My article, Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka’s Compulsive Futures, is now available in the special issue of Oxford Literary Review: EXT: Writing Extinction (41.1).

You can read the manuscript version on Academia.edu, or contact me for the published version if you do not have access to OLR. 

Abstract:

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka’s musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy’s agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida’s anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka’s anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.