Racial Biofutures: COVID-19 and Black Futurity Otherwise

Abstract

Through a consideration of COVID-19, this article offers a series of provocations in thinking about racial biofutures. First, it suggests that looking backwards through a lens of recursivity only allows us to see the same anti-black futures mapped out again and again, the repeated production of predictable futures – always – already precarious. Second, along with many others, I argue that we know this story of recursivity and that naming these repetitions is analytically reductive and politically deficient: this is a recursive trap. Third, the article argues that sociology must instead address productions or remakings of life that are embedded within (but move out of) these recursive logics: it must prioritise and elevate those practices and voices that labour to actualise living alternative futurity now.