Afro-pessimism

Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement including the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality. 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.” 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 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 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.[1]

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.”[2]

Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death forms a theoretical point of departure for almost all strands of Afropessimism. In an interview of the Kerner Report, Patterson had this to say about Afropessimism:

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.[3]

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)
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References
  1. Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  2. Wilderson III., Frank. "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption".
  3. Mineo, Liz. "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on". The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
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