to me. But what Black feminism offers is. Is a sense of. And. And, you know, Puar does this in terror, terrorist assemblages, of course, and. And also in the right to me. But it offers a. A way of thinking like the individual in the body that kind of chart a similar parallel course to how deeply invested in securitization, how deeply invested securitization is in the individual without giving over to individualism as the. The answer. Right? What black feminism, I think says is like my. And this is definitely Williams. My experience of exclusion from Benetton isn't individuated, right. I'm meant to feel like it only happens to me. But what we know is this is patterned. It's group differentiation, right? It's patterned such that I'm excluded. My exclusion stands in for the exclusion of thousands and thousands of people. And if I can be excluded from a store, what else can happen to my body, right? What other forms of vulnerability am I forced to endure as part of the allure of securitization, right? Because the last thing, I guess I didn't really say this in describing securitization, but the thing about securitization is it's doomed to fail. It can't work, right? And like the state wants us to believe that it can work so that it can perpetrate all kinds of violence, right? Some abroad, in the name of making us safer. Many, many, many examples come to mind. You know, settlement, conquest. I'm thinking very much about Gaza in what I think about this, but also all kinds of humanitarian efforts that happen on the continent of Africa and South Asia that are done to increase market grease, the skids of corporate capitalism, or else because of some kind of ideological conquest, or else the way that securitization presents these ideas to us, that we should have access to things that other people shouldn't to make us safe, safer. And the distinct. The differentiation produces the conditions of unsafety, right? So that, like, people are excluded from work, people are excluded from service, from essential human services like housing and, you know, education and are incarcerated and then are not able, you know, so that, like the, the connections between foreign war and domestic. I don't. I don't want to call it terrorism, but they call the domestic, like the defunding of the welfare state, which is so key to the story. Those two things, like, we can't understand them without black feminism, I don't think. And then just to say quickly there, you know, black feminism often also, I think for readers outside of it, it is such a beautifully robust and efflorescent theory, right? That like to say to even call a thing black feminist is to, I think, not minimize it, but to try to box it in a way that. That belies the robustness of the fields that I participate in. So when I'm writing about the Super Soldier theorem or the Super Soldier Serum in chapter four, right. When I'm writing about Marvel Comics, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'm thinking about Dorothy Roberts and Harriet Washington and the ways that black feminism has told us about medical experimentation on the black body. That is maybe not necessarily a part of the history of science in the way that it should be or the history of medicine in the way that it should be. So that's just to say that I think, you know, in some ways part of this, part of what my desire for the book, this is a later question, I think, but is that we can start to see black feminism as, like, expansive as it is, and it's talking in speaking languages that are. That it often feels, for obvious reasons or maybe inobvious reasons, excluded from that.
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B
Was so beautifully put. Thank you. Okay, so your first chapter, which is titled Assuring Survival, begins with. This is such a wonderful opening. I was like immediately so excited. But it begins with a letter that Octavia Butler wrote to the LA Times in 1981 in response to an op Ed that they previously published. And I wonder if you can give our readers some insight into how Butler's letter and the op Ed that it's responding to demonstrate what you call the structuring contradiction of assured survival and of black insecurity broadly.
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A
Yeah, this was so. This comes. Thank you so much for this question because it's comes out of the, out of Butler's archive. And one of the gifts, I mean, she gave us so many gifts. One of the gifts she gave us is this beautiful, robust archive that lives at the Huntington Library. I was fortunate enough to go there and go through her papers. And if I were a different kind of scholar or this was a different kind of book, I think there's a way that the archive can kind of overtake it. So I tried to just be very selective. And, you know, sometimes you find the perfect source. And she kept a lot of her ephemera, a lot of her, like just trace writings. And she has, they have this, you know, LA Times op Ed. It's mocked up, it's marked up with her little red pen, you know, and she. It's. It's an op Ed and political cartoon. And the op Ed is from Edward Teller, who was a nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan Project. I believe Teller was Operation Paperclip, meaning I believe he was a German. I believe he was a Nazi. I don't know if that's true. But no, he was relocated to the US as part of late World War II. And he writes this op ed about civil defense, which is about. Civil defense is pre. We're on the verge of strategic defense. We're on the verge of missile defense. But civil defense is about. In its earliest incarnation, civil defense is duck and cover, which we know not going to work. But it's about how the US can provide and store up certain strategic resources and build shelters and do all kinds of things to prevent the whole scale devastation of the nation. Should there be a first strike, counter strike scenario under the conditions of mutual assured destruction. And Butler. So first of all, she just marks it. She's like, this guy's dumb. What does Edward tell her? No, he's writing about how, oh, it won't be that bad if it happens, it's only gonna happen here and it'll be Kind of fine. And she writes, there no air. Is there no water? So just really displaying the complexity and nuance of thought that I think kind of has become common sense to us, right? That, like, oh, if polluting pollution from nuclear fallout in Japan definitely makes its way to California because of occurrence, for example. But then Butler writes her own letter. She writes her own response to. To tell her. And so this is 1981. It's five years before the publication of dawn, about three before she starts drafting Dawn. And she's in. In the letter, she walks through some of the costs of civil defense, or in the output, she walks through the cost of civil defense. She. She walks through the cost of his illogic that, like, these people will die, and it will be kind of devastating for mostly poor people. So she's thinking about, like, environmental impact and climate vulnerability in ways that we now think of as standard in the fields that I write in, but that I don't think were as common to be talked about in 1981. And as far as the structuring contradiction of assured survival and black insecurity, right? So Teller is writing from the standpoint of assured survival. He's saying, like, the state is the standard that we should have for political organization and social organization. It should exist in perpetuity, and it should exist kind of the way it looks right now, like the Democratic, liberal Democratic state, the postmodern state, the 1980s American state. It's the best. We're doing great, you know, And Butler is like, well, what about poverty? What about. What about pollution? What about, you know, racism? You know, what about the way that I live my life? Indifference from the way that you live your life. And some of this, I think, comes from her biography. So, you know, she. One of the things that you sort of find out about her, she, like, rode the bus her whole life. She didn't drive. And she was in Pasadena in California, where, you know, not having a car, not as easy. I. When I was at the Huntington, I will say, as like a sort of tangential anecdote, I did not have a car. And so I was walking from the Huntington to the gym and back to my house every day. And it's not easy. So just, like, getting around, you know, she's thinking about structure and infrastructure in different ways because she's living it as a relatively poor person. She writes a lot about financial struggle, and until kindred, so 1979, two years before the op ed, she's not necessarily doing well financially. She's worked in libraries. She loves libraries. She thinks that libraries are really important places where learning happens. So part of what I mean by the structuring contradiction of assured survival and black insecurity is that the, you know, teller is the opposite. Right? Teller is like this astrophysicist guy whisked away from one war torn context to, you know, I think go work in Arizona and develop this weapon that destroys millions of lives. And she is thinking about survival as like, how do I eat? How do I get to work? How do. What do I work? What do I do? I want to write. I want to write so deeply and I don't know how to do it. And I like. And I don't see myself in this world and I want to. And other people like me should see myself, should see themselves in the world that I in the way that I want to. And so, you know, I think from the shady to the sincere, I think she like, beautifully traces how nuclear war, as an example, is not going to affect everyone the same way. It's like people will. Some people will get into bunkers, some people will go up in planes. Most people will die. And the ones who don't die quickly will probably die slowly because crops will be poisoned, water will be despoiled, there will not be places to eat, crime will rise. You know, like the sort of after effects that she writes beautifully about in dawn will be the actual. It won't be science fiction. It will be the lived reality of people's lives. And those people aren't going to be wealthy, white elite folks. You know, it's going to be poor people on the ground.
