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ABSTRACT
If stars appear to change position, to be displaced when viewed from different point in the earth's orbit, then by analogy we might say that Afrofuturism and Afropessimism are parallax angles on the afterlife of slavery. Afrofuturism and Afropessimism inhabit forms of imaginative spacetime that are both congruent and incongruent. I will call the triangular relations among the afterlife of slavery, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism, a “black mood.” While this mood certainly has psychological meaning for individuals, I primarily point toward a sociological phenomenon that shapes the collective mood long term. This black mood is an intellectual disposition with emotional resonance. It produces both empowering joyful affects and disempowering sad affects. Though it is hardly the only black mood, this one is influential in sectors of the Blackamerican intelligentsia both within and beyond the academy. In this article, I explore a few points of contact among Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and black religion.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Dery, “Black to the Future,” 771.
2 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 102–3.
3 Dery, “Black to the Future,” 736.
4 Hart, The Blackness of Black, 122.
5 Human refers to non-blacks, that is, to white people (first class humans) and to their Indigenous and people of color “junior partners.”
6 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6.
7 Ankomah, “Black Panther,” 15.
8 Benash, “Black Panther and Blaxploitation,” 53.
9 Ward, “Wakanda Liberation is This?”, 15–16.
10 Benash, “Black Panther and Blaxploitation,” 51.
11 Mokoena, “Black Panther and the Problem of the Black Radical,” 15. Tompkins, “Woke Hollywood” and Ward, “Wakanda liberation is This?”, 24–5. Also criticize the film for similar reasons.
12 Mokoena, “Black Panther and the Problem of the Black Radical,” 16.
13 Menon, “Fifty Shades of Blackness,” 120.
14 See Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital. Kindle Oasis, Chapter One: Making Others Do Something, Loc 299–325.
15 Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath, 31.
16 Ibid., 61.
17 For a full-throated theological argument against Afropessimism see “For What Are Blacks to Hope?” in Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro.
18 Vibranium is a metal more precious than gold.
19 Tompkins, “Woke Hollywood.”
This comports with Adolph Reed Jr.’s argument that Blackamerican politics, a politics ostensibly based on racial solidarity, is a “class politics” that exploits the black working class and serves the interests of black elites, members of the ruling class. This politics obscures class dynamics among Blackamericans. See Reed, “Socialism and the Argument,” 36–43.
20 This is not to suggest that Pentecostal churches are the only churches that are influenced in invidious ways by consumerism.
21 Khan, “Viewing Black Panther,” 98–100.
22 After feeling dizziness and nausea, Edana Franklin, a black woman and an aspiring writer in 1970s Los Angeles, is miraculous transported back in time to a nineteenth-century Maryland slave plantation. She appears out of thin air at a riverbank, discovers a boy drowning, rescues and revives him. She is accosted by the boy’s mother and rifle-wielding father who perceive her as a man, possibly an escaped slave, assaulting their son. Dana disappears as suddenly and mysteriously as she had appeared, and finds herself back home in twentieth-century Los Angeles, a bit disoriented but no worse for wear. This is the first of five trips back and forth in time, all between the planation and her home in California, all connected to the survival of the boy she saved from drowning. As it turns out, the boy, Rufus Weylin, is her white, slaveholding great grandfather. Dana’s birth in the future depends on her saving him in the past. The story centers on this fantastic voyage and relationship.
Dana Franklin descends from Alice Greenwood Weylin, her enslaved great grandmother. Jackson was her married name. After a failed attempt to escape slavery with her husband Isaac Jackson, Alice was returned to the Weylin Plantation, badly beaten, and bitten by dogs while her husband was sold down the river in Louisiana. Alice was raped and impregnated by Rufus Weylin the ne’er do well son of Plantation master and mistress Tom and Margaret Weylin. Thus, Dana’s maternal ancestor was raped by her paternal ancestor. The product of this rape is Dana’s grandmother Hagar Weylin whose birth and survival is essential to Dana’s future existence. Dana confronts the conundrum of having to save the life of her slaveholding rapist great grandfather, if she is to exist in the future. At the end of the final case of time travel where she successfully ensured her future existence, Dana lost an arm to the slaveholding power that tried, literally, across spacetime, to pull her back and prevent her escape/return to her own proper time. The lost of her arm was a bodily sign of the afterlife of slavery.
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William David Hart
William David Hart (PhD Princeton, 1994) is the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College. He is the author of The Blackness of Black: Key Concepts in Critical Discourse (Lexington 2020); Afro-Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (Palgrave (2011); Black Religion: Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and Jan Willis (Palgrave 2008); and Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge 2000). His research interests include black studies, social theory, philosophy of race, American philosophy, and the intersections of religion, ethics, and politics.