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{{Short description|Theoretical framework that connects Blackness and social death}}
{{short description|Theoretical framework that connects Blackness and social death}}
'''Afro-pessimism''' is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of [[racism]], [[colonialism]], and historical processes of [[enslavement in the United States]], including the trans-[[Atlantic slave trade]] and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and [[Embodied cognition|embodied]] reality of [[African Americans]]; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts. According to the 2018 [[Oxford Bibliography]] entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and [[Frank B. Wilderson III]], Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman."<ref>{{cite web|last1=Douglass|first1=Patrice|last2=Terrefe|first2=Selamawit D.|last3=Wilderson|first3=Frank B.|date=28 August 2018|title=Afro-Pessimism|website=Oxford Bibliographies Online|doi=10.1093/OBO/9780190280024-0056}}</ref> According to Wilderson, the scholar who coined the term as it functions most popularly today,<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Cunningham |first1=Vinson |title=The Argument of 'Afropessimism' |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism |magazine=The New Yorker|date=10 July 2020 }}</ref><ref>{{cite news|last=Sanchez|first=José|date=13 June 2022|url=https://jacobin.com/2022/06/afro-pessimism-frank-wilderson-socialism-flattening-racism|title=Against Afro-Pessimism|work=Jacobin|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref> Afro-pessimism theorizes blackness as a position of, using the language of scholar [[Saidiya Hartman]], "accumulation and fungibility", that is as a condition of—or relation to—ontological death, as opposed to a cultural identity or human subjectivity.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hartman |first1=Saidiya |title=Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. |date=1997 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York, NY}}</ref>


'''Afro-pessimism''' is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of [[racism]], [[colonialism]], and historical processes of [[enslavement in the United States]], including the [[transatlantic slave trade]] and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and [[Embodied cognition|embodied]] reality of [[African Americans]]; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts.
Jared Sexton locates the foundational thread of Afro-pessimism in the "motive force of a singular ''wish'' inherited in no small part from black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival".<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Sexton|first=Jared|date=2016|title=Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word|journal=Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge|issue=29|doi=10.20415/rhiz/029.e02|issn=1555-9998|doi-access=free}}</ref> As opposed to humanist anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists who engage the history of black subjectivity as one of entrenched political discrimination and social ostracization, Afro-pessimists across disciplines have argued that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of [[modernity]]. Wilderson writes that "Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers' agendas."<ref>{{cite web |last1=Wilderson III. |first1=Frank |title=Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption |date=25 May 2017 |url=https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/}}</ref>

According to the 2018 [[Oxford Bibliography]] entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and [[Frank B. Wilderson III]], Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-Black violence—a regime of violence that positions Black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman".<ref>{{cite web|last1=Douglass|first1=Patrice|last2=Terrefe|first2=Selamawit D.|last3=Wilderson III|first3=Frank B.|date=28 August 2018|url=https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190280024/obo-9780190280024-0056.xml|title=Afro-Pessimism|website=Oxford Bibliographies Online|doi=10.1093/OBO/9780190280024-0056|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref> According to Wilderson, the scholar who coined the term as it functions most popularly today,<ref>{{cite magazine|last=Cunningham|first=Vinson|date=10 July 2020|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism|title=The Argument of 'Afropessimism'|magazine=The New Yorker|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref> Afro-pessimism theorizes Blackness as a position of, using the language of scholar [[Saidiya Hartman]], "accumulation and fungibility", that is as a condition of, or relation to, ontological death, as opposed to a cultural identity or human subjectivity.<ref>{{cite book|last=Hartman|first=Saidiya|year=1997|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kqr4H0sqEPYC|title=Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America|location=New York City, New York|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=9780195089837|access-date=14 June 2022|via=Google Books}}</ref>

Jared Sexton locates the foundational thread of Afro-pessimism in the "motive force of a singular ''wish'' inherited in no small part from Black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Sexton|first=Jared|date=2016|title=Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word|journal=Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge|issue=29|doi=10.20415/rhiz/029.e02|doi-access=free|issn=1555-9998}}</ref> As opposed to humanist anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists who engage the history of Black subjectivity as one of entrenched political discrimination and social ostracization, Afro-pessimists across disciplines have argued that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of [[modernity]]. Wilderson writes that "Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers' agendas."<ref>{{cite web|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|date=25 May 2017|url=https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/|title=Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption|publisher=Humanities Futures|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref>


