Afro-pessimism (United States)

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 transatlantic 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". 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.

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". 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."

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. 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".

Other accounts have traced similar lines of thinking to Frantz Fanon and 20th-century Black revolutionary movements, such as the Black Power movement. In the late 20th century, scholars including Derrick Bell, Lewis Gordon, and Cornel West developed concepts of antagonism and abjection that bear similarities to components of Afro-pessimism but without reaching the same conclusions.

Reception

Orlando Patterson's book ''Slavery and Social Death'', first published in 1982, forms a theoretical point of departure for almost all strands of Afro-pessimism. In a 2018 interview about the Kerner Report, Patterson had this to say about Afro-pessimism:

See also

* '' Black Skin, White Masks''
* Anti-Black sentiment

References

Further reading

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* 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

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{{philosophy topics
African diaspora
Atlantic slave trade
Concepts in social philosophy
Pan-Africanism
Africana philosophy