Afro-pessimism (United States)
Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of
According to the 2018
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
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
Reception
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
References
- . Retrieved 14 June 2022.
- ^ Cunningham, Vinson (10 July 2020). "The Argument of 'Afropessimism'". The New Yorker. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
- ISBN 9780195089837. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Google Books.
- ISSN 1555-9998.
- ^ Wilderson III, Frank B. (25 May 2017). "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption". Humanities Futures. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
- JSTOR 20686156.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Wilderson III, Frank B., ed. (2017). Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Racked & Dispatched. pp. 7–8. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ McCarthy, Jesse (20 July 2020). "On Afropessimism". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 21 July 2020. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
- ^ Mineo, Liz (21 March 2018). "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on". The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
Further reading
- Fanon, Frantz (2008) [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Philcox, Richard. Appiah, Anthony (paperback ed.). New York City, New York: Grove Press. ISBN 9780802143006. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Google Books.
- Patterson, Orlando (1985). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. OL 7693539M. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Internet Archive.
- Wilderson III, Frank B. (2008). Burrell, Jocelyn (ed.). Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (1st ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press. OCLC 934269072. Retrieved 14 June 2022 – via Internet Archive.
- Wilderson III, Frank B. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (paperback ed.). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822347019.
- Wilderson III, Frank B. (2020). Afropessimism (hardcover ed.). New York City, New York: Liveright. ISBN 9781631496141.
- Eubanks, Kevin. Afro-Pessimism, Black Life, and Classical Hip Hop As ..., 2017, https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=jhhs
External links
- Wilderson III, Frank B. (9 February 2009). "Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid w author Frank Wilderson" (mp3). iMiXWHATiLiKE! (Interview). Interviewed by Ball, Jared. Archived from the original on 4 September 2017. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
- Wilderson III, Frank B. (5 July 2013). "Dr. Frank Wilderson on Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Afro-Pessimism" (mp3). iMiXWHATiLiKE! (Interview). Interviewed by Ball, Jared. Archived from the original on 5 September 2017. Retrieved 14 June 2022.