== History and influences ==
== History and influences ==
Wilderson has cited the work of [[Saidiya Hartman]], [[Joy James]], [[Christina Sharpe]], [[Sylvia Wynter]], [[Hortense Spillers]], [[Zakkiyah Iman Jackson]], and [[Achille Mbembe]] as influences and predecessors of the framework, although not of all these scholars agree with such characterization of their own work.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Nsele|first=Zamansele|date=2020-07-02|title=Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence|url=https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-07-02-part-iii-afropessimism-and-rituals-of-anti-black-violence/|url-status=live|access-date=2021-03-04|website=The Mail & Guardian|language=en-ZA|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200704164146/https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-07-02-part-iii-afropessimism-and-rituals-of-anti-black-violence/ |archive-date=2020-07-04 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hartman|first=Saidiya V.|date=2003|title=The Position of the Unthought|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156|journal=[[Qui Parle]]|volume=13|issue=2|pages=183–201|doi=10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183|jstor=20686156}}</ref> Sharpe has named [[Dionne Brand]], particularly her 2001 work ''A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging'', as writing in conversation with the concepts of Afro-pessimism by "mapping and creating a language for thinking, for articulating black (social) life lived alongside, under, and in the midst of the ordinary and extraordinary terror of enforced black social death".<ref>{{Cite web|last=Sharpe|first=Christina|date=2012-05-15|title=Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'|url=https://csalateral.org/section/theory/ante-anti-blackness-response-sharpe/|url-status=live|access-date=2021-03-04|website=Lateral|publisher=Cultural Studies Association|language=en-US|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190104070524/http://csalateral.org/section/theory/ante-anti-blackness-response-sharpe/ |archive-date=2019-01-04 }}</ref> Other accounts have traced similar lines of thinking to [[Frantz Fanon]] and 20th century [[Black Power movement|black revolutionary movements]].<ref>{{Cite book|last=Racked & Dispatched|url=https://archive.org/details/AfroPessimismread|title=Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction|date=2017|pages=7–8}}</ref> In the late 20th century, scholars including [[Cornel West]], [[Derrick Bell]], and [[Lewis Gordon]] developed concepts of antagonism and abjection that bear similarities to components of Afro-pessimism but without reaching the same conclusions.<ref>{{Cite web|last=McCarthy|first=Jesse|date=July 20, 2020|title=On Afropessimism|url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/|url-status=live|access-date=2021-03-04|website=Los Angeles Review of Books|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200721113157/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/ |archive-date=2020-07-21 }}</ref>
Wilderson has cited the work of [[Saidiya Hartman]], [[Zakiyyah Iman Jackson]], [[Joy James]], [[Achille Mbembe]], [[Christina Sharpe]], [[Hortense Spillers]], and [[Sylvia Wynter]] as influences and predecessors of the framework, although not of all these scholars agree with such characterization of their own work.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Hartman|first=Saidiya V.|date=2003|title=The Position of the Unthought|journal=Qui Parle|publisher=Duke University Press|volume=13|issue=2|pages=183–201|doi=10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183|jstor=20686156}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|last=Nsele|first=Zamansele|date=2 July 2020|url=https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-07-02-part-iii-afropessimism-and-rituals-of-anti-black-violence/|url-status=live|title=Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence|newspaper=The Mail & Guardian|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200704164146/https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-07-02-part-iii-afropessimism-and-rituals-of-anti-black-violence/|archive-date=4 July 2020|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref> Sharpe has named [[Dionne Brand]], particularly her 2001 work ''A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging'', as writing in conversation with the concepts of Afro-pessimism by "mapping and creating a language for thinking, for articulating Black (social) life lived alongside, under, and in the midst of the ordinary and extraordinary terror of enforced Black social death".<ref>{{cite web|last=Sharpe|first=Christina|date=15 May 2012|url=https://csalateral.org/section/theory/ante-anti-blackness-response-sharpe/|url-status=live|title=Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'|website=Lateral|publisher=Cultural Studies Association|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190104070524/http://csalateral.org/section/theory/ante-anti-blackness-response-sharpe/|archive-date=4 January 2019|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref>
Other accounts have traced similar lines of thinking to [[Frantz Fanon]] and 20th-century Black revolutionary movements, such as the [[Black Power movement]].<ref>{{cite book|editor-last=Wilderson III|editor-first=Frank B.|year=2017|url=https://archive.org/details/AfroPessimismread|title=Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction|location=Minneapolis, Minnesota|publisher=Racked & Dispatched|pages=7–8|access-date=14 June 2022|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> In the late 20th century, scholars including [[Derrick Bell]], [[Lewis Gordon]], and [[Cornel West]] developed concepts of antagonism and abjection that bear similarities to components of Afro-pessimism but without reaching the same conclusions.<ref>{{cite magazine|last=McCarthy|first=Jesse|date=20 July 2020|url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/|url-status=live|title=On Afropessimism|magazine=Los Angeles Review of Books|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200721113157/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/|archive-date=21 July 2020|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref>