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B
Isn't Butler just wonderful?
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A
The best.
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B
So wonderful. Can you talk a little bit more? You mentioned this earlier, but it's such a fascinating part of the book. Can you mention or talk about how speculation was a crucial part of Reagan's plans in terms of securitization policies and how there were actual. If you can go into a little more depth about how there were actual speculative fiction authors that were a part of, you know, formulating these plans.
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A
Yeah. So I mean, I think a thing that we should accept is that speculative is that security is speculative. Right. And that securitization is a speculative endeavor in both the financial market, but especially in how we sort of interact with it as a matter of making people feel safe. And so it kind of makes sense that you would be like, oh, hey, hey, SF writers, hey, science fiction thinkers. Like, what do you got? Tell me what, tell me what's coming. You know, in the Reagan context, specifically, as I mentioned, there is this group called the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, they just actually got written up in the Times. Well, just maybe like two or three years ago, there was like a. Every once in a while they. Like the New York Times remembers that they have had written about these people. And they're like, what are they doing? You know, I think they're still around. I think they're still kind of pretty like neoconservative, like very. In the sense that, like, it's very like American moralism. Neoconquest, like we should. America has the right to impose its moral and ethical parameters on the world through its military. And so these people were not a part of the Reagan administration. Right? They were. They were a private interest group. They're a. I think we'd probably call them a CPAC now. A PAC now. They were c. But a PAC now. But they wrote these white papers and they were. The group was made up of, as I said, aerospace engineers. It was made up of, like, geologists, I think. Like, there's. So in their first big white paper that they write is called Space. They're writing a lot about the moon and near Earth asteroids and the kind of strategic advantage that these celestial objects offer in terms of military advantage, but also in terms of resources. So there's a lot of good minerals up there. We can go up there, mine them and come home and it'll be totally kosher. No one's going to. No one is gonna be worried about what's going on with the moon, even. And despite policy around who owns the moon, right. That has only recently been settled. Cause we've only recently gone there. This is in the midst of Apollo missions. So the moon is kind of a big deal. And it makes sense that some people would be like, let's go take it. But the key folks in terms of sf, in terms of science fiction, the key science fiction guys are this man, Larry Niven, who hosts one of the retreats. Larry Niven. His novels. His many novels, but I think one is called Hyperion. Right, but they're about these kind of like calamitous, you know, real Earth world, breaking of a different order. Stories about, like, the ends. And they have a kind of like Manichaean, you know, very like, kind of Dune, you know, esque, Right? Like a kind of savior will rise. Jerry Purnell P O U R N E L O E is another. And Dean NG I N G and Robert Heinlein is the biggest name. Robert Heinlein is like one of the big three in science fiction. In this moment along with Sir Isaac Asimov and oh man, the name just fell out of my head. But there are three of them and they have this. They disagree, right? These other two are like this little defense. Can't have it. But Heinlein is kind of invested in the beginning. It's unclear because they don't have minutes how much he's around or how invested he is as time goes on. But Poornal, Ng and Niven are kind of like the three science fiction folks who are pushing and they seem to be the writers. So they seem to be the ones who are especially of this collection, Mutual Assured Survival, which is where I draw the title of the chapter and which is the text that they send the letter white paper that they send to the Reagan administration that he sort of rubber stamps or maybe the auto pen. But you know that someone in the science office. Auto stamps, rubber stamps. Has like the thing that will become the Strategic Defense Initiative in some ways. And so they're really interested in turning policy into fiction or turning policy like legal. You know, the sort of policy writing into the writing that we would digest as what I'll call hard science fiction. So there's a lot of attention to the machinery and the infrastructure. It's very Alphabet soupy. It's very like this kind of laser or that kind of laser or geostatic orbit or lunar station or what if we had these flechettes that we could fire and that. It's a lot of what if? And it feels like video games, feel like comic books. It's very pulpy, it's very science fiction. But the difference is that it's policy and it becomes policy. Right? It gets incorporated into. And some of this is sort of impossible to know, but it gets incorporated into broadly the program of strategic defense and into the R and D arm of the Defense Department's work against the to fight to win the Cold war in the 1980s. And so these like, you know, kind of far out, like wowie zawi ideas again, like the flechettes. So Flechettes would be like. They use them kind of these scatter. Now in like if you've watched Top Gun Maverick, there's a point where there's like a dog fight and there's like a heat seeking missile coming and they release this stuff and it like, you know, whatever the missile hits that the heat stuff. So flechettes would be kind of the opposite where you would like fire a bunch of projectiles into the air when an intercontinental missile is coming. And it would blow the missile up before the arm before the warhead could be armed and do the nuclear thing, whatever. They're just like really into this stuff of. They're just really into it. And in a way that like, I will say I love fantasy. I love speculative fiction. Like, hard science fiction is not my bag. And so it's like, you know, it's someone's bag. It's like very. It's very Star Trek. It's, you know, not mine. Um, and yeah, they just. What. So what is it? What does it mean for me, to me the question was like, 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, you know, in some chain of events. Like he's looking at them and rubber stamping this thing that ultimately doesn't work. Right? And the end of the story, I guess. Not to spoiler alert, but we get to the. We get to the end of the. What the, what the SDI does is spend the Soviet Union, then Soviet Union into such a devastating deficit that they have no choice but to turn to liberal markets, right? And we get. Whatever. Maybe there's an eth. I mean, maybe I don't want to be reductive. Right. There's obviously some ethical transformation happening as well. But the things that they're proposing, I don't know if you know this, but we don't have, to my knowledge, anyway, geostatic. We don't have space stations that are able to blow things out of the air. And if we do, I mean, I hope we don't actually. I hope we don't have them, but if we do, they're like super classified. So that also is to me is what matters, right? That in the sense of securitization, the horizontality of securitization is that it doesn't actually have to come into being. Like, we don't actually need the Avengers. What we need is the idea of the Avengers combating the supervillain in order to sustain our desire for security, safety. I feel like I went really far around the bend on that answer. But I will say last thing. The collection was published by a science fiction input. It's called the Mutual Assured Survival, published by Bain Books. It's readily available. I think some of it's even online. And their first white paper space is also. It's a PDF, freely available online. You can read them and they're. There's some fascinating stuff in there about what do we do about the moon? How do we get the moon we have this treaty. How do we get around the treaty? We really want the minerals. We don't know what's up there, but we know we want it.
- [41:14]
B
It's just such a fascinating history and it's just absurd.
