After the End of the World is a written transcript of a concert by Harmony Holiday on black backstage culture that is the expansion of her collection of poems, Maafa, which explored black music’s emergence from the ruins of an unnamed and euphemized genocide. Holiday has created an oral history of statements on and by black musicians, made backstage or off of the formal record, and turned them into a conversation that feels like a long rehearsal tape for an infinitely looping improvised performance across and beyond genres of black music— a concert no one will ever see.

Holiday will turn the statements into a long form tone poem of a nonfiction essay on black music and performance. Where will this interminable cultural outpouring that is black music land in a world where there are no formal venues and festivals and studios and labels and streams and mechanical royalties? How will we map these de-commodified sites? What are their acoustics of whisper and scream? These are the questions this work, which gathers its title from Sun Ra and black notions of the sound and texture of ruins as velvet and venom for vicious black beauty, will ask and answer. The answers will be inconclusive, but after the end of the world we will have outgrown the need for finales and finite conclusions. This is an invitation to revel in the beauty of fewer material preoccupations together and look at the history and future of black music off the record before it all disappears into the next world.