== Reception ==
== Reception ==
[[Orlando Patterson]]'s book ''Slavery and Social Death'', first published in 1982, forms a theoretical point of departure for almost all strands of Afro-pessimism. In a 2018 interview about the [[Kerner Report]], Patterson had this to say about Afro-pessimism: {{blockquote|We're going through a period of extreme despair about the situation of African-Americans. The most extreme form of this despair is a movement called Afro-pessimism, which holds that Black Americans are still viewed as they were viewed in the slavery days as different, inferior, and as outsiders. I find myself in an odd situation because the Afro-pessimists draw heavily on one of my books, 'Slavery and Social Death,' which is ironic, because I'm not a pessimist. I don’t think we're in a situation of social death, because one of the elements of social death is that you're not recognized as an integral member of the civic community, the public sphere, and we certainly are, on the political and cultural levels. And we're very integrated in the military, which is the quintessence of what defines who belongs. The Afro-pessimists are right, though, to point to persisting segregation in the private sphere.<ref>{{cite news|last=Mineo|first=Liz|date=21 March 2018|url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/harvard-professor-reflects-on-the-kerner-report-50-years-on/|title=The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on|newspaper=The Harvard Gazette|access-date=14 June 2022}}</ref>}}
[[Orlando Patterson]]'s book ''Slavery and Social Death'' forms a theoretical point of departure for almost all strands of Afro-pessimism. In a 2018 interview on the [[Kerner Commission|Kerner Report]], Patterson had this to say about Afro-pessimism:


== See also ==
<blockquote>
* ''[[Black Skin, White Masks]]''
We’re going through a period of extreme despair about the situation of African-Americans. The most extreme form of this despair is a movement called Afro-pessimism, which holds that Black Americans are still viewed as they were viewed in the slavery days as different, inferior, and as outsiders.
* [[Anti-Black sentiment]]


== References ==
I find myself in an odd situation because the Afro-pessimists draw heavily on one of my books, "Slavery and Social Death," which is ironic, because I’m not a pessimist. I don’t think we’re in a situation of social death, because one of the elements of social death is that you’re not recognized as an integral member of the civic community, the public sphere, and we certainly are, on the political and cultural levels. And we’re very integrated in the military, which is the quintessence of what defines who belongs. The Afro-pessimists are right, though, to point to persisting segregation in the private sphere.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Mineo |first1=Liz |title=The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on |url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/harvard-professor-reflects-on-the-kerner-report-50-years-on/ |website=The Harvard Gazette |date=21 March 2018 |access-date=26 April 2020}}</ref></blockquote>
{{reflist}}


==Further reading==
== Further reading ==
* {{cite book|last=Fanon|first=Frantz|year=2008|orig-year=1952|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=m5ysTujFqbgC|title=Black Skin, White Masks|translator-last=Philcox|translator-first=Richard|others=Appiah, Anthony|edition=paperback|location=New York City, New York|publisher=Grove Press|isbn=9780802143006|access-date=14 June 2022|via=Google Books}}
* Fanon, Frantz. (1952). ''[[Black Skin, White Masks]].'' (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: [[Grove Press]])
* {{cite book|last=Patterson|first=Orlando|year=<!--March-->1985|url=https://archive.org/details/slaverysocialdea0000patt|url-access=registration|title=Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=9780674810839|oclc=165068032|ol=7693539M|access-date=14 June 2022|via=Internet Archive}}
*{{Cite book|last=Hartman|first=Saidiya V.|title=Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1997|isbn=9780195089837}}
*{{cite book |last=Patterson |first=Orlando |date=March 1985 |title=Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study |url=https://archive.org/details/slaverysocialdea0000patt |publisher=Harvard University Press |location=Cambridge, Mass. |isbn=9780674810839 |ol=7693539M |oclc=165068032 |url-access=registration }}
* {{cite book|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|editor-last=Burrell|editor-first=Jocelyn|year=2008|url=https://archive.org/details/incognegromemoir00wild|url-access=registration|title=Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid|edition=1st|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|publisher=South End Press|isbn=9780896087835|oclc=934269072|access-date=14 June 2022|via=Internet Archive}}
* {{cite book|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|year=2010|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yFTbwAEACAAJ|title=Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms|edition=paperback|location=Durham, North Carolina|publisher=Duke University Press|isbn=9780822347019}}
*{{cite book|last1=Wilderson|first1=Frank B.|title=Afropessimism|date=2020|publisher=Liveright|location=New York|isbn=978-1631496141}}
* {{cite book|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|year=2020|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gYpWxQEACAAJ|title=Afropessimism|edition=hardcover|location=New York City, New York|publisher=Liveright|isbn=9781631496141}}
*{{cite book|last1=Wilderson|first1=Frank B.|title=Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms|date=2010|publisher=Duke University Press|location=Durham|isbn=978-0-8223-4692-0}}
* Eubanks, Kevin. ''Afro-Pessimism, Black Life, and Classical Hip Hop As ...'', 2017, https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=jhhs
* {{cite book |last1=Wilderson |first1=Frank B. |author-link1=Frank B. Wilderson III |title=Incognegro: a memoir of exile and apartheid |date=2008 |publisher=South End Press |location=Cambridge, Mass |edition=1. |isbn=978-0896087835 |oclc=934269072 |editor-last=Burrell |editor-first=Jocelyn |language=en |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/incognegromemoir00wild }}


== External links ==
==References==
* {{cite interview|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|date=9 February 2009|url=https://imixwhatilike.org/2009/02/09/incognegro-a-memoir-of-exile-and-apartheid-w-author-frank-wilderson/|url-status=live|title=Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid w author Frank Wilderson|format=mp3|website=iMiXWHATiLiKE!|interviewer-last=Ball|interviewer-first=Jared|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170904234637/https://imixwhatilike.org/2009/02/09/incognegro-a-memoir-of-exile-and-apartheid-w-author-frank-wilderson/|archive-date=4 September 2017|access-date=14 June 2022}}
{{Reflist}}
* {{cite interview|last=Wilderson III|first=Frank B.|date=5 July 2013|url=https://imixwhatilike.org/2013/07/05/dr-frank-wilderson-on-nelson-mandela-south-africa-and-afro-pessimism/|url-status=live|title=Dr. Frank Wilderson on Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Afro-Pessimism|format=mp3|website=iMiXWHATiLiKE!|interviewer-last=Ball|interviewer-first=Jared|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170905000107/https://imixwhatilike.org/2013/07/05/dr-frank-wilderson-on-nelson-mandela-south-africa-and-afro-pessimism/|archive-date=5 September 2017|access-date=14 June 2022}}


==External links==
* {{cite interview |last=Wilderson |first=Frank |interviewer= Jared Ball |title=Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid w author Frank Wilderson |url=https://imixwhatilike.org/2009/02/09/incognegro-a-memoir-of-exile-and-apartheid-w-author-frank-wilderson/ |format=mp3 |work=IMIXWHATILIKE.ORG Podcast |date=2009-02-09 |access-date=2017-09-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170904234637/https://imixwhatilike.org/2009/02/09/incognegro-a-memoir-of-exile-and-apartheid-w-author-frank-wilderson/ |archive-date=2017-09-04 |url-status=live}}
* {{cite interview |last=Wilderson |first=Frank |interviewer= Jared Ball |title=Dr. Frank Wilderson on Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Afro-Pessimism |url=https://imixwhatilike.org/2013/07/05/dr-frank-wilderson-on-nelson-mandela-south-africa-and-afro-pessimism/ |format=mp3 |work=IMIXWHATILIKE.ORG Podcast |date=2013-07-05 |access-date=2017-09-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170905000107/https://imixwhatilike.org/2013/07/05/dr-frank-wilderson-on-nelson-mandela-south-africa-and-afro-pessimism/ |archive-date=2017-09-05 |url-status=live}}

{{Critical theory|BLACK STUDIES=}}
{{continental philosophy}}
{{continental philosophy}}
{{critical theory|Black studies=}}
{{Philosophy topics}}
{{philosophy topics}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:African diaspora]]
[[Category:African diaspora]]
[[Category:Atlantic slave trade]]
[[Category:Concepts in social philosophy]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism]]
[[Category:African slave trade]]
[[Category:Africana philosophy]]

Latest revision as of 16:26, 22 November 2024

Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the transatlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts.

