Spinning Sage's Gold: Allegories on the Western-Dominated Present and a Possible Post-Western Future (PB) (2025)

Sometime in the future, when social scientists begin to write the first books about the failures of the West and the defunct American experiment, they will all confront this basic truth. Despite all the proclamations of freedom and equality, the realities of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and gross economic inequalities constantly belied these ideals. The narcissism and the racism the US and the West harbors through their blind commitment to individualism is destabilizing enough on its own to terrorize and implode nation-states. Like it or not, the American Devolution, and that of the West, is already well underway.

In these allegorical essays about his hypothetical descendant Olivia, Collins engages Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism, and critical race theory to meld the serious nonfictional past and present with a speculative, nonlinear, and expansive future.

Because Olivia knew in the 24th century what too few even considered in the 21st. That the narcissism of the US and the West was a problem, one that took root the moment of Jamestown's founding in 1607. The endemic racism of the West also mutated once it came in contact with the same toxic colonial ground. That combination helped the US and West achieve their dominance, but it also planted the seeds for their inevitable decline and collapse.