- [41:20]
A
And also, you cut to, again, there's no AI, there's no Musk, there's no, like, there's no, none of those kind of quote unquote futurists in the book as it stands. But we wouldn't, we couldn't have them without this moment, right in the, in the same way that we couldn't have Trump without Reagan. We couldn't have Musk doing doge things without these guys being like, what if we just, what if we destroy the welfare state first of all. And I guess, like, I shouldn't, I should make a bigger meal of this in the book, I think, and should definitely mention it here, right? But the key strat, like, it's not only about spending the Soviet Union into oblivion, but it's also about reallocating funds from the welfare state to the warfare state. And here, like Elizabeth Hinton's work, again, can't say her name enough. Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work, right, that like Mike Davis spends a lot of time talking about this in City of Courts. But just the way that offering a voting body politic the idea that you can spend your way into safety and all we have to do is take money out of the mouths and hands of people who actually need it to make more fences and build bigger guns is super attractive. And the danger is that it requires a narrative of threat in order to be sustained. And so we get involved in war after war after war. And these are not former wars, they're these brush fire wars or these conflicts in places that are far away that people have a pretty, not a very strong connection to that allows us to not object. And the people fighting the wars are increasingly poor, undereducated, and face the choice between doing that are going to jail. So the care that might have intervened to stop this securitization process is also part of the process of securitization is to undermine care itself. And so it just, it's funny and absurd and it also is a story about us. Like we are not, we're not apart from what's happened. And I have my hope, I guess one of the hopes is that like, we, we can wake up. Like, we can, we can sort of realize that like, maybe it's not a good thing that AI runs our lives. Maybe it's not a good thing that we don't know anything about predictive algorithms. They're all black box technologies. We can't. We can't opt in or out of like, even cookies. Like, anyway, that's. Now we can. We'll get there. But yeah. So just the connection to today also feels very important.
- [43:42]
B
Come zoom into my class and talk to my students about why we shouldn't.
- [43:45]
A
Be relying on any time and you never anytime.
- [43:50]
B
Okay, so moving to someone who's thinking we like a lot better, back to Butler's Dawn. Can you talk about how dawn rejects this sort of premise of assured survival, but also the conventions of 1980s speculative fiction? Because I thought the way that you wove those two things together was really generative.
- [44:12]
A
I mean, okay, I'm a huge Star wars fan, right? But like, we think about Star wars as like perhaps the sponge. Taking in all of the tropes of science fiction of the 1970s and 80s. We get the kind of like, imperial state and the rebel hero. We get this really important love story where the kind of geopolitical or space open, the geopolitical story is going to get resolved through this love plot, but also through the family plot. Right. So the. That the desire for a kind of romance of nationalism and the romance of safety and survival are going to happen at the level of the individual, but that's also going to map onto the level of the geopolitical and science fiction of the 19. I mean, Dune is another example of this. We can go on and on. And the sort of fiction of science fiction of the 1980s, some of it I'm going to bracket like the. Again, the kind of harder stuff, because that I think is more interested in how technology can resolve the problem, which is not a part of this story, as I just described, but also is not actually what Butler is interested in. Those. I think she finds those things deeply troubling. I think there's like an implicit queerness to the way she thinks about love and relation that challenges the kind of heteronormative, romantic idea of love that we see in Han and Leia, although I love them. There is like the notion that, like, the rebels aren't necessarily good either, right? So like the Onkali, who is the alien species that. That saves humanity, their salvation comes at a deep cost. And you know, their charge, they are, they have a kind of genetic compulsion to evolve. And the only way they can't. There's no spontaneous evolution. There's no like, genetic evolution as part of some kind of natural selection. The way that they evolve is through Interbreeding and you know, what we might call miscegenation, right? Like the hybridity of genetic codes. And so the cost of Lilith's salvation is that she becomes one of the first humans to bear human on collie children. And the text, the novel Butler, I assume, does not allow that to be resolution. In fact, we get two more books about the cost of that. Like one book about how fraught the relation is between humans and human oncology constructs, which is what the book calls them, and then another book about what happens. It's been a long time since I've read Imago, but excuse me, about what happens when the, like, when. When we're. We're so far removed from humanity, we kind of don't understand the context of what a human, a human is anymore. So there's like elements of post humanism here. There's elements of. Of kind of like queerness where, you know, the Unkali have this third gender called the Uloi, and they're controlling reproduction in really compromising ways, right? But the point of all of this is that, like, they're not let off. They're not let off the hook. They are where I think the text wants the reader to think, like, what. Think about how they would invest in this kind of, you know, Sophie's choice of like, do you stay a human or do you like, give up the thing, you know, in order to survive? But that choice. I'm thinking about Samantha Pinto's like, theory of unconsent in that she writes about in Infamous Bodies, right? That, like, when I teach this book, for example, students often get really caught up in the fact that Lilith doesn't have a choice, that she's caught between these. And to me, it really matters that she makes a choice to give over to the Oncoli's desires, to give up humanity as she knows it and to accept the trade in order to live on her home, right? As a black woman, as now, like a kind of. As a queer person who's in a kind of triangular relationship, who's learned to love these objectively disgusting things. There are all kinds of resonances there that are not just about constraint, but are actually about lateral agency or a form of investment that is really important for her. So in terms of the science fiction tropes, she's really challenging the way that science fiction, the New age, science fiction, space opera, these, like, even. Even hard, hard sf, right? Which, like I said, the guys intentionally, the guys are like, really interested in like the. The beeps and boops of the Circuitry and the, you know, like, how do you get past the speed of light? What do you. You know? And she's like, oh, it's genetics, you know, Butler. She's like, oh, they can just manipulate the genome to make whatever. Like, where is the science? There's no science, you know. And I will say that's a thing I love about her is that she researches deeply and is also ultimately, like, I don't care. But also, like, what if the ship is an organism, right? Like, there's a way that part of what she's. And that's not. So it's again, not a novel idea in science fiction, not new to how certain people are thinking about a relation to land or to, you know, it's kind of land. It's like terrestrial, right? It's this huge, you know, ginormous ship. But also that, like implies what we learn about the ships is that the Ankali have traded with this species as well. And so they have a kind of integrated central nervous system response to the ship. They can feel the ship, the ship can feel them. Right? Like that's a different. We get. You know, think about Star Trek, right? Computer, beam me down. Right, that, like this. The ship is inchoate, it's insensate. It doesn't have feelings, it doesn't have desires, it doesn't have. Or it's like, you know, the Borg, like, they're. They're so. So she's really challenging the idea of intelligence and the way that. The way that, like the tropes of science fiction actually run on colonial imperial forms and is trying to say, like, there are other ways. These other ways we. What we have to jettison good and bad as the calculuses we use to determine whether or not we should live one way or another. But in order to understand that other ways are other and that like, experimenting in another way might yield more. More goodness. It might give us more life, it might give us more hope, or it might. We might end up on Earth being persecuted by these people because they realize that they didn't want to become aliens, right? And that's a choice. And we have to live with the consequences of that choice. But we shouldn't forestall. Or, yeah, we shouldn't stop ourselves from. From being alive because we're afraid that living our life will make us. Will harm us, right? Because the. The giving over into fear, which I think, which I see her as like writing against securitization in that way, allowing securitization to be the thing that runs that dictates life choices, isn't living. It's. Right. It's like. That is more of like a kind of automated, controlled position. And so, like in the text, for example, there's a moment where she's got. She's got. A. Part of her task is to, like, awaken with capital A, these other humans who have been saved. And one of the people she awakens is a cop, and he becomes her chief antagonist, right? Like, he is, like, she wakes him up and he immediately says, who do you work for? You know, which side are you on? And her response is, there's no sides left. Like, that. That war is over. So you can either realize that, like, the thing that put us in this position was that logic or not. I'm not. I'm not going to try to convince you, but I'm just. I'm not. I'm not there, you know, and he forms like, they re. I mean, as we might expect, right? This is a white man who. He rejects her power. He rejects her authority. She's then enhanced. So she's also superhuman at this point. But he doesn't like that. They don't like that she's. And they ultimately don't like her sexual practice. They don't like that she's accepted this trade and that she's got an intimacy with these aliens who they see as, like, anathema to humanity. And there again, like, we. You know, even in science fiction, that is, like, deeply about the alien encounter. Right? And, like, the kind of erotics of those encounters, like, either they're played for horror or it's like, very easy to explain. It's like. Or ET Right, Right. This kind of, like, defanged, you know, cute and beautiful. I mean, I love E.T. great. You know, Reese's Pieces were my jam when I was a kid because of ET but what about the erotic? What about, like, the way that this. The sexual practice, this alien species sexual practice changes, transforms her relationships with her partner. Right. And, like, transforms relations with people in general. So I hope I was able to speak to the securitization piece a bit. But to me, it's also a little bit more interesting just to think about how voracious of a reader of the speculative she was and how cannily she was in terms of manipulating the trope or the figuration or even the prose. I don't have the book with me, but there are ways that she sort of speaks the language of science fiction, but in a way that it's, like, much more beautiful to me than in other cases. And that play is part of what I'm trying to understand as different between these two archives.