According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-Black violence—a regime of violence that positions Black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman".[1] According to Wilderson, the scholar who coined the term as it functions most popularly today,[2] Afro-pessimism theorizes Blackness as a position of, using the language of scholar Saidiya Hartman, "accumulation and fungibility", that is as a condition of, or relation to, ontological death, as opposed to a cultural identity or human subjectivity.[3]

Jared Sexton locates the foundational thread of Afro-pessimism in the "motive force of a singular wish inherited in no small part from Black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival".[4] As opposed to humanist anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists who engage the history of Black subjectivity as one of entrenched political discrimination and social ostracization, Afro-pessimists across disciplines have argued that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of modernity. Wilderson writes that "Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers' agendas."[5]

History and influences

[edit]

Wilderson has cited the work of Saidiya Hartman, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Joy James, Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter as influences and predecessors of the framework, although not of all these scholars agree with such characterization of their own work.[6][7] Sharpe has named Dionne Brand, particularly her 2001 work A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, as writing in conversation with the concepts of Afro-pessimism by "mapping and creating a language for thinking, for articulating Black (social) life lived alongside, under, and in the midst of the ordinary and extraordinary terror of enforced Black social death".[8]

Other accounts have traced similar lines of thinking to Frantz Fanon and 20th-century Black revolutionary movements, such as the Black Power movement.[9] In the late 20th century, scholars including Derrick Bell, Lewis Gordon, and Cornel West developed concepts of antagonism and abjection that bear similarities to components of Afro-pessimism but without reaching the same conclusions.[10]

Reception

[edit]

Orlando Patterson's book Slavery and Social Death, first published in 1982, forms a theoretical point of departure for almost all strands of Afro-pessimism. In a 2018 interview about the Kerner Report, Patterson had this to say about Afro-pessimism:

We're going through a period of extreme despair about the situation of African-Americans. The most extreme form of this despair is a movement called Afro-pessimism, which holds that Black Americans are still viewed as they were viewed in the slavery days as different, inferior, and as outsiders. I find myself in an odd situation because the Afro-pessimists draw heavily on one of my books, 'Slavery and Social Death,' which is ironic, because I'm not a pessimist. I don’t think we're in a situation of social death, because one of the elements of social death is that you're not recognized as an integral member of the civic community, the public sphere, and we certainly are, on the political and cultural levels. And we're very integrated in the military, which is the quintessence of what defines who belongs. The Afro-pessimists are right, though, to point to persisting segregation in the private sphere.[11]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Douglass, Patrice; Terrefe, Selamawit D.; Wilderson III, Frank B. (28 August 2018). "Afro-Pessimism". Oxford Bibliographies Online. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780190280024-0056. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  2. ^ Cunningham, Vinson (10 July 2020). "The Argument of 'Afropessimism'". The New Yorker. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  3. ^ Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York City, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195089837. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Google Books.
  4. ^ Sexton, Jared (2016). "Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word". Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (29). doi:10.20415/rhiz/029.e02. ISSN 1555-9998.
  5. ^ Wilderson III, Frank B. (25 May 2017). "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption". Humanities Futures. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  6. ^ Hartman, Saidiya V. (2003). "The Position of the Unthought". Qui Parle. 13 (2). Duke University Press: 183–201. doi:10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183. JSTOR 20686156.
  7. ^ Nsele, Zamansele (2 July 2020). "Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence". The Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 July 2020. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  8. ^ Sharpe, Christina (15 May 2012). "Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'". Lateral. Cultural Studies Association. Archived from the original on 4 January 2019. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  9. ^ Wilderson III, Frank B., ed. (2017). Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Racked & Dispatched. pp. 7–8. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Internet Archive.
  10. ^ McCarthy, Jesse (20 July 2020). "On Afropessimism". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 21 July 2020. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  11. ^ Mineo, Liz (21 March 2018). "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on". The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 14 June 2022.

Further reading

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