M Archive

After the End of the World

By: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Narrated by: Angel Pean

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive - the second book in a planned experimental triptych - is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs' acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence", M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

©2018 Duke University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Weird narration, Beautiful Book

This is a beautiful, dreamlike book that connects to so much consciously and subconsciously. But I'm going to need to buy it and read it myself. The narrator pauses ever 2-4 words with no rhyme or reason. It gives the whole book this staccato feeling when it's actually very flowing and lyrical. It was really distracting and frustrating. It didn't feel like the narrator was actually listening to what she was saying.

Phenomenal and Beyond!

Listening to this book was an energetic, somatic and spiritual experience! The complexity of flow of thoughts beckons me to relisten (which I did and will happily do again and again). This book invited me to a practice of integration (which is my experience of sacred texts). The writing and storytelling of Alexis Pauline Gumbs speaks affirmingly to so many remote and marginalized parts of myself! I'm grateful for this spirit-full offering and the clear channeling skills present throughout! This Afro-Futurist lens on all that has occurred, is occurring and will occur is a present...a precious gift I will continue to unwrap for as long as possible!

Deep Gratitude 🙏🏾!

Yvette Murrell

Unreal And So Real

Amazing…
“… it meant everything at once
it meant once there was water
it meant once there was birth and a possible birth
it meant there were ancestors
and that someone had survived
it meant life was precious and could spill
it meant spirit was sticky
and could stay
and actually that all I was trying to say.”

read it right now

I remember before things changed when we were trying to listen to the right books to piece together to all find our way out. this book was like a map to the promised land.