Afropessimism

by Frank B. Wilderson III

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A lucid and compelling explication of a provocative and disruptively radical philosophy of race and colonialism. Wilderson twines together the ideas of a persistent, ineradicable process of Black enslavement with personal memoir. Theory and narrative, each providing illumination of the other. Afropessism is not aiming to make anyone comfortable, but the work has an unflinching, raw beauty and rings true.

“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten

 

Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631496158
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	917 KB

About the Author

Professor and chair of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson III lives in Irvine, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I

Chapter 1 For Halloween I Washed My Face 3

Chapter 2 Juice from a Neck Bone 19

Chapter 3 Hattie McDaniel Is Dead 55

Chapter 4 Punishment Park 147

II

Chapter 5 The Trouble with Humans 191

Chapter 6 Mind the Closing Doors 231

Chapter 7 Mario's 253

Epilogue: The New Century 309

Notes 341

Editorial Reviews

★ 2020-01-13
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.

To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, "slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power." No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through ("blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon"). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that "has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper."

An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.

Kirkus Reviews