The End Is a Beginning

Offers a rare look at apocalyptic thinking in African American culture

The End is a Beginning reimagines America's obsession with the "end of the world" by centering Black cultural productions as crucial sites for rethinking apocalypse, religion, and other possibilities. Drawing from theories of religion, race, and cultural studies, Mark DeYoung reframes apocalypse not only as a catastrophe, but as a revelation: the end of one world as an opening towards another.

Building on critiques of teleological storytelling from scholars of Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism, DeYoung analyzes the importance of "the end" in several works of cultural media and political discourse. He maintains that religion functions as a feedback loop that re/produces the worlds which humans inhabit, and argues that our modern world has been produced by a "religion of whiteness." The book makes the case that the racial and religious underpinnings of a wide range of apocalyptic discourses in literature, media, and politics work to maintain a white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist power structure by weaponizing "white apocalyptic anxiety." It charts how Black intellectuals and cultural producers are creating new counter-narratives to challenge the religious (re)production of this oppressive world through the use of Black apocalyptic aesthetics.

With its detailed exploration of African American visions of apocalypse as creating fugitive, liberatory worlds both within and beyond prevailing hierarchies, The End is a Beginning considers how the end of this world may open possibilities for the emergence of a better one.