Racial Tectonics

Chapter 5, “Racial Tectonics,” considers the relationship between Black materiality and climate catastrophe. The author reads N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015) to understand the twinned processes of imperial expansion and climate catastrophe, exposing the temporal logics that underlie the effort to stop climate change in its tracks. The chapter turns to Janelle Monáe’s “e-motion picture,” Dirty Computer, a long-form music video, to show how the Black femme body triangulates concerns for a racialized environment in the context of antiblack policing. It concludes by reconsidering Black insecurity as a cosmological enterprise, through an examination of visual artist Mikael Owunna’s photo series Infinite Essence (2018) and Cosmologies (2021). The author considers how space and the galactic scale of time-space fundamentally confounds ideas of security and offers a different relation to Black being.