- [53:51]
B
So moving into chapter two, how's your security? You are also sort of moving into a new era following the end of the U.S. soviet Union tensions to discuss securitization at this time, how securitization at this time required waging wars around the globe, which we sort of touched on earlier. But you're also examining the role of multiculturalism in efforts towards securitization in this period. So can you walk us through, you know, this sort of situation where multiculturalism is being incorporated into these efforts towards securitization and discuss specifically how Jo Haldeman's speculative novel Forever Peace reflects how this sort of ideology of multiculturalism, both allies, but also reproduces black insecurity in the US's neo imperial wars? That's a big question. I'm sorry.
- [54:45]
A
Oh, it's great. Yeah. So this is a chapter, I'll say first, where I'm not looking at a black authored text. So both this chapter pairs Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash with Haldeman's Forever Peace because both are speculative fiction texts written by white men with black male protagonists that are thinking about security as like a private, or in some ways as about like an individual private endeavor, while also situating those things within this wider milieu of multiculturalism, of like, Balkanization, of the breakdown of like the breakdown of U.S. soviet contention that produces a unipolar world that's deeply anxiogenic for American policymakers, et cetera. Haldeman novel comes out at the end of the 90s, so it's a potent, like a Clinton novel, whereas like Snow Crash is much more of a Bush one novel. And you know, one of the ways we can understand that the 90s and American military intervention in the 90s is as humanitarian. Right? So like, you know, all over the place in Yugoslavia, in. In Kosovo and in Rwanda in Central America. Right. Just throughout part like what I hesitate to call, well, I'll call in the language of the time, the Third World, but also like the kind of developing and postcolonial world, because there's parts of Europe too that are being decolonized as the result of the Soviet Union ending. Right? And those places are brown and black places, right? They're places where people, where like non white people tend not to go. These are places that are receiving World bank funding. You know, this is like neoliberalism has produced this world. This is the neocolonial, neoliberal world. And the conflicts in those Places are often seen as like, they're internecine, they're inter ethnic, they're right. There's like a way that the question of US intervention isn't about whether or how much, but why, when these feel like kind of local or often ethnic, like inter ethnic wars or. Yeah. Wars. And that the UN should be the one to intervene or if the US is going to intervene, there needs to be a clear reason why. And so Haldeman, in a kind of allegorical move, takes up these questions and writes about this global alliance between the first world, again in the language of the moment, and the decolonizing world. And this is an asymmetrical war, which he has previously written a book, I will say, called the Forever Wars. Haldman was, I believe a Vietnam veteran and the Forever wars were written in 1968 after his service. Right. And so he, he's critiquing this early moment in U.S. military or not early moment in U.S. 20th century, post colonial U.S. military history or post war U.S. military history where he's looking ahead and seeing like if this is the kind of war we're going to be fighting, it's going to go on forever. So cut to 30 years later and in forever Peace. There's a bunch of different things that contribute to how the wars are working. But the key is that this Global south alliance is a global south. It's like a South south alliance. Right. So the Ngumi Ngumi come from Africa, South America, Central America and South Asia, Southeast Asia. And those forces are collectively fighting a rebel war against the US led forces of coalition that have at their disposal this thing, a nanoforge that can make anything. So there's like they're just huge asymmetries. The way that multiculturalism is factoring in from the, from the coalition side is that military service. So we have this kind of. The way is that military service becomes this like prism to understand race after like after unipolarity. Right. So Julian, who is the protagonist is black. He is often remarking, or the narrator is anyway, that the world should be different. Right. That so much has changed. There should be so many different ways that the world should be organized and yet it's still a world in which he experiences racism. It's a world in which he experiences certain forms of insecurity that should have gone by the wayside because of universal basic income and universal healthcare. There are moments where he feels out of alignment with the mission of the coalition. So he has this really beautiful moment where he acknowledges that if he were born in the global south, he would be a rebel by virtue of his blackness, so that it actually doesn't even matter what his political alignment is or what it might be were he to live in the global south, but that the racial perception would produce him as a rebel. And in all kinds of ways that speaks to the kind of changing same of the 1990s, where we are moving into a post racial moment not because race is over, but because we're not allowed to talk about race in the ways that race had been talked about in thinking about Haldeman for a large portion of his life. So we're after Rodney King, we're after the O.J. simpson trial. Bill Clinton is called the first black president. Toni Morrison reading Maya Angelou, reading just the many, many ways that especially blackness is sort of suffusing this period, but also the ways that changes to immigration have yielded new forms of American racialization, including, like, you know, new immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, from West Africa and from East Asia. And the, you know, the story of the chapter is one where I'm trying to think about, like, what does it mean that multiculturalism is the prevailing racial logic of the American state? Which is to say that we can acknowledge we have different races, but we can't acknowledge racism, and we can't acknowledge how power produces racial difference at the same time that we know that we have an increasingly blackening. And like, the military service is being offset from white people to poor people, which means to people of color, that those people are being sent to fight in places where they're fighting against family members or relatives in some ways, whether real, kin or imagined. And that the purpose of those wars is to shore up American capital, right? That, like, they're not being. They're not receiving. And I have a bit of a standpoint of history, like, the standpoint of history to say that military service isn't transforming lives in ways that it's promising in the 1990s, because it looks different, right? We're talking about an engagement unlike World War II or even Korea or even Vietnam, right? Where, like, mission critical, like, participation in the mission seems to have a sort of like an end, right? Like we're gonna go fight fascism. We're gonna go, you know, but starting with Korea, certainly, and moving forward. These. The neo colonial is about occupation. It's about indoctrination. It's about hearts and minds, right? And those are. Those are much longer term projects than, like, getting rid of a bad regime and allowing the people to elect a new one. And again, maybe Historians will be like, you're very wrong. And I can hide behind the fact that I'm not a historian and say, I don't. Well, this is what I think. So then how does multiculturalism play into the war, into military service and securitization in this moment? Right. It is a way of pretending that we're all in this together. It's a way of pretending that military service, that the first Iraq war, that again, humanitarian wars in wherever they're being fought, that those things have anything to do with the safety of the people and the construction of a robust society. And when, to my mind, they are about population management, both abroad, but also managing the internal population, such that the people who are good enough to serve are allowed to serve for a time. The people who aren't are incarcerated. And then when the people who were good enough to serve return, we don't offer them the kind of benefits that they should receive by virtue of their service, and they end up incarcerated. You know, so multiculturalism becomes a wedge to say, don't. 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. I don't know if that's really got to it, but.
- [63:31]
B
Yeah, it did. No.
- [63:32]
A
Okay, good.
- [63:32]
B
Yeah, that's wonderful. Okay, so I want to talk about.
- [63:36]
A
Chapter and let me just. Sorry. Let me just say about that. That Julian. So the novel kind of maps this beautifully, and I don't think I do a good enough job describing it in the chapter, but Julian experiences. He like it become like the way the novel is mediating or meditating on these processes is that the. The technology that he uses to pilot this robot drone that he pilots is a neural interface, and he links up with his companions. So there are 10 people. They all share thoughts. And one of the things the novel says is like, if you spend enough time inside someone else's head, you can't be racist anymore. So it's making this really interesting idea or argument about intersubjectivity that racism is. That racism is about the subject and that once you become intersubjective, you can't be racist anymore or misogynists or homophobic because you know other people so intimately that you can't do that kind of harm. But Julian's and the. The novel ultimately uses that as its kind of de sex machina, where, like, it pacifies the world by making people intersubjective long enough that they lose. They can't harm each other anymore, Julian. So that's like one multi. That's like a true multiracialism, right? Or like a kind of intersubjective multiracialism where, like understanding racial experience, the understanding the way that racial experience works at the level of the psychic and emotional actually destroys the infrastructure of securitization. But Julian experiences many of the mental health problems that a soldier returning from war would experience. He has post traumatic stress disorder, or he's not diagnosed, but he's got symptoms that look like post traumatic stress, and he's has suicidal ideation and tries to kill himself. And so the novel is also, I think, really, I think one of the beautiful things it does, and again, I don't spend enough time on this in the book, is to show that the cost of war, that some of what's happening in the calculus of shifting the who is serving the population, serving, especially those serving in enlisted classes, is that it's taking a psychic toys. It's like the cost is psychic, right? So that, like, these folks come back with mental illness, they come back severely depressed, they come back with ptsd, all kinds of things. What we know about these populations is that they experience homelessness at higher rates, suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, suicide attempts at higher rates, intimate partner violence, all kinds of things, right? And that, to me is what it reveals is that like the wars, the humanitarian question is not a thing I can ask, but what I can ask is ask is what is the cost of engaging the world in this way? And the cost is to make black experience, to increase black insecurity, to make black people live increasingly in insecure ways. And the experience that black people have post war, that is broadcastable, we can see that that is not isolated to black people, but black people experience it at higher rates and because of compound stress, because of compound poverty, and all kinds of the ways that the multiple factors kind of lump into the black experience of veteran status. And then also the other side is to say that intervention doesn't have to be military, right? That if this is about building the. Building a city on the hill or whatever, we can think of all. I can think of all kinds of other forms of engagement that aren't about shooting guns at people, right? And here I am not in international relations, and of the many things I am not in this conversation, international relations scholar is one of them. But we have to acknowledge the novel beautifully links military intervention to liberalization. And so the lie of neoliberalism is that liberalization is going to make everyone safer. And we've seen endless numbers of books in recent years about how much more safe the world is. Right. And this novel is saying, like, well, liberalization is about asymmetry. It's about taking from A so that B can have more. And if that's the case, then the novel is also showing that the taking is part. Is a form of violence that can't be ignored. It is as bad as firing a gun at someone. That's what I have to say.
- [67:48]
B
Thank you. Okay, chapter three, Hazardous Bodies, takes up post 911 speculative novels about how states respond to global pandemics through securitization. So if you could talk about how you read Coulson Whitehead, Zone one to show that the connection between embodied vulnerability and bioinsecurity can help us to understand how securitization of disease in particular produces racialized worlds.
- [68:17]
A
Yeah, I think we all have a chapter three changed, almost changed the most. I think contemporary readers will have a pretty intimate relation to the question of disease and to the way that it can sort of fundamentally transform the world. And I had to confront my own sort of ideas about the failures of biosecurity while I was wearing a mask and moving around the world. Right. And so part of what I want to say first is that. And so this chapter is thinking about biosecurity as the forms that the state and Paris, like state and market, employ to manage disease vulnerability and that. Right. So in the midst of COVID and in the post Covid world, one might read this chapter and be like, justin thinks we shouldn't wear a mask. Which is not at all what I think Justin reads this. And we should think we shouldn't take a temperature or test ourselves. Right. Those are about. There's a way that, like mask mandates, mandatory testing, all of those things were. There was a moment where that was actually about making most people safe. Right. And that, like, what fell away was the fact of differentiation. And what the state had to do was recognize that people experience. They. So if we think about the first phase of vaccine rollouts, right, COVID vaccine rollouts, it wasn't. I mean, they were obviously going to. Wealthy people had access if they wanted it. But it was service workers, right? It was the, quote, unquote, essential workers who. And. And those who had more who had increased rates of vulnerability, whether because of autoimmune disease or age or whatever, that's a form like. That's securitization for sure. Right. We don't want Covid, but it's not securitization in the interest of redistributing up, right? It's actually about a kind of biopolitical investment in making the world safer, and there are better and worse outcomes, and it's not going to be perfect. And ultimately, the desire to make everybody safe, always, all the time, I think is bad. But the desire to make most people safe and to disrupt forms of asymmetry that keep the safe safe while making the unsafe unsafer, that's a good thing. So I just want to say that on the record. So, Whitehead, what I think is beautiful about this novel is that it forces us to contend with the reality of the fallacy of bodily integrity, which is to say that the novel is constantly playing with what safety can mean. So we don't know anything about this character we're watching until the very end of the novel. He's revealed to be black. So it's sort of challenges all the things that we've read before. He spends his whole life that we like the apparatus, like, the thing that he's actually. He's wearing gear and a face mask. He's got a gun, right? He's like. He looks like a counterinsurgency. He looks like he's, you know, in Iraq or in Afghanistan, like, winning hearts and minds, right? But he's. So there's, like, this layer of disconnect between us and him that is further suffused by atmospheric. So, like, the aesthetics in the novel are really interesting to me, but ultimately, because of how they're trying. How I see Whitehead is trying to play with the idea of, like, the sacrosanct body and instead offer up a body that is kind of, like, could possibly be threatened at any moment. And so it's forced to kind of navigate a world without the idea that threat isn't real. And there was a moment where I had thought about writing this chapter, like, this is almost 10 years ago, at this point, thought about writing this chapter about terrorism. And what I realized was that the discourse of insecurity after 9, 11, although we're talking about terrorism almost incessantly in 2002 and 3. But then, as the decades were on, right, we're taking off our shoes at the airport, and we're not allowed to have liquids and whatever. The real concern is the body. The real concern is, like, what happens if something gets inside me. So this is dirty bombs. This is chemical weapons. This is biological, right? This is like a world in which the kind of calamitous, nuclear big blow, that kind of. That fear wanes after this, like, really spectacular violence on 9, 11. And instead, we're worried about anthrax, we're