Afro-Fabulations

Tavia 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).

By foregrounding crucial modes of disappearance, withdrawal, obfuscation, and eclipse found across diverse examples of contemporary art, literature, and performance ... Nyong'o further renegotiates the terms of ongoing debates in literary studies, queer theory, and black thought most broadly. (LA Review of Books) To afro-fabulate is to listen to and know the ongoing history of anti-black racism, but also to rebuke it by telling another story. In showing us how artists and performers engage in this act of telling, Nyongo offers not only a compelling new way to think about works that challenge history, narrative, and truth, but also a method in which we might continue that work. (Brooklyn Rail) The imaginative power of Nyong'o's words, his push to reimagine chronology and time through the optics of Blackness and his insistence on the intellectual stakes of Afrofabulatory ambivalence stuck with me, reminding me of the importance of the ephemeral, the everyday, and the speculative. (Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal) Tavia Nyong'o provides detailed descriptions of various performances, along with intuitive and counterintuitive insights about their creators. The book uses "interdisciplinary modes of investigation" to "aid this process of critical fabulation in a variety of ways...especially insofar as they bring into co-presence a sense of the incompossible, mingling what was with that might have been" (7). (QED)