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ABSTRACT
This article argues that Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism as a analytic contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through currents in Afrofuturism. The article argues Wilderson's use of Orlando Patterson's concept of social death results in a performative contradiction as its claims deny the very possibility of their justification. The result is the inability to substantiate that Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness. The article then argues that Wilderson's Afropessimism is better understood as a mythology rather than an analytic. Interpreted as myth, Afropessimism can articulate the grammar of Black suffering through a religious consciousness rather than scientistic or philosophical reason. Afrofuturism serves as a resource in this task by creating images of the past and present simultaneously within consciousness. The claim is evidenced through engaging Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Octavia Butler's Kindred.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Sexton and Barber, “On Black Negativity, or the Affirmation of Nothing.”
2 See Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” 2.
3 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 14.
4 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 1–2.
5 Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” 1231.
6 Ibid.
7 Brown develops this concept in The Reaper’s Garden, 5.
8 Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” 1233.
9 Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 186.
10 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 7.
11 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13.
12 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 11.
13 Ringer, Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America, 118–19.
14 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 11.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 12.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 71.
20 Ibid., 72.
21 Ibid., 82.
22 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 37.
23 Pacifica radio interview.
24 Ibid., 41:44.
25 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 299.
26 Ibid., 302–3.
27 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 102.
28 Grotstein, Splitting and Projective Identification, 7–12.
29 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 103.
30 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 28.
31 Long, Significations, 32.
32 Ibid.
33 Here I am invoking the “afterlives of slavery” from Hartman’s, Lose Your Mother.
34 Morgan, “Looking Forward, Looking Back.”
35 Ibid., 27.
36 Ibid., 30.
37 Ibid., 30.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christophe D. Ringer
Christophe D. Ringer, PhD, is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics and Society at Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, IL. He received his PhD in Religion, Ethics and Society from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America that examines the religious and theological meanings that sustain mass incarceration. His research interests include African American religion and cultural studies, religion and politics, social ethics, political philosophy and public theology. He is particularly interested in African American religion as a site for understanding the relationship of self, society and the sacred as it concerns human flourishing. Ringer has presented his research in many settings including the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Political Theology Network and Institute for Religion, Education and Public Policy at California State University. Ringer has taught courses at American Baptist College, Christian Theological Seminary, New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Christian Brothers University.