WHAT THE FUCK IS AFROPESSIMISM?

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 trans-Atlantic slave trade and its 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.[4]

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.

SUGGESTED READING

• Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks.
• Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.
• Patterson, Orlando (March 1985). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study.
• Wilderson, Frank B. (2020). Afropessimism.
• Wilderson, Frank B. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.
• Wilderson, Frank B. (2008). Burrell, Jocelyn (ed.). Incognegro: a memoir of exile and apartheid
• "The Argument of ‘Afropessimism’". The New Yorker.
• Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
• Sexton, Jared (2016). "Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word". Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge
• Wilderson III., Frank (25 May 2017). "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption".
• Nsele, Zamansele (2020-07-02). "Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence".
• Hartman, Saidiya V. (2003). "The Position of the Unthought".
• Sharpe, Christina (2012-05-15). "Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'".
• Racked & Dispatched (2017). Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. pp. 7–8.
• McCarthy, Jesse (July 20, 2020). "On Afropessimism".
• "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on".
• Cunningham, Vinson (10 July 2020). "The Argument of "Afropessimism"". The New Yorker.
• Hartman, Saidiya (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.
• Sexton, Jared (2016). "Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word". Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge
• Wilderson III., Frank (25 May 2017). "Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption".
• Nsele, Zamansele (2020-07-02). "Part III: Afropessimism and rituals of anti-Black violence".
• Hartman, Saidiya V. (2003). "The Position of the Unthought".
• Sharpe, Christina (2012-05-15). "Response to 'Ante-Anti-Blackness'".
• Racked & Dispatched (2017). Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. pp. 7–8.
• McCarthy, Jesse (July 20, 2020). "On Afropessimism".
• Mineo, Liz (21 March 2018). "The Kerner Report on race, 50 years on".

KARIA ‘S LAWS OF AFROPESSIMISM

The so-called United States of America’s perpetual dependence on anti-black violence, that since the end of chattel slavery positions black people as internal enemies of their so-called civil society.

All forms of Black acknowledgement are screens for further exploitation of Black bodies, Black intellects, and Black labor.

1. Anti Blackness is a constant force applied (with modulation) from all people to all Black people.
2. There is widespread Non-Black solidarity around Anti-Blackness.
3. The fruits of Anti-Blackness include its replication through generations of Non-Black people
4. Black people in general have never fully harnessed the power of their “Blackness”, it is routinely harnessed and repackaged by Non-Black people.
5. Over centuries, Black history and Black intellectualism have been simultaneously omnipresent and have disappeared by non-Black forces
6. Black bodies are used as political and social objects.
7. Black people have no political, social, or economic power/capital that could move these violences to end, and therefore are perpetually dead.
8. Afropessimism is not a material liberatory framework
9. Afropessimism is an intellectual liberatory framework

AFROPESSIMISM