Fading Futures figures James Baldwin as a witness to modern malaise and defines malaise as a nonpathological and non-individualized affective ecology in which a present situation, often shaped by compounded crises, incites a link between a past understood as unfinished and a future made unintelligible by this sense of an ongoing past. In my first chapter, “The Future is Going to be Worse than the Past: Towards a Theory of Modern Malaise,” I turn to several crises in American (and global) politics and social life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While much of the discourse surrounding these ‘crises of confidence’ is quite general and generalizing (pointing to various wars, scandals, terrorism, the rise of the nuclear age, climate change, etc.), James Baldwin—who lived from 1924 to 1987—offers a more nuanced account of the twentieth century with regards to race relations and its correspondence to the wide-spread emergence of national disaffection. In the second chapter, “The Odor was Still There: Historicist Malaise and the Cinders of Slavery,” I argue that for the black diaspora, living the liminality between slave and citizen presents the formal conditions of a malaise that is always already historicist in that it accounts for a relation to history that renders the past as unfinished, an open-endedness that deranges experiences of the present and clouds perceptions of futurity. In addition to analyzing James Baldwin’s account of visiting the Door of No Return, Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy, I turn to Dawoud Bey’s photographic series Night Coming Tenderly, Black to propose the ‘cinders of slavery,’ a concept that registers how the material afterlife of slavery can and often does appear wholly different from the historical facts of the slave era while also insisting that the matter of slavery still matters. In the third chapter, “Despair Among the Loveless: Moral Malaise and the Ruse of Innocence,” I take up white southern ‘middle of the road’ politics and the imperative to ‘go slow’ even in the face of incessant white supremacist terrorism, arguing that such a moral bind amounts to preserving a myth of innocence while simultaneously managing anxieties around an unknowable future of racial equality. By tracing Baldwin’s theory of white innocence, including his response to William Faulkner’s controversial remarks on desegregation, I demonstrate how malaise can account for the impasse created when moral sentiment meets an unwillingness to be undone by futures made possible only through moral action. In the final chapter, “Ever Wished You Were Queer?: Erotic Malaise and the Promise of Ruin,” I theorize erotic malaise as the suspension of love between revelation and ruin (à la Baldwin), self-knowledge and chaos (Audre Lorde), as well as optimism and reason (Lauren Berlant). Using Another Country by Baldwin, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” by Richard Bruce Nugent, and Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien, I think erotic malaise alongside queerness, interracial intimacy, and genre bending as occasions to consider love’s potential to reorient and reorder our social (mis)arrangements.