In this time of crisis, I and many others find comfort in imagining what thinkers we feel close to would say about the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s idiosyncratic conception of the world. For her, it is human interaction that creates a world out of the earth; in The Human Condition, Arendt writes thatwe make a “home for men during their life on earth” by acting together and speaking to each other in a common space. It seems, then, that social distancing is quite literally the end of the world. What Arendt dreads has come to pass: men have become entirely private — that is, deprived of physical interaction with other human beings. What, then, do we do after the end of the world from COVID-19?
To answer this question, I want to suggest that we look to a bevy of recent works in indigenous and black studies that take seriously the ends of the world that have already happened. The apocalypticism of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 is not novel to people who survived the genocidal onset of modernity. The diseases that devastated indigenous populations in the Americas were many times more deadly than the novel coronavirus; the Middle Passage, too, cut short not just many lives but also spelled the end of entire families, languages, and cultures. In short, the creation and discovery of a new world spelled an end to many old ones. For people who survived these catastrophes and their descendants, the end of the world has long been on their minds.
Recent interventions have brought this rich legacy of thought to bear on the apocalypticism of the climate crisis. We would do well to turn to these recent works as we face another crisis. Just as we can learn much about crisis mobilization from the response to the pandemic, we can begin to imagine a different world post-pandemic by listening to the voices that remind us about the ends of the world that have already happened. In other words, we should think together the end of the world due to colonialism, climate change, and COVID-19. The point of this comparison is not to inspire unfounded hope: to say that the end of the world has happened should never be to diminish its severity. Yet the fact remains that people have always survived and persisted. We should turn to these voices to learn more about the stakes of apocalypticism and what to do after the end of the world.
Two recent works by scholars of Black studies provide especially interesting responses to this problematic. Both Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) draw resources from indigenous studies, Black feminism, and Afro-Pessimism. Yusoff and King are especially interested in the work of Frank Wilderson, an African-American film theorist, who writes about a kind of ontological difference of the Black from the Human. In his book Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010), Wilderson wrote that
if the position of the Black is … a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject … the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position — disintegrates into thin air.
Wilderson’s pessimism provides the most radical response to the constitution of the Black by the experience of slavery. For Wilderson, any imagined freedom for the Black
would be hyperbolic — though no less true — and ultimately untenable: freedom from the world, freedom from Humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black self).
In other words, we can only imagine freedom as the effective end of the world, because the world is constitutively anti-Black. Not only does Wilderson respond to the end of the world, he imagines it as the horizon of possibility for freedom.
The problematic Yusoff and King are responding to, then, draws not just on a historicist sensibility (the world has ended before), but also from a pessimistic ontological outlook (the only end to anti-Blackness imaginable is the end of the world). The disposition of these works also draws from a third source of apocalypticism: the end of the world implied in Anthropocene-talk. The Anthropocene was proposed as a geological epoch to mark the enormous influence humans have on the earth. The formal definition of the Anthropocene requires a geological epoch to both precede and follow it. To call the Anthropocene a geological epoch is thus to presume an end to the human world. Talking of the Anthropocene is literally apocalyptic in the sense that it foretells an end to come (“apocalypse” in the Greek, after all, means simply “to reveal”). Yet at the same time, this end cannot be utter destruction. After all, a geological epoch by definition requires an observer. The Anthropocene could only exist if there were an observer in the future to look back and mark out such an epoch. Thus, marking the Anthropocene in any way has this oxymoronic apocalypticism — implying both a necessary end to the geological epoch and an observer that exists past that end and is able to look back on it.
These three kinds of apocalypse — historical, ontological, and geological — presage the apocalypse of the pandemic. Responses like Yusoff’s and King’s help us imagine what comes after these ends of the world. Where they cohere in the problematic they tackle, Yusoff and King diverge markedly in their response. Yusoff’s work looks backwards on the field of geology, which she says has been overdetermined by its roots in both Eurocentric natural history and extractive colonial processes. She rightly reminds us of geology’s close alliance with mining and drilling for oil, calling out Anthropocene-talk for “just now noticing the extinction [the discipline] has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom.” In this articulation, Yusoff admirably marries lessons learned from Saidiya Hartman (among others) with an acute awareness of the history of geology as a discipline; her work will by all rights launch the conversation she hopes for “about how political geology might look otherwise.” Yet in reading Yusoff’s book I found little of the future-oriented sensibility that can help propel this very conversation forwards. Yusoff leaves us with what Aimé Césaire (who she quotes to end her first chapter) begins: “The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: / The End of the World, no less.”
By contrast, King offers the figure of “the black shoal” as a poetics that can help us work through apocalypse. The “shoal,” King says, pushes against a tendency in Black studies towards “rootlessness” through the predominance of metaphors like the “oceanic” (Spillers), “archipelagic thought” (Glissant), and of course the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy) — while also pushing against Native studies, which has long “centered land at the fulcrum of its analytical, theoretical, and metaphorical maneuvers that challenge coloniality.” By contrast, the figure of the shoal, King says,
creates a rupture and at the same time opens up analytical possibilities for thinking about Blackness as exceeding the metaphors and analytics of water and for thinking of Indigeneity as exceeding the symbol and analytic of land.
The affordances of the “shoal” lie precisely in how it brings together temporal, spatial, and ontological edges. King’s attention to indigenous thought represents the best of the black radical tradition, which “eschews and actively resists genocide as an order of modernity and making of the human subject proper,” thus moving “toward Black and Indigenous futures.” The shoal helps us bridge these futures in part by reminding us that the conquest Columbus brought to the New World started with (as Spillers argued) the Portuguese exploration of Western Africa in 1441. King writes that
in this hemispherical treatment of the relations of conquest, the coasts of western Africa — the reefs, rocks, and fog of Cape Bojador — function as shoals to Western and normative theorizations of the geography and temporality of New World conquest.
The shoal brings together the seemingly disparate temporal and spatial coordinates of Black and Native studies by marking how they coalesce around the formation of the human/non-human boundary.
Lest we overdetermine “the shoal” as a geological concept, King reminds us of the word’s homograph with the meaning of “a large number of fish” (whose derivation relates to “school” rather than “shallow”) — “a shoal of fish” as opposed to “a shoal in the bay.” In this sense the shoal figures as a collective. In its intimations of the more-than-human, this sense of the shoal begins to open up space for different kinds of politics, a politics that can substantively come to terms with the critique of humanism as (as King puts it) “the very order that creates a norm and, inevitable, an ‘Other.’” The recalcitrance of the shoal reminds us how our humanism today is haunted by the ghosts of those it figured as non-human, even as the shoal’s alternate figuration as a collective entangles the human and non-human to recuperate a politics that bears a responsible attitude to the ends of the world that came before it.
King, like Aimé Césaire and Audre Lorde before her, leans into a poetic response to the apocalypticism figured in the histories and theoretical traditions she draws on. What makes recent work like hers distinctive is how they bring these traditions of rich radical thought into dialog with the apocalypticism betrayed by talk of the Anthropocene, too. COVID-19 has further elicited this apocalypticism in its profound, sudden impact on the lives of more than 5 billion people — and the deaths of more than 150 000. To think more critically about what the end of the pre-COVID world means for our collective politics, especially as we begin to think of what comes after, I would urge us to re-read Wynter, Wilderson, Césaire, Coulthard, and Tuck alongside King and Yusoff. In another time of crisis, another time that pushes us to gestures of catastrophe, we would do well to redirect some of our attention to the ways Indigenous and Black thought has already grappled with the end of the world. In so doing, we might learn to think more fruitfully about what a poetics after the end might look like.