In a single room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past and future mingle. Finding its architectural form in the Black domestic space, the room features a 19th-century kitchen on one end and a futuristic living room on the other. The focal point of the kitchen of the past is a brick hearth; that of the room of the future is a five-sided television.

In the past dimension are everyday artifacts from the museum’s 18th- and 19th-century collection, their inclusion inspired by objects found at the 2011 excavation of Seneca Village, the mid-19th-century community of free African American landowners in Manhattan before the Civil War. In 1857, Seneca Village was destroyed to facilitate the creation of Central Park, only a few feet from today’s Met. Geographically, then, the museum lies in the immediate shadow of Seneca Village, just as it lies in the psychic wake of the razing of Black life, Black joy, and Black potentiality. In reclaiming Seneca Village from the past, the artifacts of the exhibit’s 19th-century kitchen ask a simple, haunting question: What could have been?

The other side of the room responds with a piercing question of its own: What can still be? In this Afrofuturist dimension, a diverse cast of contemporary artists from the African diaspora show that in the face of dispossession and death, Black imagination will not remain grounded. Instead, it will always take flight. These works boldly ask the viewer to consider the true liberatory possibilities of technoscience not wielded but nurtured by Black creative minds.

These past and future dimensions collide in the Met’s Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, which offers a decisive intervention into our own turbulent present. The world today threatens us with apocalypse, yet one entirely of our own making and inseparable from the technological innovations, gleaming fantasies, and transfixing myths of contemporary Western technoscience. Technologies, however, are not passive and, as the scholar Ruha Benjamin reminds us, technoscience is not an innocent bystander: it actively coproduces and reproduces the colonial carcerality of the past in the present.

Before Yesterday We Could Fly offered an essential perspective for me in reading three newly published books: Planetary Longings, by Mary Louise Pratt; Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, by Mary-Jane Rubenstein; and Radical Intimacies: Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, edited by Oliver Vodeb. Individually, the works span Latin American critical theory, religion and technology, and design and media. Taken together, they compel a meditation on apocalypse, although not as a singular and catastrophic event signaling the destruction of our planet.

Rather, these three works reveal “apocalypse” to be a critical dimension—informed by entangled human, nonhuman, and cosmic lifeworlds across interconnected pasts, presents, and futures—that renders visible the logic, values, and underbelly of Western technoscience. Beyond simply speaking to a recursive end of the world, the texts, just like the exhibition, boldly take hold of one’s imagination. Freeing it from paralysis, they draw it toward conjuring new myths that envision other ways of being in and relating to the world.

Each in its own way, these works suggest a path out of the cataclysmic quagmire. They probe the projects and practices that have historically bolstered and continue to harmfully stoke our technoscientific present and ask us to confront a singular question: What planetary histories must we urgently use to respond to our current apocalyptic time and enact new emancipatory futures?

Latin America has been indelibly shaped by deep-rooted histories of dispossession and destruction. These histories and their contemporary reverberations and rearticulations inform Mary Louise Pratt’s Planetary Longings, which argues that our present time is best understood as a crisis of futurity and knowledge. This crisis—enunciated through environmental catastrophe, industrial capitalism, neoliberal restructuring, militarism, and authoritarian rule—emerges from the lingering centripetal forces of colonialism and imperialism.

Specifically, it is the technologies of colonialism and imperialism that persist through time, achieving their longevity through what the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has called the colonialidad de poder (coloniality of power). As Pratt shows, the carceral technologies of the colonial and imperial projects of the West remain active and rapacious, “sucking in and devouring everything [they] can, processing it into additional productivity, wealth, and power.”

As evidence, Pratt points to how Latin America experienced a resurgence of mythical monsters, such as the chupacabra and pishtako, in popular discourse in the 1980s and 1990s (and more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic), as the region buckled under the pressures of globalization, extractive racial capitalism, and agricultural encroachment.

