This Will Not Be Generative attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, it exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive ‘we,’ and redemptive sympathy or ‘care’ disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival ‘at the end of the world’ and blackness as compost.
