Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction
Frank B. Wilderson III, C. S. Soong, Saidiya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortense J. Spillershttps://rackedanddispatched.noblogs.org/
This reader is intended to be an introduction to the theory called Afro-pessimism. Collected in this volume are articles spanning three decades of thought, with topics ranging from police violence, the labor of Black women, & the slave’s transformation following emancipation, to the struggles of the Black Liberation Army & elements of anti-Blackness in Indigenous struggles for sovereignty.
Although the authors use differing methods of analysis, they all approach them with a shared theoretical understanding of slavery, race, & the totality of anti-Blackness; it is this shared understanding that has been called Afro-pessimism. Importantly though, rather than a fixed ideology, Afro-pessimism is better thought of as a theoretical lens for situating relations of power, at the level of the political & the libidinal. Afro-pessimism, in many ways, picks up the critiques started by Black revolutionaries in the 1960s & 70s, elaborating their short-comings & addressing their failures.
To overcome anti-blackness, there would have to be what Fanon had called a 'program of complete disorder,' an expropriation & affirmation of the very violence perpetuated against black existence & a fundamental reorientation of the social coordinates of the human relation. It would entail a war against the concept of humanity & a war that splits civil society to its core, a civil war that would elaborate itself to the death.
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, & Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, & Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University & lives in New York.