As Pratt describes it, the origin story of the chupacabra (goatsucker)—a vampire-like creature predisposed to sucking the blood of animals in rural Mexico and the Caribbean—lay in a failed genetic engineering experiment in a secret laboratory on a US military base in Puerto Rico. In the Andes, the pishtako, a creature believed to suck the fat out of human bodies, first emerged in the 16th century during the savagery of the Spanish conquest that was unleashed on indigenous peoples. Contemporary Andeans tie the reappearance of the pishtako to the extraction of human fat for export to the US to lubricate everyday Western machines such as computers and cars.

Such creatures and their mythologies should be taken seriously, argues Planetary Longings. Indeed, their tethering to anxieties about technological and scientific developments resonates powerfully alongside the West’s own sci-fi obsession with extraterrestrial aliens and undead zombies that signal fears about everything from world-ending viruses to nuclear destruction. Instead of dismissing these creatures, we must read them as haunting evidence of the ways technoscience aids the unabating rabidity of colonialism and imperialism in the present.

Will the beasts that gesture toward the technoscientific end times only torment us in fantastically macabre form? Or are they able to shapeshift and in so doing, deceptively blind us to their true blood-sucking intentions?

Such monsters are not only found in myth. Today they have mutated into a different threat: the rich, white, male “astrosaviors” who curate outer space as a theater of greed and war. Astrosaviors like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos might appear benign, at least in comparison to the chupacabra of Latin American lore. But that is not so, as demonstrated in Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Astrotopia. She interrogates how the seemingly humanitarian motivations of the billionaire space barons obscure the “territorialism, economic injustice, military collusion, scientific cooptation, and environmental recklessness” of what she calls the NewSpace age.

NewSpace is not simply a technoscientific and economic project, Rubenstein shows, but a mythological one that came to be undergirded by the same enduring religious myths of expansionism, frontierism, and salvation—all taken to be manifestly destined—that bolstered imperial Christianity. If, as Rubenstein suggests, yesterday’s 15th-century colonizers and conquistadores are today’s high-tech pioneer messiahs and outer space is now the final (colonial) frontier, then it is incumbent upon us to interrogate the labor performed by the religious myths that currently swathe our future-oriented, technoscientifically engineered, and extraterrestrial dreamscapes. These myths of imperial Christianity are powerful technologies themselves and furthered in their mission by the power engendered by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, which serve as key apparatuses of the West.

Many of Western technoscience’s particularly unshakeable myths, Astrotopia shows, are rooted in its consummate irreverence for the nonhuman world. Such an argument leans on the mediations of historian Lynn White, who contended that the demise of paganism at the hands of Christianity resulted in the epistemological privileging of knowledge of power over knowledge of nature. This dispiriting of nature, as Rubenstein calls it—a philosophy of “understanding and manipulating the world as a set of resources for human ‘progress,’ wealth, and comfort”—facilitated the rise of Western technoscience. Such thinking underscores Bezos’s dream to mine asteroids and Musk’s dream of terraforming Mars. In these fantasies, the merit of asteroids and planets lies in their use value. They exist to satisfy the desires of a few (surely not all) human beings.

What planetary histories must we urgently use to respond to our current apocalyptic time and enact new emancipatory futures?

Within our technoscientific, apocalyptic present, we must reevaluate how we relate to other human beings and to nonhuman beings. Western “Man” has been over-represented, at the expense of what the Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire has called the thingification of “others.” And so, as the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter has argued, in order to unsettle the coloniality of power, we will need to redescribe what it means to be human. Humanity is, as Rubenstein notes, a dangerous abstraction, and we must not shy away from reckoning with it. Apocalyptic times require that we relate anew to the nonhuman things such as the asteroids and planets that co-constitute our cosmic existence. Said otherwise, Western technoscience and its standard bearers must ethically and politically evolve to embrace new myths.

Western technoscience and colonialism limit how humans can relate to one another, to nonhumans, and to the more-than-human world. Put another way, the West limits what kinds of intimacy are available. Some now wish to reclaim intimacy’s lost genealogy, specifically, its ability to be profoundly dialectical and communal. Consider the activists and critical scholars who compose the global network Memefest. They use design, media, and art to reimagine the public sphere and enact social change, in the name of a new relationality that they call “radical intimacy.”

