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Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life
Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss
In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure.
If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure.
If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
280 pages, Paperback
Published November 27, 2018
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About the author
Tavia Nyong’o
13 books7 followersTavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University and the author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018).
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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December 31, 2025a crucial text in my life
August 20, 2024
There were always many different moving parts between the discussions of performance art, aesthetics, and the various forms of fabulation and plasticity in event and time. I first got this book in 2019, shortly after it's release and made several attempts to read it but until this most recent attempt received nothing but confusion. The themes that stick out to me in this book as well as other writings in black studies and black aesthetics are the discussions of openness/plasticity/nothingness/nowhereness of interiority and blackness with regard to delueze as I (perhaps mis)understand it. I read this after Chen's Animacies, which helped with the understanding of this book as Chen is brought up somewhat consistently.
There were several points in the book where Nyong'o inserts subtle moments of his own afro-fabulation when discussing various artists and participants of the performance art he is investigating, and these moments stick out in my mind as particularly special as they demonstrate the described practice in the written medium, hidden by the critical theory as he proposes in the introduction (or perhaps first chapter if my memory is faulty).
Similar to Animacies, the construction and project of the writing felt so clear and deliberately in its organization, yet when I've tried to describe this book to friends, the subtlety and careful thread woven through the text seems to escape my ability to convey.
This book is particularly special to me however as it focuses on performance art and aspects of plasticity, both emergent and intentionally included, and I found this book particularly helpful in thinking about my own creative/artistic practices.
There were several points in the book where Nyong'o inserts subtle moments of his own afro-fabulation when discussing various artists and participants of the performance art he is investigating, and these moments stick out in my mind as particularly special as they demonstrate the described practice in the written medium, hidden by the critical theory as he proposes in the introduction (or perhaps first chapter if my memory is faulty).
Similar to Animacies, the construction and project of the writing felt so clear and deliberately in its organization, yet when I've tried to describe this book to friends, the subtlety and careful thread woven through the text seems to escape my ability to convey.
This book is particularly special to me however as it focuses on performance art and aspects of plasticity, both emergent and intentionally included, and I found this book particularly helpful in thinking about my own creative/artistic practices.
March 7, 2019
The book absolutely does not do what it ser out to do...and it knows that it doesn't??? But it's still mostly good??? Admittedly the book loses steam as it goes on, and there's plenty not to like about it, but I respect that it at least does some close reading that seems genuine. Hard to explain why I'm giving it such a high rating.
November 4, 2021
Simply one of the best books I've ever encountered; yes, it's an extraordinary addition to an amazing field of POC (and, specifically, Black) queer theory, but Nyong'o's work transcends such categories (and I do not mean to imply a type of multicultural universal value). This is liberation theory at its most generative, offering the reader a glimpse into a world that is "neither true nor false but fabulous."
April 10, 2023
challenging read that navigates various queerings away from dominant narratives of blackness. nyong’o packs this with examples, which sometimes makes things feel soupy. but there’s a lot to work with here, and his writing voice really dazzles
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November 12, 2024not giving a star rating because i’m only confident i understood like 35% of this. incredibly theoretically dense in a way i was not equipped for!
March 24, 2019
Tavia Nyong'o writes:
"Where I break with a certain Marxist faith in dialectical thinking is in any expectation that the deciphering or decryption of reified life will produce a real or truer picture of the world as it is, or as it could be. I instead take refuge in the more ambiguous realization that the destruction of reified and stereotypical thinking results only in yet more fantasy production."
"Where I break with a certain Marxist faith in dialectical thinking is in any expectation that the deciphering or decryption of reified life will produce a real or truer picture of the world as it is, or as it could be. I instead take refuge in the more ambiguous realization that the destruction of reified and stereotypical thinking results only in yet more fantasy production."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews