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[[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:
[[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:


<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.
<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 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>
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>


==Further reading==
== References ==
{{reflist}}

== Further reading ==
* Fanon, Frantz. (1952). ''[[Black Skin, White Masks]].'' (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: [[Grove Press]])
* Fanon, Frantz. (1952). ''[[Black Skin, White Masks]].'' (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: [[Grove Press]])
*{{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=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=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|last1=Wilderson|first1=Frank B.|title=Afropessimism|date=2020|publisher=Liveright|location=New York|isbn=978-1631496141}}
* {{cite book|last1=Wilderson|first1=Frank B.|title=Afropessimism|date=2020|publisher=Liveright|location=New York|isbn=978-1631496141}}
*{{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}}
* {{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}}
* {{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 }}
* {{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==
{{Reflist}}

==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=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}}
* {{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=}}
{{critical theory|Black studies=}}
{{continental philosophy}}
{{continental philosophy}}
{{Philosophy topics}}
{{philosophy topics}}
[[Category:African diaspora]]

[[Category:African slave trade]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:African diaspora]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism]]
[[Category:African slave trade]]

Revision as of 13:03, 14 June 2022

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 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][3] 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.[4]

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".[5] 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."[6]

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.[7][8] 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".[9] Other accounts have traced similar lines of thinking to Frantz Fanon and 20th century black revolutionary movements.[10] 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.[11]

Reception

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 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.[12]

References

  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. ^ Sanchez, José (13 June 2022). "Against Afro-Pessimism". Jacobin. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Sexton, Jared (2016). "Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word". Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (29). doi:10.20415/rhiz/029.e02. ISSN 1555-9998.
  6. ^ Wilderson III, Frank B. (25 May 2017). "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption". Humanities Futures. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  7. ^ Nsele, Zamansele (2020-07-02). "Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence". The Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 2020-07-04. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  8. ^ Hartman, Saidiya V. (2003). "The Position of the Unthought". Qui Parle. 13 (2): 183–201. doi:10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183. JSTOR 20686156.
  9. ^ Sharpe, Christina (2012-05-15). "Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'". Lateral. Cultural Studies Association. Archived from the original on 2019-01-04. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  10. ^ Racked & Dispatched (2017). Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. pp. 7–8.
  11. ^ McCarthy, Jesse (July 20, 2020). "On Afropessimism". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 2020-07-21. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  12. ^ Mineo, Liz (21 March 2018). "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on". The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 26 April 2020.

Further reading