Working across a set of five epistemological framing devices—dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis—the edited volume Radical Intimacies illuminates how we can design in order to reclaim intimacy as a radical relationality. Editor Oliver Vodeb articulates radical intimacy as a philosophy marked by a closeness with the world, committed to fierce rejection of the extractivist nature of capitalism. The projects in Radical Intimacies collectively offer a new vision for what technoscientific innovation can both look and feel like in apocalyptic times.

An insightful conversation between Vodeb and Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar reminds us that nonextractive participatory design geared toward social transformation informed design practices in Latin America and Scandinavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the philosophy of radical intimacy that the volume’s contributors call for is not new; neither is it beyond our grasp in our present end times. This philosophy is enlivened daily at the Black Yield Institute’s urban farm in South Baltimore, where activists work to restore intimacy with Black land and reclaim the heritage of Black food sovereignty. This philosophy thrives in the projects of graphic designer and community organizer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, whose designs call us to rethink the potential for cultural production to “nurture the communities from which social movements emerge [and act] as a catalyst to bring people together in a collective aesthetic experience.” As Escobar notes, we must return to being concerned about designing with as opposed to designing for. The former, he contends, is invested in “maintaining and healing and mending and repairing the web of relations that make up the bodies, places, landscapes and communities in which we live.”

In many ways, what is most at stake if we are to truly cultivate a new praxis of relationality is our imagination, which must surely transgress the bounds of Western technoscience. These texts point to the decolonial, reparatory, and abolitionist potential of indigenous, feminist, and Afrofuturistic thought for imagining other spacetimes and ourselves as planetary subjects. Indigeneity is a planetary discourse, Pratt writes. This discourse reverberates in the world-making practices of indigenous women such as late 18th-century Andean revolutionary Micaela Bastidas—violently silenced and relegated to history’s near-invisible margins—whose resistance to Spanish exploitation illustrates the need to nurture our world through a politics of radical care. We must look to such figures in order to radically shepherd our imagination when seeking to build life and futures beyond the apocalypse.

We also must look to the provocations evoked inside that small room in the Met. In unapologetically centering and layering Black lifeworlds, past, present, and yet to be, Before Yesterday We Could Fly effectively disarticulates the period room as a museum genre historically committed to showcasing the material, cultural, and psychological interiority of whiteness, then rearticulates it through the speculative lens of Afrofuturism. Rather than reading the room as spatiotemporally bifurcated between the past and the future, the curatorial team (Hannah Beachler, Sarah E. Lawrence, Ian Alteveer, and Michelle D. Commander) ask the visitor to envision the Black domestic space as spatiotemporally fluid. This fluidity maintains an irreverence for Western understandings of space as fixed and time as linear and thus results in the hearth and television functioning as “vehicles of transportation, whether alchemical or technological in spirit,” that move the visitor across, between, and beyond space and time.

In grappling with Black erasure and invisibilization, Before Yesterday We Could Fly thus stands firm in the creative might of technoscience rooted in nonextractive Black speculation. Summer Azure (2020), a self-portrait by the Black, queer, trans woman artist-activist Tourmaline, brilliantly encapsulates this philosophy. The artist presents herself clad in an all-white outfit and helmet that calls to mind the suits of space races past and present. But this is no astrosavior. The high-cut white mesh bodysuit and the skin boldly peeking out from thigh-baring pant slits show an ownership of and reveling in the beauty and sensuality of the Black body and Black flesh. The artist floats comfortably in an azure sky blanketed with clouds. Grasping her helmet between her hands, she gazes down at the visitor. Like the enslaved peoples of the past who told stories of flying away from bondage and captivity, the artist has taken flight. It is an act of refusal and radical imagination. She is an embodiment of the new myths that beckon us, of the life-affirming technoscience dreams whose realizations are very much within reach.

Observing Summer Azure and listening closely, I can almost hear the sonic waves transmitted inside the artist’s helmet. Perhaps they are from the Nyabinghi drums of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Rastaman Chant. The chants get louder and louder as the singer cries out,

I say fly away home to Zion, fly away home;
I say fly away home to Zion, fly away home.
One bright morning when my work is over;
Man will fly away home.

If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.