Play It Again (On Catastrophic Storytelling)

Abstract This introduction describes catastrophizing as a kind of storytelling, a way of gathering events into a narrative of continuity and discontinuity that, when skillfully deployed, is an expression of shifts in thought. Beginning with two short stories about the rise and fall of catastrophe theory, which enjoyed brief mainstream popularity in the 1970s, and the liquid blackness journal's own history of exploring catastrophe, this introduction suggests catastrophizing is a self-reflexive scholarly and creative practice. Disciplines tell catastrophic tales to indicate when and where modes of inquiry and their forms of expression start and stop. Black studies, for example, assumes it plays a considerable role at the beginning of the end of the world; as such, the scholarly contributions to ecocriticism, performance studies, computing, queer theory, and abolition studies that appear in this issue are all methodological experiments that begin at “the end.”