worried about botulism, we're worried about a body that can't be protected. And so I think Whitehead knows that, and I think he kind of brilliantly reveals that. Like, you know, he's. There's this really long meditation in the book on walls and what, like, what walls afford in terms of, like, safety, but also disconnection, right? That wall, like putting up a wall. It's the way the territory is marked, right? It's like the way that this sort of state knows that it's alive. But a state is not an alive thing. The alive thing is the body. And so the body has to move. It can't be sedentary, it can't be stationary, and it certainly can't be invulnerable. And so the novel, to me, the way that it's sort of tacking into black insecurity is by showing that that is a state of, like. That the insecure is a state of being that doesn't stop mobility and doesn't stop desire. It's. It's like a thing to live with, not a thing to sort of pull away from. And, you know, I don't know what that novel would look like if it had been written after Covid, because Covid did freeze. It put us in. It kept us in place, right? It stopped us from moving around. It was written. I mean, the novel's being written while there are plenty of, like, post 911 pandemics going on. And I guess the difference between Covid and a lot of those is that we see those things as happening other places, right? So, like in the novel, I write about ebola, primarily the 2014, 2015 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, and the ways that Ebola sort of maps logics of, like, disease ingress, and the ways that it's, in the case of Ebola, deeply racialized and deeply imagined to be a black virus that harms the black body. But in the period of the writing of zone one, we had H1N1, swine flu, we had avian flu, we had other SARS outbreaks, and those are racialized as Asian or get, like, sort of classified as, like, coming from a kind of polluted food source and water source that we might associate with, like, Central America in the case of H1N1, or Zika, and those in all cases, right? The. The thing that Whitehead does, that I have to say Max Brooks does as well, is acknowledge that the virus doesn't care. The pathogen doesn't care about race or class, right? It's coming for everybody. So, but where they depart, right, is that Whitehead is like. And that means race doesn't matter in some ways. Or it means the ways that race matters are not from the standpoint of pathogenic ingress, but rather from how infrastructure keeps one population in place so that another population can live. And the irony is, I think that. So the thing that I'm not saying, I guess, is Max Brooks disagrees. I think he writes a whole book about how conquest, settlement and, well, and racism, right, are the ways out of viral. The ways out of an. An outbreak, the ways out of a pandemic. So in, you know, there are these three plans. One plan, the Israeli plan, is to close ranks and build a wall. Israelis. And they repatriate anyone born in Israel or former Palestine. They allow them to come to this city for a certain time, and once they're there, they close the doors and lock it down. There's the South Africa plan, is the second plan, which is to fortify key people behind certain places and then to feed other parts of the population so zombies can go and eat. Which is literally in the text of the book, is coming out of apartheid, right? So, like, you know, apartheid is the way out of the great we did it. And then the last is that in the U.S. right, there's this kind of reverse conquest where, starting on the west coast, the American military marches across the nation in a kind of, like, reverse manifest destiny and just kills the zombies over and over again. So here we see, like, what is the difference between these two ideas for Brooks, whether or not he can even acknowledge it. Right. I think it is in some ways implicit or, like, latent race is the answer to disease for him. Right. Racism born out of race, like race policy that treats group differentiation is the answer. And for Whitehead, the answer is to reframe the temporality of survival, first of all. And so the key of that book is that this book is told over the course of three days a weekend. But the narrative is constantly being disrupted by memory. And so I think the ethical demand of the novel is to remember that life isn't only about what will happen. It's rejecting the speculative in favor of the experiential. Like, what has happened? Here's all the things that Mark Spitz has done. Here's who he's lived with, here's who he's loved, here's who he's hated. Here's this guy he meets who's kind of racist, who he feels really Bad when he dies, you know, the, like complications of a life lived that's like. I don't know. How do you build policy around that? I don't know. But I think it actually transforms how we relate to the question of aliveness. But second is to say that race matters when it matters. But ultimately, if we know that the pathogen is race blind, what would it mean to build a world that a pathogen can get through? And he's saying that the wall is racism, right? The wall is there's a line. If they could bring back paperwork, they could bring back reruns. Something else. And racism. Right. It is so deeply embedded in the logic and practice of life under the liberal state that the only possible way out of it is to have the whole state collapse and to force us to imagine a life we can't imagine. Right. To force us to think about what happens to this man when he decides to move into this sea of undeath. And so the answer is, like, maybe unsatisfying because I don't think he hasn't. I don't think it's his job to have an answer to this question. But I don't think he can say what we should do differently about disease except take racism out of how we do disease management. Or take asymmetry, I guess, is what I'll say out of how we do disease management. But I think again, we saw a glimmer of that and it went away real quick. I mean, and that's really unfortunate. And it has gotten worse, obviously, in the last eight years, but six years, can't do math and stands to probably get worse should things resurge. But that small glimmer of possibility when we're not thinking about reinforcing hierarchy but redistributing laterally is, I think, what the novel's ethical claims are and how I would imagine the novel speaks to, or how I would argue this novel speaks to the concerns of bio. Of the biological threat.
- [79:37]
B
Yeah, no, I definitely didn't get the impression that you were anti. Wearing masks after that, if that comforts you at all.
- [79:44]
A
No, I. You know, it's hard though, because, like, that's what was used, right? Like biosurveillance is what was used. And. But the problem is, like the way it was used under, in the Ebola context was to keep out black people, right? So it was like airports were just shutting. Like if you were coming from this place, we just assume you have it, you're not getting in. And there were similar forms of bio. But that's not biosurveillant. I mean that's just racism. That's just explicit, right? And again, as in the case of the brushwire fire wars of the 90s, the solution, what we really want is a world without disease, which I don't think is possible. But if we want to reduce, if we want harm reduction from disease, then the answer is to redistribute wealth to the places where disease happens and especially the kinds of disease that we're talking about. So in that chapter I read this tool that was developed by the Rand Corporation that's like how to predict if your nation's going to get Ebola. And it's, it's like, do you have robust markets? Do you have like, it's like are you the West? Well then no, you're not going to get Ebola. But are you, you know, are you a form? And what they fall comes short of saying is like are you formally colonized? Has your government been disrupted by the American state or its allies? Have your markets been intervened in by the World bank or International Monetary Fund? Do you have infrastructure? Do you have roads? Do you have good sewage? Do you have a healthy access to good food? Well if no, then you're kind of sol, you know, and it's like okay, well that's the answer. If that's the, if that's the equation, how do we yield the result of. And so what that means is more foreign aid, more like taking off the strings that come with investment from World bank and imf, taking away US intervention in foreign nations, haha, you know, decreasing military intervention, reducing the number of guns, arms and ammunition that move around the world. You know, like that's the answer. To me that's the easy answer. The harder answer is like let's go kill people like ethically. Right? Like what if what we. Anyway, now, now I'm, now I'm editorializing. But I think that's also what Whitehead is saying. I think he's saying like this is not it, you know, we need a different choice.
