Black Insecurity at the End of the World

Abstract

“Black Insecurity at the End of the World” examines the sensibility I term black insecurity by reading Colson Whitehead’s 2010 novel Zone One against a backdrop of bioinsecurity and police murder of black people. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, from the same year, when situated in dialogue with Whitehead’s text, show that black insecurity reframes the spatio-temporal notion of survival by unmasking security structures as dead and dying. Engaged from the standpoint of ongoing racial justice protests and stay-at-home conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Black Insecurity at the End of the World” argues that black speculative fictions uniquely expose the false premises of securitization and show that black love is an essential process for unmaking the forces of anti-Blackness.