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ABSTRACT In stories of unexpected death, rural African Americans investigate signs of premonition and personal destiny in the predeath behavior, biographical attributes, and conversations of deceased relatives. Premonition is clouded in misdirection; stories explore the conundrum that the future is known and actively communicated by those who will die, but the information only becomes accessible to the living after the person's death. Latent predictive powers exist in the universe, but they must be discovered and ratified. Drawing on epistemologies of surprise and the exotic, I argue that premonition is an individual and communal knowledge inquiry process through which the living test fate's edges, respond to its possibilities, and seek to predict its influence. I challenge scholarly interpretations of fatalism as a passive, ultimately defeatist worldview. [death communication, premonition knowledge, family stories, fatalism, surprise and intentionality, African American]

Our aim in this afterword is to take the position of an informed reader in the social sciences who seeks as we did to discover points of entry into critical failure studies as developed within the Routledge International Handbook of Failure. Because the book ranges across disciplines and subject matter, we find that the introduction provides an ample overview of the chapters and the goals of the work. We have chosen to ask the question: how might a reader navigate this volume and approach its many theories, definitions, and perspectives? To accomplish this, we offer a brief view of two current projects, distinct in their foci, which served as points of entry to this body of work. First, a project on failure narratives among women in the academy, and second, a project which revolves around the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine hesitancy across six nations. In so doing, we hope to show how particular chapters provide surprises, insights, and theoretical frameworks that inform and deepen our understanding of this nascent and rich inquiry into the nature of failure and how it is problematized and challenged.