Frank B. Wilderson III

Frank B. Wilderson III (born April 11, 1956) is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is Chancellor's Professor of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine.^[1] He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in rhetoric and film studies from the University of California, Berkeley.^[2]

Life

Wilderson was born in

Wilderson moved across the country to study European Philosophy and Comparative Government at Dartmouth College in September 1974 to begin his undergraduate education. Wilderson's sister Fawn Wilderson-Legos also attended the school. He continued to organize protests and engage in civil disobedience while in university and was suspended for two years after being arrested in relation to a protest against the poor conditions of immigrant construction workers there. While suspended, Wilderson worked as a laborer, freelance writer, and garbage man, hitchhiking around the U.S.^{[citation needed]}

Back at Dartmouth, he participated in work at the Afro-American Society house there, was president of the Black Student Union. At Dartmouth, Wilderson also played football for the first two seasons he was there, in the position of outside linebacker.^{[citation needed]}

After graduating, he worked for several years as a stockbroker in Minneapolis until returning to school to get an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1990s, he lived in Johannesburg,

Wilderson has been described as one of the first writers in the tradition of Afro-pessimism.^[7]

In "Grammar and Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom", Wilderson asserts that the emergence of the nation(ality) is the violent grammar that originates in slavery. He writes, "No other place-names depend on such violence. No other nouns owe their integrity to this semiotics of death."^[8] This violence gives way to a mark ("let's face it"), where to be African, to be African American, to be Caribbean, is to be "shaped and comprised by slavery". African-descended "peoples", share a history and a violence in every gesture and thus, Wilderson's tracing of history begins with slavery and thus, the violence that configures the "African" does not only misstep in attempting to cohere around a nationality but also fails in attempting a coherence of the identity at all.

Wilderson's writing has appeared in Social Identities; Social Justice,

Wilderson III also directed the film Reparations......Now (2005).[9]

Awards

• The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order^[10]
• The Judith Stronach Award for Poetry^[10]
• The Crothers Short Prose Award^[10]
• The Jerome Foundation Artists and Writers Award^[10]
• The Loft-McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota^[11]
• The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America.^[10]
• 2008
  American Book Award, for Incognegro^[10]

• Incognegro: From Black Power to Apartheid and Back. Beacon Press. 2007. [12]

• Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid.
  ISBN 978-0-89608-783-5
  .
• Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010).
• Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020)
  ISBN 978-1-63149-614-1

• "Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?." Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225–240.
• Wilderson III, Frank B. (2007). "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal". In James (ed.). Warfare in the American Homeland: policing and prison in a penal democracy. Duke University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8223-3923-6
  .
• "The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents", InTensions, Vol. 5 (2011)^[13]
• "Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave", Black Camera, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Fall 2015)^[13]
• "The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World", The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, Vol. 43 (2015)^[13]

Anthologies

• ISBN 978-0-394-17041-1
  .
• Sideways Between Stories (Commune Editions, 2016)^[13]

References

External links

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