Tavia Nyong'o on Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with award-winning books including The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) . His work in critical theory and performance studies explores the intersection of history, imagination, and Black aesthetic life through the lens of performance. Tavia Nyong'o's public-facing writings have appeared in prominent publications such as Vogue, them, The Nation, n+1, Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Cabinet, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and NPR. and has been recognized with fellowships from prestigious foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He serves on multiple editorial boards and co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Currently curating public programs at the Park Avenue Armory, Nyong'o is completing groundbreaking research on topics ranging from digital technology's cultural history to racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture. In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), where he shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.