- [81:53]
B
Yeah, no, this is such a great chapter and for, for me it was really useful because I work in fat studies which is sort of contesting like the idea of like so called obesity like as a disease. And thinking about like there was a moment, right, right after 911 where Richard Cremona described obesity as like the terror within. So thinking about like a non infectious disease and how it sort of stuck, stabilizes some of these ways of thinking I think about the integrity of the body. Yeah, it was just really useful. So thank you. Thank you. Especially for this.
- [82:22]
A
Of course. Yeah. I will say, like, I know we're not going to talk about chapter four, but the conversation. Yeah, well, just the way that like bodies, I think bodies matter. Right. And so like chapter four, which is about the mcu and there's like a sort of little moment about muscles and like the grotesque. The way that this comic, this graphic novel about this black super soldiers who the state developed the super soldier serum on their grotesquery. Right. That the other side also is about. There's an investment in maintaining bodies on both sides and using narratives of disease and health to kind of control. And the right one, the good body is the one that looks the most normal, is the one that we know that experiment works when the body is revealed to be normate. And I don't, you know, I don't know that I have a fully formed thought here, but I. There's this future research actually. But there's a way that I kind of love what that novel, what that graphic novel is doing. It's truth. Red, white and black. I love what it's doing in terms of reframing the historical realities of what it would look like to give us someone like Captain America. And I also think it moves through the violence that abnormal bodies are forced to endure really quickly, in part because it. It can. But so it's this group of five black men who have. Who are subject to medical testing. But also there's this really terrifying scene where Captain America and his like, you know, not Captain America, Elijah Bradley, who's Isaiah Bradley, who's this like very muscular, beautiful black man, goes into a gas chamber and is surrounded by these like, victims of Nazi violence and is he sort of dragged down and the contrast embodies. There is also. It's like about bodily grotesque greenway that I think I don't do enough job talking about in the chapter, but it's in there.
- [84:14]
B
You're so critical of the work that you're doing.
- [84:17]
A
Well, that's where you are. I think it's a good book.
- [84:21]
B
Yeah, it is. It's a great book. Okay, so talking about. Let's move to your last straw chapter, Racial tectonics. Can you sort of describe this term, racial tectonics for the listener?
- [84:33]
A
Yeah. So if the book is tracking these regimes of security, I wanted this fifth chapter to be about climate security in part because climate security is the form that liberal securitization has taken in recent years. Right. In the similar ways to human security, which hasn't gone away. But these are ideas Coming from a kind of progressive policy wing of security policy that are saying, like, to do the work, to truly do security, we need to think about the human peak component. Great. To truly do security, we need to think about the climate. Great. To me, there's a cost in calling that security, right? There's the cost of calling something security is the premise. It's the master's tools, right? We can't dismantle the house. And so for me, racial tectonics is first and foremost a way of understanding climate vulnerable people as having intimate relations to land and land, weather, climate broadly, that are not easily mapped onto the like vulnerable. So I call them climate vulnerable people. But these are racialized people who live in relation to the climate, who experience vulnerability sometimes, but also euphoria other times, who have, you know, intimate knowledge of land and weather, who map it and use it in ways that are not necessarily following like a Cartesian or Baconian idea of, you know, the scientific in the novel because of the disrupted tectonic environment. So the novel takes place on, I think Earth, but far in the future, where various things, including the destruction of a moon or that pulling a moon out of. There's a lot of moons here, I guess pulling a moon out of orbit has resulted in a really devastating climate transformation. And some people have developed an attunement to those transformations. And they get this growth that they have this organ grow in the back of their head and the base of their. It's internal and they can control the Earth. And so in addition to sort of mapping the relation that black and brown people have to climate and terrain, the way that the novel is imagining the seizure of Earth and its use is often through this disruptive, often angry form. And so racial tectonics also maps the ways that like speculative in the ways in speculative fiction broadly, but in this text specifically, that those ideas about proximity to land and climate often manifest like a relation to the world, right? And not just a desire, but a capacity to actually change the world at the level and scale of climate. So for example, in the book, one of the characters has experienced the murder or the enslavement of many of his children. And he has been living with the protagonist on a maroon colony, a pirate colony. That child, his name is Adam Alabaster, his partner's name is Cyanite. They're sort of the colonial forces come or the like, imperial forces come, they disrupt this colony or this out this outpost, and his child is killed is the point. And he has experienced, you know, loss after loss after loss. After loss. And he is one of the most skilled Orogenes is the term that they use to describe this. He is one of the most skilled, most powerful in the world. And the thing he does, which is the thing that opens the book, is he goes to the Capitol and he opens a magmatic rift underneath the Capitol and kills thousands of people. And brings about the fifth season, this season of dust, where volcanic ash is gonna create a winter and people are gonna die for years and years and years to come. So it's kind of like an inversion of racial tectonics, is maybe an inversion of the kind of survival that Butler is imagining, where, like, the proximity to land and the desire and the desire for revenge and anger kind of comes up and out of this man and like, produces, you know, like revisits those forms of deep historical trauma and loss at the level of infrastructure that then produces. That yields death and destruction in real time. How was that?
- [89:13]
B
That was great. Do you want to say anything more about, like, sort of how you see that at work?
- [89:19]
A
Yeah. So, like, the language of rage is really important to this chapter. And the novel itself is often characterizing this force as coming out of rage. Or like, the characters that we follow who use this force are enraged when using it. So I've just described alabaster. There is. The key moment that I read in the chapter is this moment when he and the protagonist Sinaite, are on their way to do this job and there's a. There's gonna be an eruption. Like, there's gonna be a tectonic event, an earthquake, maybe a. Maybe a. Maybe a volcano. And he. And she stop it. And he just kind of like grabs her and they go down and she has this moment, or the narrator describes this moment where she's. Because she's kind of inside him. Or their power has melded. She can feel him in a different way. And she realized. She describes him as he. Pressure and rage. And that there's so much of those things that he. She's, like, astonished by it. And the novel does again, the speculative. Does this really something that I think we kind of can't have in other genres, because it's unclear whether or not he, in taking control of this fault has become heat, pressure and rage, or if his heat, pressure and rage as a human are the thing that enable him to work at the level that he's working at. What she discovers, what he brings her to is that there are. There's a school called the Fulcrum. And the Fulcrum trains orogenes. It Also polices them because they're seen as dangerous black insecurity. And there is a moment where if they can't be trained, the fulcrum will take them and hook them up to a machine, anesthetize them, and then allow their instinctive originic power to keep big shakes at bay. So they're like connected to seismographs, basically reading the land around them. And if something becomes they instinctively, out of a desire for self preservation, they just stop that thing from happening, right? Keeping everybody safe. So the safety of the people in this case is literally built on a human machine infrastructure of enslavement. And there's an element to this that's just worse, which is that this, she. So he brings her to this. They're called node maintainers. He brings her to this node maintainer station and reveals to her that this child, it's his child. He doesn't necessarily say it outright, but she's looking at the faces and sort of mapping them. And he's had, I think 12, 10 or 12 children. And many of them have been. They use these children to maintain him, right? There's this sort of echo of the history of enslavement where black women would be controlled through the selling of their children. And this figure in particular has been sexually assaulted by someone in the community and will come out of his medically induced sleep and responded by trying to blow up the world, right? So there's a relation between the instinctive desire to stop violence at any. The like violence to the body of the most horrific kind at any cost, and then what alabaster does at the end. And so this instruction, the instruction that she, cyanide, receives at this moment in the novel comes back later when the imperial forces arrive at the. At the colony where they are and her son is killed by her guardian. And she does the same thing, right? So, like, there's a way that there's these three moments where. Where the experience of imperial violence, especially the kind that comes that's coming from the kind of like, you know, in the. The family, right? The violence, the disruption of the black family. The response to that is to destroy the world. And ultimately, to me, this is like the most. It used to be. Well, I won't say that, but this is like the most compelling form of worldbreaking to me, right? Because I think it's. When I think about scale, it is the text that was really trying to understand, like, what would the solution, like, what should the answer to racism be? And not just like you, I'm called a bad name. But, like, this is a society structured on dominance and structured on the dominance of a people who are racialized by virtue of having this appendage, right? So in the world of the novel, it's not race because it is about a different capacity, right? It's much closer to something like ability. But these people are all racialized as black. It is built on, like, the history of the structure or the history of the biology is built on racism, right? So it's understood as a form of racism. It's reproduced discursively as a form of racism through epithet, through distinction and difference in all kinds of ways, Right? So in. In a kind of allegorical sense, it's functioning the way racism functions, even if it's a different thing. And the Nava is asking, like, when we think about racism working in this way, and especially when we think about a society whose survival is predicated on the use and abuse of racialized children, which we know is like, sort of is intentionally calling back to enslavement, but is also thinking about, I think, mass incarceration and all kinds of things, right? What is the solution? And how could we understand the solution on a human timescale? Right? So the last thing that the book does and the last thing that I hope Racial Tectonics offers is like, you know, there was that 2020 moment where, like, everybody was an anti racist and we, we were just searching high and low for the racists. We couldn't find them, right? And then the answer, the. The what's what? I wrote this, this chapter in the midst of that. This book was written in the midst of, like, Ferguson uprisings. This book being the Broken Earth. What struck me was like, we're not. We were not. And it's so we were not thinking about any kind of longer. We're not thinking about any kind of horizon that extended beyond the month, let alone the year. And so it was the easiest thing for the Trump administration to pull apart in 2024. Like, all they had to do was issue one executive order and the whole thing came crumbling down. So it wasn't about. It wasn't redress, it wasn't even apologia, right? It was just like, well, oops, you know, and like, this book shows, like, sedimentation, right? It's dealing with the telluric, it's dealing with the earthly, because, like, you can't look away from how. From sediment, you can't think differently about the layers and layers and layers and layers of violence that inhere in the way this Society works. It's like, because it is how like the speculative is animating those layers through the power to control Earth. So that's kind of how I see racial tectonics working in the book. I hope it works.
- [96:16]
B
I think so.
- [96:17]
A
Okay, good.
- [96:20]
B
So we have touched on this a little bit. But I want to ask you, what do you want readers to do with what they learn from your book Think?
- [96:26]
A
I think like one. Okay, so there's like the pie in the sky and then the like, what can you do? Like what can we do right now? So I'll start with what can we do right now? I think just like a healthy suspicion of infrastructure that's promising ease, comfort or safety. Right? Or technology that's coming to east coast that's promising ease, comfort or safety. Those things are like, we know that like big, that big data is. Or I guess we shouldn't. I will tell you, big data is like first of all invested in monetizing that. So the suspicion for me is like if I'm being, if my body is being used to make money and I'm not receiving that money, I have a relationship to that history. I should be suspicious of that. But also those things are like the predictive becomes an effort. Like it becomes a force of control. And that like even if we're being steered toward a thing, one thing or another by whatever Google reading my email and saying like, oh, it seems like you want more, I don't know, vanilla, vanilla syrup for your coffee because you're out of it. Or I think that seems harmless, but it actually has broader implications and that those implications are not evenly distributed. So people who can opt out of certain things can. And people who can't are forced into relations with structure that they may not want. But that is the thing that's sort of offering itself as solution or as solace or whatever. The more like pie in the sky I think is like, is to think about the ends of things like the state as not so far fetched. And like I say this as a somewhat hesitant, somewhat hesitantly because I believe that the state is important and I believe it actually does some good things or some necessary things. But I also think that like following abolitionists, it's working as designed in a lot of ways and that we should be critical of reform as the only offer or only answer to the myriad violences of securitization, especially as they pertain to racialized and gendered bodies. So this means, I think, yeah, thinking about abolition and more thinking about abolition at all, but thinking about it in ways that aren't just about the abolition, that include that subsume police and prison abolition, but that also include the abolition of the military and certainly ice, I should say, in this moment, and an investment in human creativity as the answer to the problems of human creativity. And this is. I'm just going to take us back to Butler where she's like, we have these two problems, hierarchy and intelligence. These things are incompatible. And I think her implicit solution is get rid of hierarchy, or get rid of a hierarchy built on the kind of arbitrary distinctions of race and gender for sure, but also get rid of a hierarchy that serves the reproduction of hierarchy and invest in a hierarchy born out of intelligence that is about lifting up or making as many people survive as possible in the best possible way. Again, I think probably pie in the sky for some, but hopefully not for all.
- [99:39]
B
That was lovely, thank you. Okay, so last question. What are you working on now?
- [99:46]
A
I'm working on two things. One is a project about dreams. So I'm thinking about what it means for black creatives to represent dream worlds in the aftermath in the shadow of Martin Luther King's I have a Dream. And I'm specifically thinking about the ways that the dream of integration belies a more robust and nuanced and varied history of black dreams that sometimes are about kind of separatist dreams, sometimes are about individualist dreams or that reimagine community, but aren't always, or even really mostly about integrating. And also I'm thinking about the ways that integration as a dream kind of compromises the project of racial justice. So that's the first book and then I'm in the very early stages of work on a book that kind of comes out of chapter four, which is why I was so keen to talk about the body. But that's thinking about. It's kind of like a black feminist critique of muscle. It's thinking about the aesthetics of muscle, the biopolitics of muscle and the ways that, you know, when we think about the muscular body, it's often offered as a vision of health and aspiration. But you know, there's a lot of things, many of them not good, that go into the muscular body. There are some things that are non regulated that go into the muscular body. And so from the standpoint of like biopolitics, but also aesthetics and ethics, like what kinds of ideas is the black muscular body kind of projecting into the world? And then what do we do once those ideas are taken up? How do we rethink our relation to those things and ultimately how do we kind of move towards a more complicated understanding of health that isn't just about what kind of idealization of, say, Dwayne Johnson's body or something like that?
- [101:40]
B
That sounds. Both of those programs sound fascinating. And hopefully you'll come back to the New Books Network when those are available and chat again.
- [101:49]
A
Absolutely. If you'll have me.
- [101:51]
B
Well, thank you so much again for being here today, Justin.
- [101:53]
A
Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a listener. I love. I love what you're doing, and I'm just very happy to. To tap with you.