Afro-pessimism (United States)

Afro-pessimism is a field of thought which takes seriously the historical reality that blackness is politically and ontologically coterminous with slaveness. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson, 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.” This violence, they argue, “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.” According to Frank B. Wilderson, the scholar who coined the term as it functions most popularly today, afro-pessimism theorizes blackness as a position of, using the language of scholar [Hartman], "accumulation and fungibility"; that is, as a condition of —or relation to—ontological death, as opposed to a cultural identity or human subjectivity.

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. As Wilderson writes, “Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBT, and workers’ agendas.”

Further reading

• Wilderson, Frank (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4692-0.
• Patterson, Orlando (March 1985). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674810839. OCLC 165068032. OL 7693539M.
• Wilderson, Frank B. (2008). Burrell, Jocelyn (ed.). Incognegro: a memoir of exile and apartheid (1. ed.). Cambridge, Mass: South End Press. ISBN 978-0896087835. OCLC 934269072.
• Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: Grove Press)
• Sexton, Jared (2016-03-15). "Chapter 3. The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism". In Agathangelou, Anna M.; Killian, Kyle D. (eds.). Time, temporality and violence in international relations: (de)fatalizing the present, forging radical alternatives (Paperback). Interventions (1. ed.). London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315883700. ISBN 978-0-415-71271-2. OCLC 859585160.
• Rieff, David (1998). "In Defense of Afro-Pessimism". World Policy Journal. 15 (4 (Winter 1998/1999)): 10–22. ISSN 0740-2775. JSTOR 40209594. OCLC 205900677.
• Dienstag, Joshua Foa (2009). Pessimism Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Hardback). Princeton, N.J. and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14112-1. JSTOR j.ctt7sw6h. OCLC 5559552758.

External links

• Wilderson, Frank (2009-02-09). "Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid w author Frank Wilderson" (mp3). IMIXWHATILIKE.ORG Podcast (Interview). Interviewed by Jared Ball. Archived from the original on 2017-09-04. Retrieved 2017-09-04.
• Wilderson, Frank (2013-07-05). "Dr. Frank Wilderson on Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Afro-Pessimism" (mp3). IMIXWHATILIKE.ORG Podcast (Interview). Interviewed by Jared Ball. Archived from the original on 2017-09-04. Retrieved 2017-09-04. {{cite interview}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 2017-09-05 suggested (help)